U.S. News & World Report | December 26, 2005
Saving Souls in Siberia
American Evangelical Christians struggle in a cold, hard land.
By Ilana Ozernoy
KRASNOYARSK, Russia – Grace Church rests on a high hill on the north bank of the Yenisey River, above the iridescent fog that rolls over the cold, black waters on winter mornings. Built with American money and Russian hands, the Baptist church is a marriage of Protestant austerity and Slavic tradition, a sober, gray edifice with a single onion dome and cavernous insides painted in a sort of wedding-cake motif--peach and rose walls stenciled with flowery peasant artistry and Bible Scripture.
The church's cornerstone was laid not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time when thousands of American missionaries flooded into the void left by seven decades of godless communism. And Russians, fascinated by what had been forbidden for so long, welcomed these foreigners with open arms. "There was an initial deep curiosity in anything that was western, especially literature, so distributing free Bibles was extremely easy," recalls Chad Wiebe, a Mennonite pastor who grew up on a hog and cattle farm outside Wichita, Kan. "It was enough to say something was free, and they would line up."
But despite the initial enthusiasm, any hopes of sparking a Protestant-style spiritual revival soon faded as missionaries increasingly found their message falling on deaf ears. Their bootstrap ethos and self-determination didn't meld in this nation of fatalists and dictators. Then again, some Russians simply couldn't bring themselves to believe in God; for others, the Russian Orthodox Church, for centuries synonymous with Russian national identity, would always be the only rightful church in Russia. Faced with a harsh climate and dashed hopes, most of the missionaries went home.
Most, but not all. Several hundred families stayed behind, as others came and went, scattering over the vast Siberian steppe, which spans eight time zones from west of the Ural Mountains to the shores of the Pacific in the east. In the bleak expanse, they struggled to build their congregations, gathering to pray where they could--in schools and apartments and garages. They searched for congregants in alleyways littered with dirty heroin needles and bus stations crammed with the poor, inviting into their budding churches those members of society left behind in the new order--the elderly, drug-addicted, and sick. "Our job is to sow the seed and get the message out," says Ron Winkler, an evangelical Christian who moved his family from California to Krasnoyarsk two years ago. "It's God's job to bring in the harvest."
Even so, the missionaries would need helping hands. In 1994, Wiebe was dispatched by a mission organization called SEND International to establish the Krasnoyarsk Bible Institute on the second floor of Grace Church. He knew it would be tough-going and slow, but Wiebe believed he had found his life's calling, and he soon met a Ukrainian translator named Leanna, got married, and bought an apartment in an old, Soviet-era housing block. "There are frustrations, there are days that feel like there isn't a response that there was in the earlier days," says Wiebe, as his three blond daughters flit in and out of the Wiebes' modest living room. "[But] we're here because we continue to feel that we're making a difference."
That difference is difficult to quantify and, with lackluster results, the interest by religious groups in the United States is waning. Russia has, in recent years, fallen out of fashion in the missionary world, and mission boards are redirecting funds to lands where a Protestant revival has taken root, such as Latin America and parts of Africa. "It's easy to talk about something exciting--there's kind of a romantic feel, and people want to give to that," says Wiebe. "But when the romantic feeling is gone and you're left in the trenches with blood and sweat, suddenly people don't dig so deep into their pockets."
Modest contributions. The Baptist Union, a network of churches that Wiebe helped establish, currently cannot survive without American dollars. Local fundraising produces little results because of cultural and economic factors, and most of the members of the congregation do not have the means to make serious contributions. "Russians learned how to sacrifice their life, their time and their families, but they haven't learned to sacrifice their money," says Wiebe.
Financial sacrifice, self-governance, empowerment were just some of the things Wiebe discovered didn't come naturally to passive Russians. An energetic mover and shaker, Wiebe found the way of life here slow and the people slow to change their ways. Even a simple chore like getting a driver's license could take a day or longer. Planting churches, getting people to catch on to his ideas of entrepreneurship, seemed as though it could take a lifetime. "Russians are different from Americans," says Alexander Sisko, 34, a Russian pastor who took over for Wiebe as director of the Bible institute two years ago. "You schedule things by the minute, and we schedule things by the week."
