Saving Souls in Siberia
American Evangelical Christians Struggle In A Cold, Hard Land
For the Prangers, it is all part of the adventure, and when they lost their visa status in Ust-Omchug, they simply packed up and moved again. With the days of hitchhiking from village to village carrying a knapsack full of Bibles behind him, Pranger concentrated on church building. He bought a dark-blue UAZ jeep (the Soviet version of the Hummer) and rented a cramped, two-room apartment on the ground floor of a nondescript building, where he stuck a rickety pulpit and several rows of wooden pews in the front room. His wife found John 3:16 translated into 19 different languages on the Internet, which she printed out and taped to the walls to mask the peeling wallpaper: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." Pranger says the neighbors thought they were weird and stayed away.
The congregation, which gathers at the Pranger apartment-church on Wednesdays and Sundays, is modest in size: an American couple from California and their three young children, an elderly Russian woman whom Jim Pranger calls simply "Babushka," a taciturn mother and son. There are others, Pranger says, who come and go. The back room, which doubles as a Sunday school, is stocked with boxes of New Testaments, and most Saturdays, the Prangers stand at the nearby bus station and pass them out, as well as Gospel tracts translated into Korean, Vietnamese, Uzbek, and Armenian, most courtesy of the Fellowship Tract League in Lebanon, Ohio. On a good day, the family can pass out as many as 300 New Testaments. On a bad day, people throw the books back at them, and they get harassed.
But the Prangers, like other missionaries here, have learned to manage their expectations. "If you can get a Russian to stop smoking and drinking and swearing. . . and come to church, you've done a lot," says Pranger. "We're trying to grow oak trees that won't blow over when the winds come, and that takes time."
More information can be found at www.usnews.com/russia
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