In Latvia, where ethnic and religious tension has triggered bloodshed in the past, missionaries Bob and Sharon Perry are calling the church to embrace reconciliation.
It is early on a Sunday morning, about an hour before first light. Bob Perry is driving through the Latvian countryside behind the wheel of his white Toyota van affixed with Virginia license plates. As he pulls up to the Lithuanian border, a guard approaches the van and his sleepy passengers pass forward a bewildering array of passports.

Two Lithuanian. Two German. One American. One Swedish.

“This is what I do best,” Perry, an American, says as the sun rises and he speeds on to the port city of Klaipeda, where a small Lithuanian-Russian charismatic congregation is waiting for him and his message of Christian unity.

A day earlier he was eating lunch at a TGI Friday’s in Riga, the Latvian capital, with a Canadian Lutheran, an American Lutheran, a Ukrainian charismatic and his own assistant pastor, who has roots in Soviet Central Asia. Sunday night Perry will eat a salmon dinner with a Swedish-born Milwaukee man of Latvian extraction who shares a similar vision of Christian reconciliation and togetherness.

Sound confusing? Not to Bob Perry. He’s in his element here, preaching unity in the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. These are the three small former Soviet countries wedged between Scandinavia and Russia that this year voted to join the European Union (EU).

Everywhere he goes Perry talks about bringing Christians of all stripes together. At first glance, he might seem like an unlikely messenger. Viewed from several yards away, before he even begins to speak, Perry is quite obviously not from these parts–not with his cotton chinos, tweed sport coat and broad, frequent smile.

He’s fond of quoting the Bible. Jesus pops up frequently in conversation. Sometimes it is hard to find people like this in the West’s ecumenical movement, where a premium often is put on avoiding conflict, never straying beyond least-common denominators.

Standing on this Sunday morning before the 60-member congregation of Jesus Christ Is Life Church that’s meeting in a rented hall in Klaipeda, Perry urges his rapt listeners to put aside petty differences and age-old prejudices.

“We need more color in this church. We need Gypsies. We need Africans. We need Jews,” pleads Perry, listing some of the ethnic groups most despised in this part of the world.

“You can’t be afraid of immigrants. The church and the kingdom of God think global.

“Think big. We are a friend of the nations.”

Perry goes on to introduce Rosemarie Claussen, 69, a German woman whose father was a Nazi general, whose godfather was Adolf Hitler and who narrowly escaped death as Russian soldiers swept across Germany in 1945. Like Perry, she preaches about unity but gives the teary-eyed congregation a strong dose of forgiveness, as well.

“I just hated Russians. I was so full of hate and fear. …. And then, I became a Christian,” Claussen tells the congregants, a mixture of Russians and Lithuanians. “Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom.”

Breaking Ground

Forgiveness, patience, reconciliation, unity: These are some of the watchwords of Perry’s ministry. They help explain how he has not only survived but also flourished in an environment in which Western missionaries typically stay for one tour of duty that lasts three or four years.

Eleven years ago, Perry; his wife, Sharon; and their three children (there are four now) arrived in Latvia from Grace Covenant Church in Herndon, Virginia–a member congregation of Morning Star International, whose stated ministry purpose is “church planting, campus ministry and world missions.” They settled in a then-faded, now-flashy beach resort outside Riga.

After getting the lay of the land, Sharon Perry settled into teaching at the Riga Choreography School, and eventually writing and producing an original ballet dedicated to the Holocaust. The children embarked on a rigorous program of home schooling and extracurricular activities.

Bob Perry got to work by first advising Riga’s fast-growing New Generation Church and then launching what eventually became three Morning Star of Latvia congregations–two Russian-speaking, one Latvian-speaking. In the coming year they aim to plant another Morning Star church in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and they currently are grooming a young pastor for the job.

“There was a time of about 18 months in 1993 and 1994 when we baptized about 1,400 people in the Morning Star Church. That was the peak. Since then, we’ve baptized maybe 250 people in total,” says Bob Perry, who, at 46, still looks the part of the high school football captain with his good posture, jagged features and strong jaw.

“But now we are 100 times better,” he adds. “We’re much better equipped. We don’t make the same mistakes. Now we just need Jesus to send the fish again.”

By the yardstick of mass evangelism, the Perrys have not enjoyed stunning success in their work among Latvia’s 2.3 million mostly Christian residents. They don’t lead a megachurch or have a TV show or hold citywide revivals that grab headlines.

“It’s been tough,” Sharon Perry says one evening in her living room. “I think it’s especially tough for Bob–as a man–because he’s been here for 11 years, and there’s not 10,000 people–or 1,000 people. … Thank God those that support us are not into the numbers game.”

Still, they have survived and learned from their errors and are deeply respected among the local Christian leaders, from Baptists to Roman Catholics, and among indigenous Latvians and Russians alike. This is no small feat in a country where the taciturn Latvians are deeply suspicious of their 30 percent minority of hot-blooded Russians, and vice versa.

“We would tell people that the Orthodox Church is not teaching right. [We’d say] it was stupid. It gets back to the Orthodox pretty fast. We don’t do that anymore,” recounts Bob Perry while describing Morning Star’s work in a secondary school teaching English and morality classes.

“We don’t need to pick a fight. It’s all about being a little more Christian,” he says.

Building Bridges

A handsome beige clapboard building that was originally built in 1905 as a seaside sanatorium for railroad workers houses the congregations in Jurmala, Latvia.

Inside, a marriage conference led by local and American couples is just finishing. Some of the church leaders gather outside in the sea air to chat with Perry. For Latvia, they are a remarkable mix of nationalities–Indian, Filipino and Russian, as well as Latvian.

Perry revels in the diversity, saying provincial Latvians need role models.

“When you’re in a place like Moscow, it’s an international city. Here in Latvia it is like Alabama–the way people relate to each other,” he cracks.

The Latvians’ September vote to join the EU reflected those divides as Russians in the country disproportionately voted no. Many Russians who happened to be in Latvia in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up have yet to be granted citizenship and were not allowed to vote in the referendum.

Extremists on both sides aggravate Latvian-Russian relations. In the fall, the country’s culture minister took part in the dedication of a monument to Latvians who served in Hitler’s Waffen-SS. A group of Russians are accused of plotting the violent overthrow of the government in hopes of rejoining the world’s largest country with Latvia, which is slightly larger in area than West Virginia.

