08316
April 23, 2008

A Pauline journey

Missionary treks to northern Siberia to spread the gospel

by the Rev. Donald Marsden
PC(USA) mission worker in Russia

Editor’s note: The Rev. Don Marsden is concluding nearly 20 years of service as a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker with the Narnia Center in Moscow, Russia, in order to join the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, a validated mission support group related to the PC(USA), where he will be evangelizing unreached people groups in northern Siberia. He recently traveled there to become better acquainted with his new mission field. This is his journal of that journey. — Jerry L. Van Marter

MOSCOW — A journal of my Feb. 15-28 trip to northern Siberia:

Feb. 15/16

On the evening Feb. 15 I flew from Moscow to Khanti-Mansiisk.  Arriving at one in the morning, I was met by brother Sasha Khorshilov from the Baptist Church. After four hours of sleep, I was on a bus headed north to Nyagan.  The road was uneven, and I found myself frequently being jolted awake by a stab of fear as I was launched toward the ceiling of the van. It was windy and cold at the bus station parking lot in Nyagan, so my eyes were watering as I stepped out of the van. I looked around for brother Sergei from the Nyagan Baptist Church who was supposed to meet me, but he was nowhere to be seen.  I found shelter in a cafe called “Tashkent.”

A half-drunk man from Bashkortostan asked me who I was and where I was headed.  When he learned I was an American, he became rather animated.  A lot of eyes in the little cafe focused on me.  The Bashkir man told me he had never met a regular American before.  He didn’t seem to like what he knew about Americans from television. 

Soon brother Sergei appeared. At the train station a lot of eyes were focused on me again when people sensed a foreigner was in their midst.  These small Siberian towns are not filled with foreigners as Moscow is, where a foreigner draws no attention at all.  The hour-long train ride to Priobie cost me just two dollars. 

Arriving at Priobie — the end of the line for the train line — I hustled to another parking lot to find a bus headed for Beryozovo by way of Igrim.  The road from Priobie to Beryozovo is a winter road, a trail beaten down by trucks across the frozen rivers and swamps of the north.  In the summer you travel in these regions only by boat or by helicopter. 

I arrived at a bus stop in Beryozova around 8 p.m..  It was windy and bitterly cold, so the five minutes I waited till my friend arrived — Dmitri (“Dima”) Petrovich Bogdanov, pastor of the Baptist Church in Khanti-Mansiisk — seemed to drag out as fellow passengers quickly disappeared in taxis and other vehicles.

Dima gave me a big bear hug and drove to the Baptist Church where we joined a large group who were sitting in the dining room having a hot meal.  It was good to be out of the cold and among friends.

Beryozovo is the Siberian town on the Ob River where Dima started his missionary work some 15 years ago.  It is also historically a center for the preaching of the gospel to the native peoples of this part of northern Siberia.  For centuries the Russian Orthodox sent missionaries to the Khant people in this area, at times attempting to baptize them forcibly. 

Like so many of the Baptist pastors in the area, Dima is a Ukrainian who felt the call to plant churches in the far north back in 1991 when religious restrictions were removed after the fall of the Soviet Union. After calling together the congregation and building the house of worship in Beryozovo, he passed on the pastoral leadership to a local man and headed south to plant a second church in Khanti-Mansiisk eight years ago. 

Dima lives by the gospel. He tells people about Jesus whether he has known them all his life or has just met them and never expects to see them again. In addition to planting and building two churches in the larger cities of the area, Dima regularly travels out to the isolated villages in the region to preach.  He has helped to place part time missionaries in five of those villages.  His congregation of 100 helps to support them. 

Dima and a group of 11 Baptist pastors and church workers had set off some five days earlier from Khanti-Mansiisk on a winter expedition to visit many of those remote villages in the north.  I had to make the complicated trip from Khanti-Mansiisk to Beryozovo because I wanted to join them. 

