In Depth:  Russia

Iain Taylor

The dramatic flight of Yuri Sipko to escape arrest for criticising Russia’s war on Ukraine was prompted ‘by his Biblical convictions that caused him to speak out’.

That is the verdict of Mark Foster of the Slavic Gospel Association, as Sipko, the former President of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (RUECB) between 2002 and 2010, sought refuge in Germany.

In parts of Far East Russia there are those who have never heard the name of Jesus.

Alexander Balagansky, a missionary sponsored by the Slavic Gospel Association (SGA), in the Buryatia region, is involved in the difficult and sometimes dangerous challenge of reaching them. Villages and communities there are isolated, often cut off and inaccessible due to extreme weather conditions. However, strange as it may seem, the extreme weather can become the missionary’s friend and associate in pioneering gospel ministry!

letter from Russia

Vitaly Vlasenko, General Secretary of the Russian Evangelical Alliance, has sent an open letter to all evangelicals, in which the Baptist pastor laments his country’s military invasion of Ukraine:

To my dear brothers and sisters around the world:

Iain Taylor

Evangelicals Now is regularly privileged to come across much faithful gospel witness by often small and (humanly-speaking) under-resourced evangelical ministries in sometimes far-flung areas of the world. The GoodWORD Partnership (GWP), founded by Blair Carlson in Minneapolis in 2005, is one of those.

Blair coaches national church leaders in local evangelism, guiding them with their outreach, including preparation and follow-up within local churches. He has just returned from Russia and Poland, where GWP helped lead a major evangelism training conference, the Forum for Evangelism in Russia, which is now in its fifth year. Blair spoke to Evangelicals Now afterwards:

The region of far east Russia is almost as vast in area as the USA. Within it lies some of the most inhospitable territory on earth, subjected to the harshest and most extreme weather.

Many regions lack the most basic infrastructure and amenities. Nevertheless, faithful servants of Christ, 12 of them supported by the Slavic Gospel Association’s (SGA’s) Project 70, are taking the gospel to scattered communities in seemingly unreachable corners of this huge landmass. They find ways and means of overcoming the absence of roads and basic communication facilities such as telephone and internet to carry on their ministry, presenting the gospel by any means possible.

With tensions remaining high in the region despite Russia’s recent military pullback from the Ukrainian border, evangelicals on both sides of the border have spoken out wanting peace.

The Russian Evangelical Alliance has led calls to ‘restore the peaceful relations between the peoples of both countries’, while churches in Ukraine have been encouraged to ‘pray and fast for the peace in our land’.