Amid this legacy of centuries of mutual hatred and oppression, Perry says he is doing all he can to put out fires and build coalitions through prayer. His status as an outsider from a “new church” is sometimes helpful, sometimes not, according to other leaders of the Latvian Evangelical Association, where Perry heads the Prayer Work Group.

“People are very suspicious. They look at this guy,” says Lutheran pastor Martins Irbe, pointing across the table at Perry, whom he credits as a driving force, “and they say: ‘Are you Lutheran or Catholic? No? Then you must be in some sort of sect.'”

The Latvian Evangelical Association, started in 2002, has grown quickly, to the point that 150 pastors attended a prayer leadership summit in March. The association doesn’t include Catholics or members of the Russian Orthodox Church, but an informal ecumenical group that sponsors annual prayer summits of top religious leaders does. It was through this group that pastor Irbe’s wife, Gunta, encountered Perry’s Morning Star Christian Church.

She says the proof of Perry’s commitment has been evident from the beginning.

“The first time I met these guys, we were doing the 40 hours of prayer on top of Latvia’s highest mountain–or hill, I guess you’d call it. It was January and minus 25. That’s cold.”

The man who organized that “prayer summit”–and one every year since–is Levi Graudins, a Stockholm-born, Milwaukee-raised Latvian who shares Perry’s vision, especially when it comes to prayer. Graudins says that before the idea of having 40 consecutive hours of prayer caught on Perry was “the only one who understood the concept” and thus was “invaluable.”

“Bob is a very loving person, a man of encouragement,” Graudins notes.

Despite all the accolades, Perry is not universally loved. Three years ago, his religious work in Latvia was thrown into jeopardy when the government’s powerful, secretive Constitution Defense Bureau (CDB) ruled that he was a threat to national security. On the advice of the U.S. Embassy, Perry retained a local lawyer who specialized in religious-freedom issues and fought the ruling through the local courts.

The case dragged on until October of last year, shortly after the EU vote, when Perry got a letter that inexplicably reversed the CDB’s initial decision. He and his lawyer are at a loss to understand what happened and why.

Senkans offers one explanation of why a man who promotes Christian unity might be a target for expulsion: “People like Bob Perry are not always welcomed by the traditional churches.”

For the last 11 years while living in Latvia, Sharon Perry has straddled two worlds that don’t always get along. As a dance teacher and choreographer at the Riga Choreography School (Mikhail Baryshnikov was one of its graduates), the 46-year-old Perry finds herself immersed in an artistic world where success is everything and dancers smoke to stay slim.

As a mother of four and a leader of the Morning Star Christian Church, Perry is steeped in congregational life centered on Bible-based tradition and values. Despite this friction–or more likely because of it–Perry is thriving, integrating the two worlds. Her crowning achievement came in September 2003 with the premiere of Voices From the Ground, a ballet she choreographed about the Holocaust.

Her two daughters danced in the production that was inspired by a family trip to the Auschwitz concentration camp in nearby Poland. Perry teamed with Lithuanian composer Gerald Povilaitis to create the ballet, which she dedicated to the 70,000 Jews who were confined to the ghetto in Riga, the Latvian capital, and marched to their deaths in 1941.

Clara Vesterman, a Riga-born Jew who holds the position of Second Secretary at the capital’s Israeli Embassy, was one of those in attendance on opening night.

“I tried to imagine it: How am I going to feel about something as beautiful as a ballet about something as horrible as the Holocaust?” Vesterman recalls. “I wrote to my office that this was the first time in my life that a ballet made me cry.”

The ballet was not without controversy in a place where, as Vesterman describes it, Latvians were “more than responsible.”

“There were places where they killed Jews even before the Nazis came,” she says.

Perry agrees that the production struck a nerve.

“Some people got upset,” she says. “It is hard to accept that your relatives might have done something like that. But we have to learn a lesson from that so it doesn’t happen again. I think that art has the power to change people’s consciousness.”

Perry would like to choreograph future productions devoted to subjects ranging from U.S. slavery to the plight of Afghan women, but ultimately, she stresses, art and education can bring people only part of the way to understanding the horrors of the past–and neither of them can prevent atrocities from occurring.

For proof of this, she notes the societal setting in which the Holocaust arose.

“[It] happened in educated Europe. Education doesn’t really change the heart of man,” Perry says quietly. “Only God can change the spirit of a person. We need to be changed from within, supernaturally.”

LATVIA

Population: 2.3 million

Year Christianity came to Latvia: circa 1300.

Year Latvia became independent of the Soviet Union: 1991

Percentage of Latvian population exterminated under Stalin’s regime: One-fifth. Also, during World War II, 70,000 Jews were herded into slums in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and later sent to death camps.

Percentage of Latvians who attend church regularly: 2 percent

Percentage of Latvian youth who believe in God: 80 percent, but few of them have ever been introduced to Christ.

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Frank Brown, who writes frequently for Charisma, is a freelance correspondent based in Moscow. For more information about Morning Star Christian Church, please e-mail bperry2010@.

The largest church in Europe today is pastored by a young Nigerian–a man of faith who won’t let racism or harassment stop him from changing a nation.
It is early on a Sunday afternoon in winter, and almost 100 people are packed into a windowless basement room at a church in Kiev, Ukraine. After an hour, the low-ceiling room smells heavily of stale cigarette smoke and body odor. These first-time visitors have been listening to what they can expect as new members of the Embassy of God church.

At the end of the session, each newcomer is paired up with a mentor–a specially trained church member who guides the new believer through four consecutive days of lectures, prayers and church services. About 25 percent of the newcomers will come back, the pastor in charge of the program says.

“We don’t get people who are just curious,” pastor Armen Movsisyan says, after making sure all the newcomers are paired with mentors. “Everybody who comes here has a problem. Everybody is in crisis.”

Tatyana Pavlenko, 28, came to “learn how to live God’s law” so that she could turn her husband from his “devilish life” of drinking and “acting like a hooligan.” Proskoviya Kireyeva, 72, has a more specific request of God.

“I need one more thousand, that’s all. There’s a one-room apartment in the city for $17,000. I just need $1,000. I came to pray for that. That’s the only reason I came,” she says.

First-time visitors like Pavlenko and Kireyeva come by the hundreds every month to the Embassy of God. Most of them are unchurched and desperate. They’re searching for a way to cope with alcohol, drugs, a lack of money or spouses who stray.

These are people who could have chosen a fortune-teller or exorcist from local newspaper classifieds. Or they could do what Pavlenko and Kireyeva’s ancestors did: light a candle in front of an icon in a Russian Orthodox Church.

