Editor's Note: This year's Week of Prayer for International Missions, December 2-9, focuses on missionaries who serve in the former Soviet Union as well as churches partnering with them, exemplifying the global outreach supported by Southern Baptists' gifts to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.
How do you reach the fifteen million souls of Moscow? One at a time.
The Metro, Moscow's renowned underground rail network, mirrors the city itself. It is huge, with untold miles of tunnels buried deep in the earth and escalators stretching out of sight. It's crowded; an estimated nine million people ride daily, from homeless immigrants to high-powered executives. It's elegant and cultured, with chandeliers, marbled mosaics, and works of art adorning more than one hundred and fifty station platforms.
And it's dark. The people you see there seem achingly alone despite the pushing crowds around them.
"See their faces?" whispers a missionary riding with a trainload of Muscovites. "See how sad they are? They've got no hope."
The Metro mirrors Moscow. And Moscow mirrors Russia.
Approaching its 860th birthday, the city begun by a medieval warrior prince has been the capital of a vast nation, the stronghold of czars, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church, the mind of a great culture, and the center of Soviet communism. Ruled by the Mongol Golden Horde and Ivan the Terrible, burned and rebuilt, starved by famine and revolution, "conquered" by Napoleon, besieged by the Nazis, terrorized by Stalin, Moscow has endured.
"We know how to suffer," boast older Muscovites, who pride themselves on their combination of toughness and sophistication.
Communism did its best to destroy that spirit during seventy years of grim, gray conformity. Today, however, Moscow has re-emerged as the gleaming jewel of the "New Russia." It throbs with color, energy, life — and spiritual hunger.
"They have it," a missionary says of that inner hunger. "But they don't realize it."
New Generation, Old Pain
Red Square on a sunny summer day surges with young hipsters, families out for a stroll, wedding parties, stylishly dressed women, ragged pensioners scrambling for loose coins. A demonstration by a small band of aging communists mourning the Soviet Union's demise attracts little more than a few curious onlookers.
"We are dying off," one of the communists bitterly complains. "Every year there are fewer of us. The youth don't care about anything. They only live in the present."
Actually, Moscow's new generation does care about something: getting an education, scrambling for a good job, making money. Moscow is the social and economic dynamo of Russia. An estimated 80 percent of the nation's total wealth flows into and out of the city.
Up to fifteen million people — more than a tenth of all Russians — live within the four urban "rings" that surround the Kremlin's walls. It is Europe's largest metropolitan area.
At least four million Muscovites are between the ages of 18 and 40. They include the heart of Russia's educated leadership class. Graduates of the city's two hundred and twenty colleges and universities compete for the best jobs. The successful enjoy the city's shiny shopping malls and nightclubs. The rest of Moscow's millions hustle to make a living.
Underneath the bright surfaces of the city, however, lies a hard substratum of Russian pain. Six in ten heads of Moscow households are alcoholic. Many men die too young from drinking and despair. Many children seldom see their fathers. Mothers struggle alone to make ends meet. Dysfunctional families are the rule, not the exception.
Russians are proud of their heritage of great literature, music, and art. But the revolutions, wars, and mass dislocations of the 20th century tore away much of their history — and left nothing to replace it. Nearly all Muscovites are born into the Russian Orthodox Church, but few worship in its ornate, mostly empty sanctuaries.
Challenges, Opportunities
Longstanding suspicion and hostility persist toward non-Orthodox religious groups — including Baptists, who have worshipped in Russia one hundred and thirty years. Even if they don't practice Orthodoxy, many Russians feel they would be denying their "Russianness" by joining another church.
The novelty of post-Soviet religious freedom has worn off. In heady days of new openness in the 1990s, Muscovites would respond by the thousands to evangelistic campaigns. No more. Now it's a hard, slow effort to make committed disciples of Christ.
That's not necessarily bad, according to missionary Ed Tarleton, a fourteen-year resident of Moscow.
"There would be a hundred people accept Christ, but a year later you couldn't find them," Tarleton recalls of the early post-Soviet days. "It doesn't sound as glamorous, but now if a missionary says to you, 'We've got ten to fifteen people in our Friday night Bible study,' a year later that Bible study is turning into a church."
The biggest challenge of all, however, is the sheer size of Moscow. An estimated eight thousand evangelical believers live among the city's fifteen million people.
Mikhail Chekalin, forty-six-year-old leader of the association of twenty-eight Moscow Baptist churches, understands the enormity of the task. As the grandson of a Baptist pastor shot for his faith under Stalin's reign of terror, Chekalin relishes the new freedoms.
"It's wide open," he says. "We can do evangelism without being reprimanded. We can do it in the streets. We can meet with our brothers and sisters without problems. We can start churches. We can preach like our fathers could not. People are searching for Christ — and we must search for them."
How do you find them in a sea of fifteen million?
"We have twenty-eight churches, and that is small," Chekalin admits. "But there are people in these churches God is preparing to do evangelism and start churches. God has given us the inspiration and desire for this to happen."
Veins of Gold
As partners with Moscow Baptists in the evangelism task, Southern Baptist missionaries seek effective ways to help. A key strategy is to break the enormous city into smaller, more manageable pieces:
• Geographical pieces, like the Northern Administrative District, where veteran missionaries Brad and Lori Stamey coach a team focusing on starting churches.
• Social pieces, like students from elite universities.
• Cultural pieces, like the city's musicians and artists and the Deaf community.
• Religious pieces, like the city's Jews.
Tarleton calls them "veins of gold" in Moscow's rock-hard mountain.
"You can't take on the whole city — it's too massive," he admits. "But you can find avenues. If you find a responsive pocket, follow it, and it leads you to the next."
It's an impossible task without God. With Him, all things are possible.
Reaching Moscow "is going to take an outpouring of God's Spirit," Brad Stamey says.
"That's what we need to pray for — an outpouring into the hearts and minds of people that gives them a hunger for spiritual truth, that makes them seekers. As the Scripture says, he who seeks will find.
"We're seeking the seekers."
IMB Fast Facts
Field personnel under appointment (10/23/07) — 5,309
Career/associates/apprentices — 4,147
2-year International Service Corps/journeymen/masters — 1,162
Field personnel appointed (2006) — 758
Student volunteers (2006) — 6,100
Overseas baptisms (2006)* — 475,072
Overseas churches (2006)* — 135,252
Overseas church membership (2006)* — 8.8 million
New churches (2006)* — 23,486
People groups engaged* — 1,170
People groups of the Last Frontier* — 5,900
Population of the Last Frontier peoples — 1.6 billion
World population (2006) — 6.6 billion
World Hunger/Disaster relief receipts (2006) — $6 million
Lottie Moon offering receipts (2005) — $137.9 million
Lottie Moon offering receipts (2006) — $150.1 million
Lottie Moon offering goal (2007) — $165 million
*Data from 2006 Annual Statistical Report