That night I experienced my first banya — a uniquely Russian cultural experience which is something like a sauna, except that the banya is much hotter. Once you have been adequately “steamed,” you either jump in a pool of ice cold water or go outside to roll in the snow.  Since this banya had no pool and not enough cold water to douse ourselves freely, Dima and I went out to cover ourselves with fresh snow to cool down. And then right back into the banya to steam again.  This is repeated several times before washing and getting dressed. 

Feb. 17

It’s Sunday — we worshiped in the Beryozovo Baptist Church.  After lunch we piled onto the vakhtovka — which can only be described as a truck outfitted as a bus — to drive over winter roads to the village of Tege, a small Khant village of 500 about sixty kilometers from Beryozovo. 

Inside the cold hall of the House of Culture — the name the Soviets gave to the community center they built in every village, town and city of the Soviet Union — which was still decorated from the recent Christmas and Valentine's Day discotheque gatherings, a group of about forty people from the community had gathered in anticipation of our arrival. They were mostly older women wrapped in winter coats and with their heads covered, but also a few teenagers in blue jeans and leather jackets, one old man and two or three children. 

A banner at the top of the stage read “Peace, Happiness, Success, Kindness.” The group sat for two hours in total silence, apparently unmoved by the program, which included sermons by three preachers, singing and the recitation of a poem about the grace of God.  But when it was over the people were clearly glad that we had come. Some stayed to talk with the preachers before walking home. 

We stayed that night in the apartment of a young couple named Sasha and Valeria.  They are recently arrived missionaries in Tege, Sasha a Khant and Valeria of the Komi people.  With their three small children — Solomon, Timothy and baby Vera. — they moved to Tege from Beryozovo, where they are members of the Baptist church. 

Their parents helped them buy the apartment, which is very cold but they still struggle to pay the electric bill. That’s the way it is for everyone in the village. Sasha goes hunting and fishing with the local men, who mainly make their living that way.

Sasha conducts worship services in their apartment for a small group of believers. The twelve of us slept on mattresses or on the rug in sleeping bags on the kitchen and living room floors. One of the drivers slept in the cloakroom.  The family of five slept huddled together in the only other room in the back of the apartment. 

We drove north up the Ob River, leaving the territory of the Khanti-Mansiski Autonomous Okrug into the Yamalo-Nenetski Autonomous Okrug, stopping in the middle of the day for lunch in a larger village called Muzhi. 

We were received in Muzhi by a Pentecostal missionary named Sergei and his wefe, Oxana. Sergei told us about his difficult ministry. Unlike most villages, where there is no church at all, in Muzhi there is a Russian Orthodox Church and the priest forbids the villagers to attend Sergei’s meetings. 

When my Baptist friends Dima Bogdanov and Alexei Teleus heard about the difficulties Sergei and his wife were having, they said, “We need to ask God’s forgiveness, because back in 1992 one of our Baptist missionaries conducted evangelism here. The entire village came to Christ, and they begged the missionary to stay as their pastor, but within a few weeks he left them. He returned to following year, and again many people came to the Lord and once again pleaded with him to stay, but within two weeks he had left again. No one followed up on the work he had started, so the people felt betrayed.” 

They then kneeled in Sergei’s living room, asking God to forgive them for their negligence of this village and asking God to bless Sergei’s ministry there. 

After lunch, we drove along the Ob River to Salekhard, passing through five or six villages along the way. It had been our hope to stop and preach the gospel in some of those villages, but arrangements had not been made in a timely fashion. Salekhard is a city of 35,000 people, with several churches. We stayed in the Baptist Church. 

Today we drove four hours east along the Ob River to the village of Salemal, traveling no faster than 40 mph on the badly rutted road. In Salemal we were received by a woman named Valentina and her son Avdei. They are Nenets believers. The handful of other believers in the village had been invited to the meeting, but none came, so we visited with Valentina and Avdei. 

Valentina misses the visits of Anatoli Marechev, the Russian pastor from Salekhard’s Good News Church. He used to visit frequently, but lately they have not seen him.  Valentina also told us this. 

A year ago, Valentina’s 17-year-old daughter Anastasia disappeared. She had been out with friends that night and everyone had gone home around 10 o’clock. The police investigated her disappearance but no trace of her has been found. There is no reasonable explanation for her disappearance and Valentina is hoping against hope that she may someday again see her daughter. Tragically, this is not the first instance of such a disappearance in the village. 