Instead, most of them choose to come here because they have heard about the healing and preaching abilities of one man–pastor Sunday Adelaja, a 35-year-old Nigerian.

“Pastor Sunday”–as he is known to church members, skeptics and enemies alike–has created in nine years what may be the largest church in Europe. That, in itself, is striking.

Even more remarkable is the fact that he has done it in the capital of Ukraine, a country of 49 million between Russia and Poland, where fewer than 2,000 black residents live–all of them subject to frequent racial harassment and sometimes violence.

“Some people ask, ‘Why do we need this black-skinned man to tell us what to do?’ Unbelievers ask this question,” says Adelaja while preaching on a Sunday afternoon to a sea of 7,000 upturned faces. “But you–you have opened your eyes. You can see the divine within me, not just the black skin. You–you can get beyond the broken Russian I speak.”

That evening in an empty, expensive Kiev restaurant, Adelaja recalls in a voice hoarse from preaching two services how he was skeptical of a divine vision that sent him to all-white Ukraine.

“I said, ‘God, I want to know that You really want me to go to Kiev,” he told Charisma. “It is just not so easy to do this as a black man.'”

After leaving Belarus, where he had studied for six years, Adelaja started his ministry in February 1994 with seven people who met together in a rented apartment in Kiev, a city of 1 million on the banks of the Dnieper River.

Today, acting out a plan he says God unveiled to him in a series of visions, Adelaja sits at the head of the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations, a mini-Protestant empire in an overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian nation.

Adelaja–a fit man with a ready, confident smile–is the host of a weekly Christian TV show, founder of a feeding and health center for the homeless, and author of religious books. He has also helped plant 200 “daughter” churches in 15 countries including two recently in the United States.

“My American friends will be flabbergasted when they find out that we are planting churches there. We hope to have six by the end of the year,” he says, adding that congregations are already in Sacramento, California, and Sarasota, Florida. “The Americans are usually sending money to this part of the world.”

The core of his Kiev ministry is preaching, healing and providing desperately needed services in a society that is, at best, inept at coping with rampant alcoholism, widespread poverty and severe strains on families. Adelaja’s management style, his use of television and the content of worship services are firmly within the mainstream of Spirit-filled congregations in the United States–perhaps even on the conservative side.

But in Ukraine, this is all new. In Soviet times and before the 1917 Russian Revolution that brought Communists to power, Ukraine had a small Protestant minority that knew its place and never took on the dominant Russian Orthodox Church. With his ambitious church-planting campaign and growing Kiev megachurch, Adelaja most definitely does not know his place. Consequently, his enemies are not hard to find.

They view him as a foreign-financed charlatan who brainwashes and hypnotizes congregants into parting with their money. Speaking in tongues and falling under the power of the Holy Spirit are just more proof of the cultlike nature of the Embassy of God church, according to critics who nearly succeeded in getting him kicked out of Ukraine in 1998.

To this day, Adelaja says, Orthodox Christian leaders are preventing him from getting city permission to build a proper church. Instead, he must rent an indoor sports facility that can hold only one-third of his congregation at once.

Adelaja’s steadfast and most powerful foes are not shy about their desire to have the Nigerian shut down. On Kiev’s Right Bank, not far from the monastery that is one of Orthodox Slavs’ most holiest sites, are the offices of the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods.

Led by Valentin Lukiyanik, the Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods represents 36 lay organizations in Ukraine that are loyal to the 80 million-member Russian Orthodox Church. Sitting under a portrait of Patriarch Alexy II, the Moscow-based head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Lukiyanik explains why Adelaja is so “dangerous.”

“Sunday is not a classical Protestant. He is a neo-Protestant, not like a Baptist,
Adventist or even Pentecostal. He is something new. What he has is a totalitarian, destructive cult,” says Lukiyanik, who is not so keen on Roman Catholics either, having organized street demonstrations against Pope John Paul II’s 2001 visit to Ukraine.

Lukiyanik, a broad-faced affable man who works in an emergency room in a Kiev hospital, concedes that Adelaja has a vibrant, growing church but predicts it will begin to evaporate as Ukraine’s economic situation improves.

“Yes, they’ve got influence. But it is an aberration,” he says. “I’d say it is some kind of psychosis. We consider it to be some kind of psycho-cult that is well-financed.”

That financing, says Orthodox spokesman Father Georgy Kovalenko, comes from Adelaja’s laundering of money for Nigerian drug barons. The accusation–unsubstantiated and denied with a laugh by Adelaja–has wide currency in Ukraine’s yellow press in part because Nigerians do play a role in the country’s heroin trade.

Though Adelaja has enemies in high places, he also has well-placed friends, including three members of the congregation who sit in Ukraine’s lower house of parliament. One such church member proved to be an important ally when Orthodox church leaders launched a campaign in 1998 to slow the spread of charismatic churches by revoking Adelaja’s Ukrainian visa.

At one point, Adelaja had two weeks to leave the country. He refused and Vladimir Shushkevich, a church member and then-parliamentarian, gathered 60 signatures in parliament and thwarted the campaign, allowing Adelaja to stay.

Adelaja’s Nigerian citizenship is his Achilles’ heel. As recently as February, the Russian Orthodox Church in Kiev reported that Adelaja was under investigation by the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office and that his
permission to live in Ukraine with his wife and three children was in jeopardy. The Orthodox report was picked up by Ukrainian mass media, prompting a robust denial on the Embassy of God Web site ().

The provocations, innuendo and public tussles are likely to continue as long as Adelaja is Ukraine’s most visible charismatic leader. Another African, pastor Henry Madava of Zimbabwe, leads an 8,000-member charismatic church in Kiev. His profile, however, is nothing like that of Adelaja, who is becoming an international figure with worldwide church plants and the occasional political pronouncement.

In January, he and pastors from 30 other countries attended a three-day conference in Washington, D.C., of Generals of Intercession, led by international prayer leader Cindy Jacobs. Afterward, Jacobs released a statement summing up the religious leaders’ consensus on the probable war in Iraq.

“Each of us felt in our hearts that God wants to humble the spirit of Islam and its god, Allah, and that God is leading President Bush,” she said. “We felt that the true God would prevail and the region would open for the gospel.”

When Adelaja got back to Kiev, he played a tape–in English–of Jacobs’ prophecy about the Embassy of God. When an assistant translated it into Russian for the congregation of 7,000, people rose to their feet, clapping enthusiastically. One middle-aged woman collapsed and twitched on the floor.