After Wiebe trained the preachers and the trainers, men like Sisko who help in the college or preach the Sunday sermons, he set out to make the Baptist Union a more efficient operation. In order to ensure continued growth, Wiebe needed to make church building more cost-effective, and that put Grace Church at the heart of a cultural clash. The main hall is capacious and has a lofty ceiling, making it expensive to heat through the long Siberian winter, when temperatures plummet to 50 below zero. But when Wiebe brought in plans to build a new church, a "quick-build" model developed in the Canadian tundra that was cheaper to construct and maintain because it was a compact structure made from sheetrock, the Russian pastors were incredulous--it would look like a suburban car garage next to the towering multi-colored Orthodox temples. "It took a while," says Wiebe, recounting how he coaxed the pastors by comparing the thin, insulated walls of the quick-build church to the thin shell of an airplane. When the quick-build church was finally erected in a nearby hamlet, the locals predictably tagged it as they perceived it: the American Church.
There was also the business of growing a congregation. Over 10 years, Wiebe graduated 152 ministers from the Bible institute, half of whom devoted themselves to full-time evangelism in the wilds of Siberia. The Baptist Union grew from 22 to over 100 churches scattered over the Krasnoyarsk region, which stretches from the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the north down to just above the Mongolian border in the south. Now, the pews of Grace Church are nearly full on Sunday mornings with 900 members. The congregants greet one another with an easy familiarity, and the din of the children in Sunday school mixes in with the preacher's sermon when the doors to the basement swing open. It could be a church in Anytown, U.S.A., except for the Russian pastor's occasional references to communism.
Thinking big. With the backing and resources of his mission board, Wiebe invited pastors from American seminaries to teach at the institute. He instructed the emerging church leadership on the virtues of small-group Bible study. He showed newly minted evangelists how to recruit through team sports and group activities like fishing trips. He taught his congregants to reach out to orphanages and homeless shelters. "We want our students to think big in the Bible college," says Wiebe, opening his arms to demonstrate magnitude. "Jesus was a big thinker."
But Wiebe had a difficult time reaching the middle class which, after an initial curiosity, went the way of secular western Europeans. So he started approaching people who were open to his message: pensioners nostalgic for the religious traditions of their childhood and a generation of disaffected youth drowning in a flood of cheap and easy drugs. Wiebe opened a drug-rehab center in the mountain village where the quick-build church was raised and funneled recovering heroin addicts into the Bible institute. "People who were once addicted to drugs now find themselves clinging to God for life," says Wiebe. "We want people to see the love of God, and usually needy people are the people who are most ready to receive God's love."
Arguably, Wiebe is helping those who are in most need of help and perhaps in most need of faith, but there are questions over the viability of Grace Church and whether the next generation will be able to sustain the growth. After 10 years of evangelism in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial city of 1 million, the proportion of pensioners in Wiebe's congregation dramatically outweighs every other age group, and while the recovering addicts have embraced their new faith with ardor, it is not clear that they come to Grace Church because they prefer the nuts and bolts of the Baptist Church to Orthodoxy or simply because that's where the door is open. "I went where help was offered. I didn't know who they were," says a graduate and former heroin addict, Vladimir Tsapkov, 33. "If the Orthodox Church had offered help, I would have gone there." Or as the coordinator of the rehab center put it: "Junkies don't have denominations."
"Underhanded tactics." Post-Soviet Russia is a country caught in a spiritual crisis and afflicted by physical decay. Siberian villages are drained of life, as people flee for industrial cities and towns, while rampant unemployment and graft have infected those city streets with drugs, crime, and disease. The Russian government has largely left these problems unchecked, whether because of ineptitude or an unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of the situation.
When evangelicals like Wiebe stepped in with American dollars and opened drug-rehab centers and invited HIV-infected youth into their churches, some regional and local authorities were grateful for the help. But the Orthodox Church felt threatened by these meddlesome outsiders, who were making them look bad. Some clergy even denounced foreign missionaries who do humanitarian work or hand out Bibles as using “underhanded tactics" and accused evangelicals of giving away free goods in order to seduce souls into their faith. "The Russian Orthodox Church [is] scared by the financial power and efficiency of the evangelicals," says Victoria Clark, author of Why Angels Fall: A Journey Through Orthodox Europe From Byzantium to Kosovo. "They see it as very aggressive indeed to come and fish for Russian souls when Russians are already Christian by being Russian. It's an attack on nationhood, not just spiritual identity."
Whether encouraged by their Orthodox clergy or motivated by their own growing xenophobia, some local and regional authorities decided to take matters into their own hands. The problem metastasized to a national level when, in 1997, the federal government passed a law limiting religious freedom to the extent that even the Salvation Army was kicked out. As the situation deteriorated, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom began to keep a running tab of the misdeeds: congregations forced to pray in schools and private homes because they couldn't get permits to build their churches; a Baptist Church set on fire; dozens of reported cases of slurs and street fights.
