Dear Friends,

On October 2, 2006, Laurie, Jeremiah, and I flew from Moscow, Russia, to Frankfurt, Germany, and connected to our flight to Washington D.C.’s Dulles airport. Our friend Abe Lincoln from Third Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia, was there to meet us when we came out of customs. He drove us to the campus of Union Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education on the north side of Richmond where we have rented an apartment. It was to this same part of Richmond that our family moved 17 years ago, and we have returned here for a nine-month furlough after nine years of mission service in Russia.

It’s good to be on home soil. The words of Psalm 126 describe our mood:

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
We were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
And our tongue with shouts of joy;
Then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
We are glad.

We have felt run down by life in Russia lately, and our time in the United States is restoring our strength. We enjoyed warm sunny weather, the fresh air, and the beautiful colors of autumn in the month of October here in Richmond. Richmond will be our home base during this furlough. After the New Year we will visit churches, especially churches in the western United States, since we have not visited churches there in six years.

What has happened in the nine years we have been serving in Russia? We arrived in Moscow in August of 1997. We arrived just as the great enthusiasm about the rapid evangelization of Russia was starting to wane. The late 1980s and the early 1990s were a time of unbounded (largely naïve) optimism about quickly winning the hearts of Russians for Christ. Through miraculous turnings of events, religious freedom was proclaimed. Billy Graham held several open-air evangelistic events in large Moscow stadiums. During Gorbachev’s last years and the beginning of Yeltsin’s presidency, missionaries began to flood into Russia in large numbers. To be a missionary in Russia during those years was a sensational and thrilling thing. In those years it seems that many Russians, after a long period of religious repression, had a deep hunger to hear the gospel. Hundreds of new churches were organized.

By the time we arrived in 1997 this wave of enthusiasm had not died, but had begun to diminish. In that year the Russian Duma passed a law that began to limit religious freedoms. Foreign missionaries and their churches were identified as “sectarian” or “totalitarian” and as undermining traditional Russian Orthodoxy. To be sure, many of the criticisms of the foreign missionaries were justified because of the ignorance and insensitivity of missionaries to Russian culture.

In 1998 Russia plummeted into a financial crisis. The ruble lost most of its value. The hope of many Russians for material wealth and economic stability was shattered. Optimism about Russia’s new democracy quickly turned to cynicism. This cynicism was also directed at matters of faith. Many Russians adopted the attitude that God would help only those who help themselves.

In connection with Putin’s presidency, we have seen a quiet, slow but steady “tightening of the screws” on religious freedom. Evangelical Christianity is labeled as suspect. Nationalist and Orthodox groups have made evangelical Christianity into a common enemy. While basic religious freedoms have been maintained, on a local level government officials have set up extremely difficult obstacles for evangelical churches while they have helped and financially supported Orthodox churches. The obstacles have largely been set up to hinder the Russian Christians, not Western missionaries like us.

The result is that many of the churches organized during the early years of religious freedom have not survived. Relatively few of the churches that have survived have managed to build or purchase a building. Those who have a building are often harassed by city building and fire code inspectors who lay heavy fines on them. Those who have not managed to get a building constantly struggle with high rent for the use of public space and the constant threat that permission to use a building may be withdrawn.

The effect of these changing conditions has been felt Western missionaries in Russia as well. Whereas 15 years ago many groups were establishing and developing new mission organizations in Russia, during the past six years we have seen the downsizing of many of those organizations. I can think of only a few new mission initiatives started during recent years. Missionaries continue to come to Russia, but it is mainly to replace those who have left and to maintain the work that has been started, not to initiate new work.

Materialistic atheism is no longer the official ideology of Russia, but its dark spirit continues to hold Russian bureaucrats captive so that the gospel is hampered by administrative limitations. Though many Russians may now wear crosses around their necks, they have not come to know the freedom of trusting and following Jesus.

What do we do in this context? We seek to strengthen the foundation of the existing churches and especially of the large number of churches that have been organized over the last 15 years. This is the purpose for which Narnia Center in Moscow has been established. We seek to strengthen churches through training events and through the publication and distribution of literature.