Jacobs proclaimed in a high-pitched shout: “Sunday, the Lord says: ‘You are to prepare that army. I put a sickle in your hand. Be ready for the harvest. This is why I brought you from Nigeria. This is why I brought you to Ukraine.'”

Later in the service, Adelaja preached about the importance of supporting U.S. foreign policy, saying: “George Bush is our brother. He is a believer.” That evening, over dinner, Adelaja said he was ready to send missionaries to Iraq “as soon as it opens up.”

These kinds of ventures into world politics by the head of Ukraine’s largest church drive Orthodox Christian leaders to distraction. They lead to accusations that Adelaja is a national-security danger and should be kicked out of the country.

Such threats aren’t empty. The pastor’s friend Alexei Ledyayev, head of the charismatic New Generation movement in nearby Latvia, was stripped of his Russian visa last year by authorities who apparently were worried about his preaching on political themes.

Ultimately, Adelaja plans to leave Kiev. One reason is, he received a divine vision to bring the gospel to Arabs, to enlighten them just as he has Russians. Another is that Kiev is not a hospitable place for a black family of five to live. This situation is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to a local human-rights activist who monitors racially motivated attacks in Ukraine.

Most of the recent beatings of African and Indian students have occurred in southern Ukraine, but Kiev too is a dangerous place for a dark-skinned person to walk about, particularly at night, says Maxim Baryshnikov, an activist who teaches law at Kiev’s International Solomon University. There is no single reason for the attacks, but Baryshnikov says that generally the dark-skinned immigrants’ “lifestyle and values are not understood by the local people.”

“From ignorance and misunderstanding it is only a small step to violence,” Baryshnikov says.

Adelaja is driven back and forth between the Embassy of God offices and his home on the edge of Kiev. His three children are not yet school age. Thus, he avoids having to ride Kiev’s subway or buses, the places where racial attacks most frequently occur.

Two years ago, he started to travel abroad more frequently, planting churches in Western Europe, former Soviet republics, as well as in the United Arab Emirates and, secretly, in Afghanistan. Eventually, the pastor says quietly during an interview, he will leave Ukraine for western Europe, where he will plant churches and devote more energies to winning Muslim converts in the Middle East.

“I would really like the Arabs to enjoy what the Russians have come to have. … I’m only 35. Our church is only eight years old. But I am very ambitious. I want to touch half a billion people before I die,” he says, adding that his work here still has a long way to go. “I have a target of bringing 5 million people to Jesus in Ukraine. That is the minimum before leaving.”

Sipping a tall glass of fresh-squeezed carrot juice after a long Sunday packed with a pair of three-hour services and numerous meetings and private prayer requests, an exhausted Adelaja outlines how he expects his life as a religious leader to unfold.

“I think it will take until I am 40 years old to reach my goal in Ukraine. After that, from when I am 40 to 50 years old, I will work on transforming Europe. From the age of 50, I’d like to touch another two continents, even if only slightly.

“And, I want to work on pastors,” he adds, while noting that he is a slightly better preacher in English than Russian. “I want to raise up 50,000 pastors all over the world. Between the ages of 60 and 70, I will work on deepening the work that I’ve already started.”

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In a nation devastated by Soviet atheism, Ukrainians are still uneasy about the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

One thousand years of Orthodox Christianity and 70 years of state-sponsored religious repression have taken a heavy toll on Ukraine.

Orthodoxy’s emphasis on participation in long liturgies rather than studying the Bible means that some nominal Christians in Ukraine aren’t quite sure who Jesus is. The Soviets’ severe crackdown on religion means that Ukrainians older than 30 grew up in a country where religious expression was discouraged, if not punished.

In this environment, pastor Sunday Adelaja must constantly stress, especially to newcomers to his Embassy of God church, that his gift of healing comes from God, not from his own power as a miracleworker.

Adelaja was raised as a Presbyterian in a village of 100 people in Nigeria’s Ogun State. In 1986, at the age of 19, he was saved while watching pastor William Kumuyi of Nigeria on television. Six months later he was in the Soviet Union studying journalism in Minsk and praying secretly with other foreign Christian students.

It was during this time he began the intensive praying and fasting that eventually led him to understand that God wanted him to found a megachurch in Kiev. It was also when he began to hear the Holy Spirit.

“Because of my life, I have a kind of authority, a credibility with God. People can have access through me. But if He doesn’t show up, nothing happens,” Adelaja says, adding that this has never happened but admitting that he is “afraid” it could.

To stay plugged in and able to mediate, pastor Adelaja makes a point of devoting one week of every month for prayer and meditation. Otherwise, the demands of his 21,000 congregants can be overwhelming, he says.

On a Sunday afternoon, after leading one long service and getting ready for another, Adelaja was deluged in his office with private prayer requests.

A woman in her late 50s walked into his office carrying a package of cotton bandages. Her granddaughter had been severely burned the previous night when a pot of boiling water turned over. Could Adelaja pray over the bandages that would be used in the hospital?

The pastor closed his eyes, scrunched up his face and held the bandages tightly for about 15 seconds.

A few minutes later, a mother and her sunken-eyed daughter were ushered into his office. They wanted advice on whether the girl should go ahead with an expensive liver operation or keep praying for a miracle. Clasping hands with the girl and her mother, Adelaja prayed that God would smooth the way for an operation if that was His will.

Adelaja says that his gifts of healing are mostly spiritual but that occasionally in a large crowd he can pick out a person, “sense and hear” what ails them, and heal the disease.

“Sometimes, I can feel the Holy Spirit behind me, talking,” he says.

Most recently, the Adelajas’ daughter, Perlina, was diagnosed with a brain tumor while still in her mother’s womb.

The tumor, American doctors said, would prevent the child from developing normally but an operation on the newborn’s brain would be risky.

With an electric guitarist’s soft, soulful melody in the background, Adelaja related the story to his rapt congregation during a February service.

On January 13, minutes after Perlina was born in the United States in a Sarasota, Florida, hospital, Adelaja took the child and “prayed and prayed and did my thing,” he says.

The next day, an X-ray of the newborn showed the tumor had disappeared, he testified.

The pastor says his power to diagnose an illness and heal it comes from his “intensive search” for the Lord.

“I asked to see and for the ability to hear in the Spirit,” he says. “Before, I was spiritually deaf.”