Avdei, which means “Obadiah” in Russian, was a student of mine at the missionary college in Salekhard in 2005 and 2006. He is a Nenets Christian about 25 years old. He was one of the best students in the missionary college and after finishing school found a job on a fishing boat in Salekhard. He has just moved back to Salemal, transferred when his boss learned that his mother lives in Salemal.

The group of 14 missionaries, which included two regional Baptist superintendents and several other Baptist pastors, gathered around Avdei, and told him: “You are a believer.  You have studied in the missionary college, so you have the necessary training to conduct ministry here. It just so happens that God sent you here to Salemal two days before we arrived. You may feel as Moses did that you are not ready for this, you may feel as Jeremiah did that you are too young, but there is no way for you to get out of it. You must preach the word of God in this village, because God has sent you here!” 

I spoke to Avdei about the fact that God had sent him home to support his mother at a time of great difficulty, as she has lost her daughter. I also talked about his name, Obadiah, taken from the Old Testament book which consists of  one very short chapter.  I said, “You may ask ‘What significance does this obscure book of one short chapter in the Old Testament have?’ It may appear to have no significance at all, but it has great significance. 

“In the same way, you, Avdei, may feel that you cannot do anything in this village, because you are young and inexperienced. You have no wife or children. And you may feel unsure of what to do. But your presence here has great significance. Be faithful to the Lord and He will show you what to do.” 

We drove back toward Salekhard and at Aksarka Boris Ruskalamov and I got out and drove his Russian jeep back to Salekhard while the 12 other Baptists continued their expedition all night to Urengoi. 

Arriving in Aksarka after 10 p.m., Boris and I  stopped by the home of Sasha and Oxana Salinder. They are Nenets Christians, with a five-year-old daughter Christina, in whose dedication ceremony I participated three years ago. Sasha and Oxana told us that on Saturday (Feb. 23) they were planning to hold a service in their home, which is shared by two or three other families. They insisted that we return and we agreed, but only after visiting believers in Kharsaim, which is halfway between Aksarka and Salakhard. 

Feb. 22

We made plans to visit four villages over the next week — Kharsaim, Aksarka, Beloyarsk and Shurishkari. None of these villages has a church. Only one has a young missionary to gather the few believers for worship. Boris is responsible for visiting and keeping in touch with the believers in 10 villages outside of Salekhard. It is too big a responsibility for one person, but at this point there’s no one else to do it. 

We drove out to Kharsaim, arriving around Noon. Kharsaim is a Khant fishing village on a gentle slope down to the Ob River. In the winter you see more snowmobiles than cars.

We visited a believer named Lyudmila, whose house is warm but primitive. There is no plumbing and electric wires are tacked on the walls because she got electricity after the house was built. The house is heated by hot water radiators fed by a boiler that heats the whole village. Sleeping areas are divided from each other by blankets hung from the ceiling. The couches in each room are all beds by night. The doorways and the floors of the house are all crooked. But there are cells phones plugged into the outlets to keep them charged, and there’s a color television set that gets excellent reception with a DVD player connected to it. The TV is never turned off. This is a typical house in a typical village in northern Siberia. 

We held a service with a congregation of one — Lyudmila, who told us she’s not been doing well. Her husband and three sons come home drinking and cussing. She tries to keep things together, but said she often loses her composure and starts cussing back at them. 

Eight years ago there was a Christian congregation of about 20 people in Kharsaim, fifteen of them baptized. But a series of tragedies weakened and dispersed it, and other villagers blamed a spate of accidental deaths in the village on the Christians, saying that by serving Christ and refusing to serve the traditional idols they had drawn the wrath of the ancestral spirits against the community. Finally, the Russian preacher who had been traveling regularly from Salekhard to conduct services in Kharsaim, Anatoli Menshikov, had a heart attack, and could no longer bear the responsiblity. 

