March 2003

Dear Friends,

A week and a half I ago I returned from a trip to Omsk, Siberia, where I taught a two-week course on "Developing the Sunday School" with twenty men in a Baptist Bible college. What a blessing that trip was!

Like many training schools I work with, this Baptist college trains brothers. There are no programs for women at the college, yet. As you might imagine, not all the men were totally enthused about the required course on Sunday schools. A number of them started out looking at it as just one of those requirements that the college administration puts into their program, which is neither interesting nor useful. These men see themselves as preachers and systematic theologians. And I can understand them. When I was in seminary I didn't take a single course connected with Sunday school or children's ministry. I dreamed of being a preacher in a large Presbyterian church to which people would flock to hear my inspiring sermons! I would have laughed if you had told me I was going to be involved in training Sunday school teachers! But God had other plans in store for me.

I knew it would be an uphill battle getting some of those men interested in thinking about how to effectively organize Sunday schools and train teachers, but on the third day the group started to come alive.

I did my best to keep the learning process interactive right from the start by asking the men who were sitting in straight rows at tables facing the blackboard to rearrange the tables into blocks for small groups of four people each.

I gave them lots of questions to discuss and problems to solve in their small groups, and each group was required to conduct a one and a half hour mock training seminar for teachers during the last three days of the course. And although many of them had had no experience at all in teaching, they caught on to the concepts and did a super job with their training seminar.

While in Omsk, I met with Viktor Sipko, the senior regional leader for the Baptist churches of Siberia, to discuss the possibility of Narnia Center conducting seminars for children's ministry leaders in that region of Siberia. We have done this in central Russia, and if God provides the resources and the time we will begin children's ministry leadership training in Siberia as well. I was encouraged to meet a number of people in Omsk highly dedicated to ministry with children not only in Sunday schools, but also in camps, orphanages, cancer wards, and with kids on the streets. We made tentative plans for a children's ministry seminar in Siberia next year.

Whenever I travel, I am on the lookout for key leaders in ministry with children who can help train others in their regions. One such person is a man named Andre from the Tomsk region of Siberia. He has been teaching children in Sunday schools for seven years and has never had anything but the most basic training.

At the end of the course he said, "When I started this course, I had a few questions, but I thought I knew most of what there is to know about working with children. But now I feel as if I have been to the doctor for an examination, and the doctor given me an X-ray and has found about nine areas were I am sick. But the good news is that those areas can be healed."

Andre reminded me of some of the people I have met who are the descendants of German immigrants whose families moved to Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I asked him whether he was of German heritage. Andre explained to me that his last name, Nyepomnyashikh, is not a typical Russian name. It means "unremembered." His family was exiled to Siberia by Stalin during the Soviet period, and somehow the family name was lost. Such people were given the name "unremembered." Andre does not know who his ancestors were. I met other wonderful Christians in Siberia whose families had been exiled by Stalin and who could not establish any links with their families or former homes because all records have been lost or because the government refuses to help.

When I met these wonderful people I remembered the words of Jesus "Your names are written in heaven" (Luke 10:20). I remembered the prayer of the thief who was crucified next to Jesus who cried out "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And I thought, "Andre, your family name may have been forgotten, but God has remembered you!"

As we approach the celebration of greatest event of the Christian year, the celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the holy festival of Easter, know that you too are remembered. Whoever you are, wherever you are, in whatever circumstance you find yourself. God has not forgotten you. No matter how unbalanced and unstable our world seems to be, God holds it, and he holds each one of us. Through Jesus Christ God has established a cosmic, eternal kingdom of peace. He is coming to claim this world as his own.

I am grateful for your partnership in the ministry to which God has called us in Russia and wish you every blessing.

Grace and Peace,

Donald Marsden

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 94