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Frank Brown is a correspondent for Charisma based in Moscow. He traveled to Kiev to interview Sunday Adelaja.

God is using Russia’s first female Bishop to redefine traditional roles in her country.

It’s not easy being a woman in Russia, a country where historical cultural values give men dominant roles and do not allow for the possibility that women can lead or teach men–especially on matters as important as whether a man born in Israel 2,000 years ago is the Son of God. Nor is it easy to be a charismatic Christian in Russia, where displaying the gifts of the Holy Spirit is often greeted with deep skepticism if not outright hostility.

That means Bishop Natasha Schedrivaya, president of the Moscow-based Calvary Fellowship of Churches, has her hands full in the world’s largest country as she faces skeptics within and without her denomination.

“There are pastors who are praying against me, that God will remove me and some other women in leadership because it is not the work of God but of Satan,” Schedrivaya said during a recent interview in an outdoor café on Moscow’s fashionable Tverskaya Street. “There are changes coming in these churches but not always so quickly.”

Schedrivaya was elected in 1997 as president of the Calvary organization and is the first woman to be elected by male peers to such a key leadership post in Russian churches. She is also considered to be the first woman ever to be ordained a bishop in Russia. It is a highly respected title there. But Schedrivaya said she doesn’t let her ascension to such key positions distort her vision of the humbling role God has given her in her homeland.

“Russians know how to order and to command, but we need to better understand that a leader is really a servant, especially in church structure,” Schedrivaya says.

Calvary Fellowship, which Schedrivaya leads, consists of 80 churches in Russia and more than 300 churches across the vast lands of the former Soviet Union. The churches are mostly charismatic and Pentecostal.

Schedrivaya estimates that 46 percent of Calvary churches are pastored by women, an unusually high number in Russian Protestant circles. More traditional Pentecostals and the vast majority of Baptists in Russia are skittish about accepting women in leadership roles, although 80 percent of the membership of Pentecostal, Baptist or charismatic churches are women.

This resistance to women in ministry is a result partly of Russian Protestants’ isolation from world developments and their struggle to survive during 70 years of severe religious repression under Communist rule. It is also a result of the influence of Russia’s dominant faith, Russian Orthodoxy, which allows women virtually no role in religious services outside singing in the choir, and traditional Russian cultural values.

Schedrivaya told Charisma magazine during a 2001 interview that Russian women missionaries who teach the gospel at home meetings in villages often find that men won’t listen to them because they don’t believe it is appropriate for women to teach men on important matters such as spirituality.

“Yet often the Holy Spirit intervenes, and a lot of these men are drawn by God into the home Bible studies and are saved,” she says.

Despite the hard work that many Russian women are doing to carry out the Great Commission across the many countries that now make up the former Soviet Union, women are rarely recognized or given the opportunity to advance their gifts in a male-dominated hierarchy, Schedrivaya says.

“It is a challenge even to work with the Protestants. But with the Orthodox I think we’ll have to wait for the coming of the universal church of Jesus (when He returns). For them, I think, it is an abomination,” says Schedrivaya, who, like most ethnic Russians, has Orthodox ancestors.

Aside from her work at the helm of the Calvary Fellowship, Schedrivaya, a tall, energetic woman with a gentle forcefulness, leads a Moscow church of 40 members and travels about the immense former Soviet Union giving leadership conferences that are sometimes co-hosted by American evangelists.

Perhaps her most ambitious project, however, is the Village Gospel Harvest Project launched in 1998. The project’s aim, as she explains it, is to outfit inexpensive, Russian-made vans with religious literature and send out missionaries to the estimated 36,000 villages in the former Soviet Union that have yet to be evangelized.

“If we can ask God for 1,000 vans and each of those vans can go to an average of 36 villages, then we will reach the 36,000 number,” she says, adding that the project has so far given out 14 vans with another eight planned for this year. “There are villages out there where there are not even any Orthodox. I get reports back from the Far East that there is nothing, nothing at all.”

One of the recipients of such a van is Pastor Mamuka Djebishashvili, who leads the embattled Word of Life congregation in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, a country of 5 million located in the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Turkey.

“There are a couple of villages where we had wanted to evangelize, and now it is easy. We just send the van,” Djebishashvili, 32, said in a telephone interview from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

“We can work like this all summer. In the winter it is a little more difficult because there is no electricity and so people don’t gather as much,” he said in reference to frequent wintertime power outages.

Djebishashvili met Schedrivaya in the early 1990s at a Bible school in Latvia operated by Calvary International, a Florida-based missions agency. Many of the school’s graduates are now pastors across the former Soviet Union. According to Schedrivaya, Georgia is an especially difficult place to work–geographically and politically–so the mobility afforded by a van is especially important.

Djebishashvili’s church, which meets in a rented movie theater, was attacked last December 23 by a mob of radical Orthodox believers led by Father Basili Mkalavishvili, who has launched dozens of attacks against Protestants and Jehovah’s Witnesses but never has been arrested. Since the attack, in which 20 parishioners were beaten, Djebishashvili says his congregation has shrunk from 300 to 200 members.

Despite the violent Orthodox priest’s attempts at enforcing a kind of extreme Orthodoxy, Djebishashvili says the general public is much more tolerant and would, for example, be ready for women to play a greater role in church life.

“Although the Orthodox here don’t accept women as ministers in the church, we’ve got St. Nino, who brought Christianity here, and we consider her equal to the apostles,” he notes, referring to Georgia’s acceptance of Christianity in A.D. 337. “People are quite ready to accept women in a church role. I don’t see how anyone could object to Natasha’s work.”

All the same, Schedrivaya reports ongoing resistance to the empowerment of women that she teaches during her leadership conferences. She recalls one Russian pastor with a congregation of 93 women and seven men who asked Schedrivaya to help motivate his flock.

“He is telling them to sit down and cook. I’m telling them to get up and go,” she remembers with a smile.

Although a hint of frustration sometimes creeps into Schedrivaya’s voice, she generally exudes patience and hope when speaking of the task of enlightening and evangelizing in this nation of 143 million, where less than 1 percent of the population is Protestant. Perhaps memories of her own conversion give her staying power.

She grew up the daughter of a Soviet Army officer who was responsible for keeping soldiers solidly atheistic and away from people like the evangelist that Schedrivaya has become. Living in Minsk, Belarus, and working as an English teacher, she first came into contact with religion through an underground Pentecostal congregation in 1988.

