July 23, 2005

Dear Friends and Family,

One of the best things about our position here is that we have the privilege of working with fellow Christians from other denominations. Here in Russia, we work with Baptists, Orthodox, and Lutherans. There are, of course, differences of theology and outlook, not only between us Presbyterians and our Russian colleagues, but between and among Christians in Russia. Nonetheless, if we look attentively, we can find more points of similarity.

I got home last week from three weeks with various groups from PC(USA) churches who had come to Russia to share faith and fellowship with their Russian partner churches. Since I teach school from September through May, the summer is the only time when I get substantial time with visiting groups. As it happens, most groups come in the summer, and the need for translation and other help is the greatest then. This year, we had such a volume of visitors that we ended up mobilizing the whole family, which brought blessings all its own.

After two weeks of living in tents, I traveled (by plane, no less) from Moscow to Orenburg with two visitors from First Presbyterian Church, Quitman, Georgia, a small town in south Georgia. Pastor Bobbi Neason and Elder Marie Hill came to make the first contact with their Lutheran partner church in the small city of Sol’ Iletsk, located some 70 kilometers from Orenburg, not far from the border with Kazakhstan. Although Orenburg itself is in Europe, Sol’ Iletsk, on the other side of the Ural River, is technically in Asia. To the east are the Ural Mountains and Siberia, to the west are the bleak but beautiful steppes.

The Lutheran church has existed in Russia for nearly 300 years, since the arrival of German immigrants at the invitation of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. These Germans brought their Lutheran faith with them, and kept it, together with the German language, through all the succeeding decades. Their relations with their ethnic Russian neighbors were quite good until 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin promptly deported all ethnic Germans away from the front (usually to Siberia and Central Asia). The Lutheran church, like all churches in the Soviet Union, suffered periods of terrible repression during the Soviet period. The church building in Orenburg was destroyed, and a medical school built in its place.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Lutherans in Orenburg and Sol’ Iletsk found new freedoms and new opportunities, but also new challenges.

The Lutheran church remained overwhelmingly a church of and for ethnic Germans. When it became possible for ethnic Germans, with the support of the German government, to emigrate to a unified Germany, many church members, especially young families, left.

Bobbi, Marie and I had the opportunity to see how the churches in Sol’ Iletsk and Orenburg are responding to these challenges. In Sol’ Iletsk, Pastor Nikolai Surovyatkin’s congregation consists mostly of older women. Only one man attends on a regular basis, and he is 93 years old. Employment opportunities in the city are poor—there is a salt mine, which has operated for hundreds of years, and a maximum-security prison. There is seasonal employment during the summer months, tending and harvesting the city’s most famous product, watermelons. The church invites all interested persons to its holiday celebrations, which are frequently held in public halls because the church’s sanctuary cannot accommodate many visitors.

Pastor Nikolai’s major outreach is directed to a group that can never come to church. The inmates of the prison here have all been sentenced to life terms, typically for repeated violent crimes, multiple murders, etc. The conditions they live in are brutal, their chances of release virtually nil. But Nikolai is there twice a week to teach lessons from the Bible, offer counseling, serve Communion. He has a constant barrage of letters from prisoners, all of whom eagerly await his response. He has collected a book’s worth of poetry written by inmates, as well as amazingly intricate works of art. Until quite recently, when the cost of printing became prohibitive, he produced and edited a newspaper that was distributed throughout the prison. Many people in the community cannot understand why he spends so much time and effort on these inmates, reasoning that they deserve to be exactly where they are. Nikolai prefers to point out the inmates who have come to know Christ during their time in prison, and the artistic creativity of which they are capable.

In many ways, Pastor Inessa Thierbach’s church in Orenburg is better situated: the congregation is larger, younger, more diverse. They have a beautiful building, built with assistance from the Lutheran church in Germany. But they still have problems with emigration and limited financial resources. Their major area of outreach has been to the children of the community. They visit a local children’s home, provide meals in the church for street children, distribute boots and winter clothing. For several years, they offered a music school for neighborhood children, although that program is now in jeopardy because there is no money to pay for music teachers. But perhaps the most impressive work that they do is their work for children with educational difficulties. The church basement is home to a program, the only one of its kind in the city, where parents can bring children with autism, Down Syndrome, and other conditions for activities and therapy. These services are basically unavailable through the usual government network of clinics and hospitals; most of these children have little or no chance to go to school, and many will be institutionalized when their parents are no longer willing or able to care for them.

The church gets many referrals from city agencies that can offer no help to these children, and the diagnoses made at the church are accepted at local hospitals. The basic remodeling needed to make the church basement useable for this work was paid for by the city, but the city provides no help with the ongoing costs. One member of the church, a textile engineer by training, has begun creating church tapestries to sell in order to raise funds for this ministry. Unfortunately, the basement, even remodeled, does not comply with the necessary sanitation codes, because there is no bathroom on that level. To put in a bathroom, and a drain for the kitchen sink, would require a pump, since the basement is actually lower than the city sewer system. The church simply does not have the $2,000 necessary to buy and install the pump. The net result is that the church continues to operate this vital ministry on a series of temporary permits, never sure that they won’t be shut down the next time they come up for renewal.

FPC Quitman’s partner is the church in Sol ‘Iletsk, but we wanted to introduce Pastor Bobbi to Pastor Inessa as well. Inessa is one of a handful of ordained women in the Lutheran church in Russia. Many of her fellow pastors oppose the ordination of women. It is not easy to be in such a minority, but she has found her place, serving on the Synod Council and serving as a district superintendent in her region, all of which says a great deal about this dynamic woman. We forwarded a letter from Pastor Bobbi to Pastor Nikolai through Inessa, because email to Sol’ Iletsk is so unreliable. In that letter, Bobbi shared something of her journey to the ministry. Inessa found many points of connection. We scheduled the visit to the region to allow time for these two sisters in ministry to connect as well.

We experienced extraordinary hospitality with our brothers and sisters in Christ in both Sol’ Iletsk and Orenburg. It is inspiring to see how these churches on the edge of Siberia are working on behalf of those least able to help themselves, putting into practice our Lord’s teaching that whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do for Him.

May God bless you all.

Peace,

Al Smith

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 187