We returned to Aksarka and the home of  Sasha and Oxana Salinder.  They regularly invite the Christians in Aksarka to meet in their home. But they are Nenets Christians and the Khant Christians in the village refuse to attend gatherings in the homes of Nenets Christians unless a Russian or a Ukrainian pastor is presiding. The same thing happens in other places where the Khant believers gather — the Nenets refuse to come. Only when a Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan or European pastor leads will they come together. 

When it was my turn to speak I read from Matthew 10:40 where Jesus says, “Whoever receives you receives me and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.”  I spoke about how this family’s reception of us as God’s messengers speaks of their faith in Jesus Christ. In that village where there is no church, where they themselves are crowded in a house they share with two other families, they joyfully provide a place for God’s people to gather. They not only received us, but all who come in the name of Christ. 

It’s Sunday and I worshiped at the Baptist church where I had been staying in Labitnange. Their pastor Vladimir Shitov, is a burly man of about 6' 8" who came to Christ in prison through the ministry of a little German woman back in the early 1990s. He preached on faithfulness — simple, repetitive, but biblical and forceful. 

Sunday afternoon I visited Good News Church. This church has a much freer, contemporary feel to it. The women of the church put on a special program for the men of the church in celebration of Soviet Army Day, an old Soviet holiday that now is generally celebrated as men’s day, something akin to our Father's Day.

The women prepared an excellent dramatic program in which they rewrote the verses to popular songs so that each man in the congregation was acknowledged.  They played games, performed skits and prepared a wonderful meal.  There were lots of laughs.

After I spent Feb. 25 sick in bed, Boris and I set off in his jeep to Shurishkari. We drove across the frozen Ob River to get onto the winter road to the south.  At the beginning of the winter road is a little trailer type building and a bar blocking advance where you must register your car before heading out. You tell the officials where you are headed, and when or whether they should expect to see you come back the same day. This is a safety precaution. Theoretically, if you don’t appear at another check point, they could send a search team out to look for you. 

As Boris went to check in with the officials, a Bahkir woman carrying a couple large bags ran up to our jeep and hopped in the back seat. She was about 50 years old.  As we drove out onto the winter road Boris asked her about her relationship with God. She said “I am a Muslim.”  

I asked her whether she attended services at the mosque.  She told me “No, the men attend the mosque.”  Does she prays? She told me, “No, it is very hard to learn the Arabic language, and you need to pray in Arabic.”  I asked her, “Then of what does your practice of faith as a Muslim consist?”  She said, “We observe three holidays, including fasts.” 

I told her that in our faith all languages are equally suited for speaking with God and that the Christian gospel has been translated into most of the languages of the world, so we can speak to him in our native language. We had a good conversation. When it was time for her to get out at the crossroads to her village, she insisted on giving Boris a few hundred rubles for gas.

In Shurishkari, we called Valentina Vitalievna, who had invited us to come to her house for lunch. Surishkari is one of the villages in which a group from New Wilmington Missionary Conference conducted a children's program back in the summer of 2006. At the time Valentina was the acting mayor in Shurishkari  and  she helped us a great deal when our group arrived. Her daughter attended our program. 

We visited with several people, including the new mayor, who all invited us to return to conduct another children’s summer program. Later, after dinner at Valentina’s, Boris gave pocket New Testaments to Valentina and her sister. Then I prayed, giving thanks to God for the hospitality of this family, asking God to show Valentina the way as she seeks a new post-mayoralty direction in her life. 

As I finished the prayer, Valentina, her sister, her daughter, and her husband all crossed themselves three times, looking up at the icon of the Virgin Mary in the upper corner of the kitchen. Although there is no church in this village, Valentina and her family, who are of the Komi people, practice the Orthodox Christian faith. They thanked us profusely for our visit, and wished us God’s blessing as we left their home.

Wrapping up the trip, Boris and I met with Anatoli Marechev, pastor of the Good News Church to make plans to return in the summer with a group from Harrisonburg, VA, to conduct ministry in the villages. 

Missionary work in the villages of the north is hard work, and the results seem small, but we are reminded of Jesus’ promise: Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  (Matthrew 18:20)