“I’d never heard about God or Christianity,” she recalls, adding that she was initially deeply skeptical, even to the point of angering a friend who had escorted her to the service. “She got mad at me because I was so stubborn.”

Although she was eventually saved in 1990, that stubbornness is still evident and serves Schedrivaya well as she plows ahead with her gargantuan, divinely inspired task. Church planting is the key to winning Russia village by village, she says.

“Seventy percent of all the money (in Russia) is in Moscow,” she says. “Let them have the money and the power struggle. The government will never help the villagers.

“But if 36,000 villages are reached for Christ, all of Russia will prosper. In 1996, God put it in my heart to do work with women because 80 percent of our church members are women,” she says. “They are [the] best positioned to do missionary work.”And Schedrivaya, determined to impact her country for God, is helping to make sure they get to do it.

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Frank Brown is a Moscow-based freelance journalist specializing in religion. Before moving to Moscow in 1994, he worked for several U.S. newspapers.

A Russia-born American rabbi has launched an aggressive campaign to warn Jews about Messianic outreach efforts

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After years of unchecked growth, Messianic Jewish groups in the Soviet Union are facing their first organized, well-funded opposition. It comes from a newly opened center in Moscow. The four-person office, opened in early February in a former kindergarten in the center of the Russian capital, is run by Rabbi Alexander Lakshin, a Russia-born U.S. citizen who said he is committed to fighting Messianic Jewish groups across the former Soviet Union.

“Clearly, belief in Jesus as a Messiah or God or both clearly contradicts the foundation of Judaism. For 2,000 years, Jews rejected this idea,” said Lakshin, a soft-spoken 44-year-old with a flowing beard and an easygoing manner.

Lakshin criticizes Messianic Jews–ethnically Jewish Christians who incorporate Hebrew traditions into worship services–for what he said was their intentional efforts to mislead uneducated, secular Jews into believing that belief in Jesus as the Messiah is consistent with Judaism.

For their part, Messianic Jewish leaders counter that Jews don’t stop being Jews when they start believing in Jesus.

“Of course I am a Jew. One hundred percent. In every way,” said Rabbi Efim Litvak, 64, who heads a 400-member congregation of Messianic Jews called Shomer Yisrael. “When a Jew becomes a Christian, they say, ‘Fine, you go your way, and we will go our way.’ But when a Jew becomes a Messianic Jew they want to hunt him down.”

Lakshin said he has no intention of hunting down Messianic Jews, but is working instead to better inform Russia’s estimated 600,000 Jews, the vast majority of whom have only a basic knowledge of Judaism after 70 years of state-enforced atheism. “Ignorance” is especially high in small, remote Jewish communities in Siberia and the Far East, Lakshin said.

“The best way to counter [Messianic Jews] is with Jewish education,” said Lakshin, explaining later that he has also organized pickets of large-scale events, such as appearances by American
preacher Sid Roth.

Although Lakshin’s five-room Moscow center opened only in early February, he said he plans to quickly build a network of volunteers throughout the former Soviet Union to counteract the rapid growth of Messianic congregations. He estimates the number of Messianic Jewish believers to be in the tens of thousands, with an especially strong presence in Ukraine, the former Soviet republic with a slightly smaller Jewish population than Russia.

In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Yevgeny Umedman, a secular Jew working closely with the local Chabad Lubavitch synagogue to monitor and combat the growth of Messianic Judaism, said in a recent interview that “for every one Jew who goes to synagogue, there are 10 going to churches.”

“It is a very big danger. When I go to a synagogue, there are hardly any new faces,” said Umedman, who volunteers his time gathering intelligence at Messianic Jewish meetings. “But when you go to these services, you’ll get at least 10 new people at each service.”

Hard numbers for Messianic Jews are virtually impossible to come by because there is no central organization, and many congregations come under the aegis of local Pentecostal, charismatic or Baptist groups.

By most accounts, Kiev boasts the highest number of Messianic Jews. There are three congregations, one that has more than 1,000 members.

In Moscow, Rabbi Litvak said he has already noticed a change. He said an Orthodox Jewish aid organization, Chama, recently cut off all assistance to his Shomer Yisrael congregation when it became clear they were Messianic, not traditional Jews. Now Litvak said he is struggling to make up for 3.5 tons in dry goods that, until January, had been arriving monthly for his congregation’s poor and elderly members.

Rabbi Dovid Karpov, a member of Chama’s board of directors, said there was no link between Shomer Yisrael’s Messianic Judaism and the decision to cut off aid. “Maybe that is what they think, but it is not like that,” said Karpov, adding that the Russian government determines where most of the aid goes. “There is only so much aid, and Russia is a huge country. We’ve got a directive to work in the Far East and Siberia this year.”

A government crackdown is using secret police and propaganda against believers

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The pastor of one of the largest churches in Belarus reports that the government has recently launched a campaign of harassment and intimidation aimed at curtailing the work of Pentecostal and charismatic churches in the former Soviet republic.

From the capital of Minsk, pastor Vasily Moskalenko offered an unfavorable comparison of religious freedom in Belarus with situations in other former communist-bloc countries. Belarus, located between Poland and Russia, has secret police still known as the KGB.

“I think the situation is the worst in Belarus,” said Moskalenko, 40, of former European Soviet lands. “It is freer in Russia, freer in Ukraine and in the Baltic countries.”

Moskalenko, pastor of Minsk’s Grace of Christ Church, also said that finding space to meet on Sundays is the foremost problem.

“In Russia, you can rent a movie theater. But in Belarus, all the churches were driven out from all the meeting places about four months ago,” Moskalenko said.

Moskalenko attributed the crackdown on the country’s 70,000 Protestants to pressure from Belarus’ dominant faith, the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church. Throughout the former USSR, local Orthodox prelates frequently complain about the rapid growth of what they term “untraditional” faiths that include Pentecostals.

Pentecostal and charismatic believers are also frequently tagged as being members of “totalitarian sects,” Moskalenko said, explaining that practices such as speaking in tongues and faith healing are sometimes misunderstood.

At Grace of Christ Church, the government’s paranoia over those manifestations –and especially the incidence of congregants falling to the ground during altar services–has resulted in constant monitoring of meetings to prevent such activity, Moskalenko said.

“People cannot fall down, because [the KGB] are always watching,” said Moskalenko. “Those [Pentecostal] churches that weren’t careful were among the first to be driven out of the space they rent for services.”