As we enjoy the beginning of this furlough year, the ministry we have worked to develop in Russia continues. Alexei Markevich, who participated last year with his family in the program at the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, has returned to Moscow and is energetically leading the staff of Narnia Center in their work. Here are some of the things Narnia Center has been doing:

• Last winter Narnia Center conducted children’s ministry training events in Tyumen and in Muravlenko, Siberia. We were kept warm in the churches and the homes of the faithful in spite of temperatures reaching down to -42 Centigrade.
• In late May and early June our children’s ministry magazine editor, Larisa Zhukova, and our book sales manager, Igor Slyonkin, flew from Moscow to Vladivostok, a city on the Pacific ocean in the far east of the Russian Federation, to participate in a training event for Christian camping leaders. They offered Narnia Center’s books and magazines to the participants at the event and to the churches and bookstores of the city. Vladivostok is a ten-hour flight from Moscow, just as far as New York is from Moscow.
• In late September we conducted a children’s ministry training seminar in Angarsk, near Irkutsk, not far from Lake Baikal in Siberia. Lake Baikal is famous as the deepest fresh water lake in the world. Fresh water seals, which have developed the capacity to stay submerged without breathing for up to 75 minutes, live in this lake.
• This November a new three-year program for training Sunday school teachers for the Baptist churches in the Oryol region has begun under the direction of Narnia Center. In addition to this, sessions for the training of pastors have again resumed in Noyabrsk (Surgut) and Kirov.
• Narnia Center continues its publishing ministry. During the past year we have published the following books: Listen to the Singing by Jean Little; The Open Secret by Leslie Newbigin; Raising Parents, an original work in Russian, by Mikhail and Nadezhda Telepov; Ignatius the Worm and His Discoveries, another original work in Russian, by Viktor Krotov; The Psalms and Lectures on Pastoral Care by Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Introduction to Evangelical Theology by Karl Barth; Our Unsinkable Ark, an original work in Russian written by and for the parents of mentally handicapped adult children; and four issues of our children’s ministry magazine Narnia. We also reprinted a number of our best-selling books.
• Many other books are in the process of preparation. Some of them are The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth Speare; The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald; The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter; Sermons by Karl Barth; The Misunderstood Man by Walter Trobisch; I Married You by Walter Trobisch; The Joy of Being a Woman by Ingrid Trobisch; Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byers; Amos Fortune Free Man by Elizabeth Yates; Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell; Park’s Quest by Katherine Paterson; Marcelino, Bread and Wine by Jose Maria Sanchez Silva; Fireflies by Jan Karafiat; Sword Song by Rosemary Sutcliff; My Sister Is An Angel by Ulf Stark, and a number of other original Russian works.

Our two girls Hannah and Christiana are now enrolled in college. We have visited each of them since returning to the States. We are greatly pleased to see each one is thriving in the community in which she is studying. Jeremiah, who at age 14 stands 6’3”, is enrolled in NorthStar Academy, an online Christian Academy. He interacts with the teachers of his five NorthStar classes and submits all his work to them through the Internet. I am the teacher for his sixth class, ninth-grade Bible. Jeremiah was very disappointed to have to leave his friends at his school in Moscow for a year and is very eager to return there next fall. But this arrangement means that we as a family will be able to be together more as we travel to visit churches. We plan a trip back to Russia in February to spend time together with Narnia Center staff and our partners in ministry. During that trip we plan a two-week trip to Salekhard in Siberia to explore possible work there in the future.

I want to thank those who have helped make this ministry possible. Please continue to do so with your prayers and your financial gifts.

Our contact information during this time is 3401 Brook Road, Richmond, Virginia, 23227. The apartment telephone number is (804) 359-1335. Cell phones are (804) 432-5654 for Donald and (804) 432-5655 for Laurie. My email continues to be Marsden [at] eamail.net.

Grace and Peace,

Donald D. Marsden Jr.

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 188