With the growing threat from local security services, tapped phones, and revoked visas, sticking it out in small-town Russia has become a quotidian gamble for American missionaries. As a result, many have retreated to the relative blur of Moscow or St. Petersburg, and many more returned home to America. "The honeymoon is over. It's been over for some years," says a U.S. government official who follows Russia but would speak only on condition of anonymity. "If you're a member of a minority religious group and you're living in a community that's hostile, chances are you're not going to get much help from the local government. If you go and complain about harassment, you might find you suddenly lost your lease."
The village of Ust-Omchug lies in the heart of Russia's far eastern tundra, in the remote region of Magadan, which was once so notorious for its forced labor prisoners that it was tagged "gateway to hell." Jim Pranger and his family moved there in 2000, after they were unable to get visas to live in the nearby village of Palatka. At first, only children came to Sunday services, and before the Prangers could find enough adults to keep the congregation going, warnings from the local Orthodox clergy that it was a mortal sin to attend the Pranger services began to circulate through the cloistered community. Soon, Pranger and his family lost their religious visas--again. It was the third time they were forced by circumstances to relocate in Russia, and this time, they would go west to Krasnoyarsk, where there was more freedom to operate.
A self-professed "ex-druggie rock-and-roller," Pranger has a thick, long beard and black boots that make him look a little like an outlaw biker. The devout Baptist says that he grew his beard out only to protect his neck and face from the harsh Siberian winds and that he no longer drinks, smokes, swears, or listens to rock-and-roll the way he did in his Navy days--not since he found faith in Jesus in Jacksonville, Fla., 27 years ago after being lured to church by "pretty girls and a free chicken dinner." Now, if a rock-and-roll song comes on during a movie he's watching, Pranger hits the mute button.
For Pranger, life in Russia is an adventure. An avid reader of Christian literature, he gleans inspiration from the likes of Hudson Taylor, who charted his own course through China in the late 1800s, and David Livingstone, who roamed Africa translating the Bible into indigenous tongues. "A lot of these guys are my heroes. I like adventure! I like to get things started, but I don't have the patience to finish it," he says. Before he was a pastor, Pranger had tried a lot of things he'd never finish: construction, small-engine repair, farming.
Pranger, his wife, Laura, a pious woman from rural Indiana, and two of their five children moved to Krasnoyarsk last year, with the support of their home church in Cleveland. "I love Russia. I would rather be here than anywhere in the world," says Pranger. "People think it's a sacrifice, [but] it's easier living here. There's a lot of politics in churches in the States, but being here and being on our own, we're free to follow the Bible."
But the Prangers discovered that life in Russia came with its own set of limitations. After the 1997 law was passed, obtaining a visa became a cumbersome and costly process. If and when the visa is granted, American missionaries are required to leave the country every six months to renew their registration. For a family with children, the processing fees, airplane fare, and hassle to daily life are too big a burden. Region to region, the law is interpreted differently by local administrators and is in constant flux. "The law may not be capricious, but the way it's applied is," says one American missionary, who asked to keep her name private to avoid getting in trouble with the authorities over her precarious visa status.
Low profile. The Prangers used the local Independent Baptist Church to secure their religious visa, but they remain independent of even the Independent Baptists (and the Union Baptists and any other sort of Baptist or Christian branch that doesn't share their deeply conservative views). The ex-pat evangelical community itself is largely fractured. Missionaries seldom mix with other Americans for fear of becoming more visible or being lumped with an offending denomination. Some people suspect strongly that they have a file with the security services. Others were afraid to give their name for this article for fear that the Russian authorities would search their names on Google. These missionaries periodically surf the Net to see if any information about them is in the public domain that may possibly contradict what the authorities know about them.
Their fears are not baseless. Scores of missionaries have been kicked out for evangelizing and proselytizing, tagged by the government as security threats or as agents of U.S. imperialism. In order to get around the bureaucracy, some have gone underground, registering under the auspices of a student or business visa. They teach English, do humanitarian work, and evangelize surreptitiously. These missionaries perhaps feel the most discouraged by the reality of their situation, and when they watch families around them pack up and go home, they wonder how they'll ever hold out. "Our ultimate goal is to see more churches here, but everyone we talked to that has experience in church planting says that you can't expect it to take less than 10 years, and part of that is because of the law you have to convert people one on one," says the American missionary who was afraid to give her name for this article. "I've said I just wanted to go back to being a secretary in an office, but we have too much invested here. However many years we have under our belt, that's just toil under our brow."
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."