Despite such pressures on his 1,200-member church, Moskalenko said the congregation is steadily growing–to the point where Sunday services have been broken up into five shifts in order to accommodate believers. The church also purchased a building for $120,000 (U.S.), which is a miracle considering the average monthly salary in Belarus is $35.

Jim Raley, pastor of Calvary Christian Center Assemblies of God in Ormond Beach, Fla., has traveled to Minsk twice to preach at Grace of Christ. Raley told Charisma that congregants there gather together closely during altar services so that no one would fall.

“The government did a documentary in which they compared Pentecostal and charismatic churches to Hitler and Nazism,” Raley said. “They made a government-sponsored program and filmed Grace of Christ services, and showed clips of Benny Hinn, and compared us with the Nazis and Hitler.”

Raley added, “There is incredible freedom of worship in the midst of that oppression. At any given service, the KGB are there. Last year when we were there, I couldn’t even open my Bible. The pastor just introduced me as an American ‘who is going to give a testimony.'”

Grace of Christ operates 30 home Bible-study groups, and special programs for alcoholics and cancer patients. Members also participate in daily prayer walks through Minsk with stops at the parliament building and the residence of the authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenka, who is up for re-election later this year and is a strong backer of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Raley said he believes the growth of Pentecostal churches strikes fear in governments and in the Orthodox Church. Despite persecution, God continues to move “because these people just lay it all on the line for Jesus,” he added.

“Please pray for the persecuted church that there is a lifting of the oppression, because there is a burning, boiling revival that is beginning to take place,” Raley said.

A vibrant, growing Pentecostal congregation in the northern Russian city of Kostroma has won an important court victory, marking the end of a yearlong struggle for survival.

The Family of God Church, founded in 1991 and led by pastor Andrei Danilov, had been denied government registration and was threatened with “liquidation” under Russian law. Government officials claimed Pentecostals were using hypnosis to manipulate members of the congregation and thereby corrupting the morals of Kostroma residents.

After refusing to accept as evidence a surreptitiously filmed videotape of a church service, Judge Tamara Koshkina ordered the Ministry of Justice on Nov. 16 to register the church as a religious organization.

“I think we’ll have it done by the end of the year,” said Danilov, 36, in a December telephone interview from Kostroma, a city of 260,000 residents on the Volga River. Despite the court victory, Danilov said he expects to face continued attacks in the local press.

“It just goes on and on,” he said, referring to a spate of negative local newspaper articles and TV reports.

With about 250 members, the Family of God Church is the largest Pentecostal congregation in Kostroma, which, like most Russian cities, is overwhelmingly Russian Orthodox in its faith.

Throughout Russia, up to 16,000 religious organizations were to have been re-registered by Dec. 31 under a controversial 1997 law designed to restrict the activities of dangerous religious sects. In practice, the law has been used by local authorities to shut down minority faiths. Pentecostal and charismatic congregations are especially vulnerable, said Vladimir Ryakhovsky, one of Russia’s top religious freedom lawyers.

Ryakhovsky represented the Kostroma church in its court battle and has also helped Jewish, Muslim and Old Believer Orthodox communities fight for registration through the courts. Because Pentecostal congregations tend to grow particularly fast, they often attract unwanted attention, he said.

“These are big churches and very active. They will have several thousand parishioners, young people, professionals,” Ryakhovsky said.

In Moscow, the Salvation Army faces closure of their local operations. The Salvation Army lost an appeal on Nov. 29 to stay open. This will result in the closure of an operation that includes the feeding of about 6,000 people a month.

–Frank Brown in Moscow

They call it vybukh, or ‘explosion.’ It’s the best word to describe what the Holy Spirit is doing among youth in Ukraine, where most churches have been ill-prepared to meet the needs of troubled teen-agers.

Outside a cavernous sports hall on a crisp Saturday evening in Kiev, Ukraine, hundreds of teen-agers crowd together, waiting in line to purchase tickets to a 7 p.m. concert. When the arena doors finally open, droves of youth rush into the hall and quickly find their seats. It’s a scene repeated in thousands of cities across Europe as young people hit the town to party at high school dances or catch their favorite rock bands in concert.

But this event is different. The concert has been touted for weeks in the city’s Protestant churches as a unique witness to the Holy Spirit’s presence in Ukraine.

The nearly three-hour concert lives up to its name: vybukh, or “explosion.” The music is painfully loud, and the singers and dancers are unrelentingly energetic. The show is tight, well-choreographed and–aside from the lyrics–indistinguishable from a secular rock concert. It is a style of worship radically different from what many of Ukraine’s Protestant believers are used to.

But for the 2,000 teens attending the Vybukh concert, this is God in a form they can understand. The youth in this city of 2.3 million, weaned on local MTV and hip to the latest Western fashions, have little interest in the Orthodox Christianity of their grandparents or in joining the often staid Protestant congregations that survived 70 years of atheistic Soviet communism.

“They go, but they don’t understand what it is all about, what with the old language and all,” says concert organizer and youth leader Yury Ravnushkin, referring to the old Slavonic language used in most Orthodox Christian services. “They can’t find the answers they need. Most kids don’t even try.”

For much of the Saturday night concert Ravnushkin, sporting baggy cargo pants and dyed-blonde hair, was center stage, whipping the young crowd into a frenzy. The next morning he was in Kiev’s Hillsong Church, where he serves as youth leader, getting ready for the first of three two-hour services that would stretch until 3 p.m.

When it comes to ministering to youth in the former Soviet Union, the 1,500-member Hillsong Church is in the vanguard, using techniques that are novel and radical, but effective. Over the course of just 18 months, the series of Vybukh concerts have grown from 100 to 2,000 people, mostly teens. And church leaders believe they are only seeing the beginning of a great move of God among the country’s youth.

 

Reaching Lost Youth

Operating out of a rented theater where the congregation shares space with a Chinese restaurant and bar, kickboxing studio and video poker lounge, Hillsong is the capital city’s second largest Spirit-filled congregation. Planted in 1992 by missionaries from the network of Hillsong churches in Sydney, Australia, the Kiev church has been steadily pushing the envelope of the Ukrainian Pentecostal and charismatic scene.

Hillsong’s pastors, Zhenya and Vera Kasevich, both 30, incorporated the Vybukh concert into a three-day training seminar for several hundred church leaders from across Ukraine. Vera says Hillsong is filling a long-empty niche by catering to youth. Her husband agrees.

“Most churches don’t do anything with youth,” Zhenya told Charisma. “That’s for three reasons: Youth don’t bring in money; youth cost money for the extra programs that are necessary; and, last of all, youth are very unstable. They could be here this year and gone the next year.”

Vera says that even those Ukrainian churches that do try to cater to youth often get it wrong.

“The other churches just try to attract them with discos or something,” says Vera, who, by Kiev’s street standards, dresses radically in a knee-length black leather coat and matching leather pants, along with a purple hair weave and matching fingernail polish. “We try to disciple them. We have 40 home groups for children, 40 for youth and 120 for adults.”

Kiev has emerged as one of the most dynamic cities in the former Soviet Union for Christian youth ministry. Besides Hillsong, at least three other Protestant organizations based in Kiev specifically target youth.

One of the more recent arrivals is Judy Sculley, 38, an Assemblies of God pastor who moved to Kiev a year ago to plant youth churches and develop youth programs with the Ukrainian Free Churches’ Union of Evangelical Christians, one of two Pentecostal church associations in the country. Like Vera Kasevich, Sculley says the traditional sermon-based dynamic simply does not work in youth ministry.

“Young people want something more punchy, something that answers their needs,” says Sculley, who plans on founding a Spirit-filled church in Kiev just for young people. “The churches need to get beyond having someone preach straight for an hour and a half and then expecting everyone to get excited about hearing the Word of God.”

Sculley says she has been struck by young people’s hunger for the gospel, recalling one meeting in April 2000 that drew 300 unchurched youth. When it came time for the altar call, the majority responded. “Even more surprising was that I’d say 70 percent of them were men,” she says. “You just don’t see that elsewhere.”

As Ukrainian society becomes increasingly Westernized and begins to grapple openly with topics that were once taboo, such as sexual abuse, eating disorders and abortion, Sculley predicts that youth ministries will have more and more social relevance.

“Once they take the lid off it and start talking about these things, people’s hearts will be exposed, and they will be walking around like the walking wounded,” she says, referring to the gradual process of sensitive issues entering Ukrainian public dialogue. “Only God can help the guilt and the shame. Imagine if you are a girl who has had five or six abortions and you are entering into a marriage.”

One of the main goals Sculley hopes to accomplish in the three years she has committed to working in Kiev is to encourage the development of youth ministries on a grassroots level. To
that end, she plans next fall to start
a 12-month certificate program for Christian youth leaders throughout the former Soviet Union.

 

Rising to the Challenge

According to the government’s Committee on Religious Affairs, as of October 2000 Ukraine was home to 6,400 Protestant congregations, 2,121 of which were Pentecostal or charismatic. Comparatively, there were 12,600 Orthodox Christian parishes and 4,066 Catholic parishes. The government does not maintain figures on the number of individual believers.

Protestants in Ukraine generally enjoy more freedom than their counterparts in other former Soviet countries, such as Georgia or Turkmenistan, where they are actively persecuted. Bickering between the dominant Orthodox Christians who are divided into three separate factions do not wield the political power they might otherwise.

Ukraine’s religious landscape, however, may change as two of the three factions work to unite into one church. Patriarch Filaret, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kiev patriarchate, is keen on joining with the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Should this happen, he says, Orthodox Christians will be in a much better position to lobby the Ukrainian government for a crackdown on sects and foreign missionaries.

But even if the government policies regarding foreign religious workers don’t change, the influence of these workers on local Protestant ministries is likely to wane all the same, according to Sergei Suknenko, 29, director of Rouka Dopomogy, a Kiev-based organization that specializes in Christian youth leader training. Ukrainian believers themselves must rise to the challenge of reaching lost youth.

“In the long run, all the American ministries are not going to be of much help. The two cultures are just so different,” says Suknenko, referring to vast historical and economic differences that separate one of the world’s richest countries and one of Europe’s poorest, where an estimated 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty level and the life expectancy for males is 60 years.

“To give you one example, here there is often a special sense of reverence in church,” Suknenko says. “You wouldn’t have clapping or laughing or running. There is a sense that God is going to be angry if kids are having a good time in church.”

Suknenko’s partner, American missionary Doug Landro from the Atlanta-based Reach Out Youth Solutions, agrees. Landro, 38, says he sometimes encounters legalistic attitudes in the Ukrainian congregations that thwart the development of vibrant youth programs. He describes observing signs in one of Ukraine’s largest Baptist churches that read: “No boys with jeans. No girls with makeup or earrings.”

“We deal a lot with the idea that the kids need to change first, and only then will the church welcome
them,” Landro explains.

These widespread attitudes make Hillsong’s flashy Vybukh concert an unusual event in the world of Ukrainian Protestantism. In the final analysis, Suknenko says everyday efforts such as after-school programs and youth-focused classes will prove the most successful in reaching teens for Christ.

The need is enormous. A sociologist by training, Suknenko rattles off facts and figures demonstrating post-Soviet youths’ tremendous desire to fill today’s moral vacuum. A recent poll in Russia showed that 81 percent of youth feel a hopelessness about their role in a society where they cannot expect protection from the government, police or army.

“If people don’t have a feeling of security, that is when you have low morals,” Suknenko observes. “One reason young people have premarital sex is that they think, ‘If I can’t enjoy my future, I might as well enjoy life while I can.'”

And that’s why Yury Ravnushkin, the Vybukh concert organizer, says he tries to convince youth that they have a choice that their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t have growing up in the atheistic Soviet Union.

“We try to tell them: ‘You can get what your parents didn’t get. You have God. God will help you with these things.'”

It is a message that youth ministers across Ukraine are praying teens will hear. *

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Frank Brown is a journalist based
in Moscow. He frequently files reports for Charisma from the former Soviet Union.

Once a week in a simple basement meeting room decorated with Israeli flags, a few dozen elderly Jewish Muscovites get together to socialize, pray and–above all–to dance. With a four-piece klezmer band providing an irresistible rhythm, it is not long into the service before most of the elderly women are on their feet, dancing in a lively, free-form style.

It is a scene repeated often enough across Moscow, a city of 11 million people.

However, the Jews who gather here at synagogue Shomer Yisrael–unlike at other synagogues serving Moscow’s estimated 200,000 Jews–aren’t waiting for the Messiah anymore. This synagogue’s 400 members are Messianic Jews who, while they preserve many elements of traditional Judaism, pr

oclaim Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

That doesn’t make temporal life in Moscow any easier for them.

They are reviled by traditional Jews for abandoning their forefathers’ faith, and as Christians, they are refused the right of Israeli citizenship. Despite such obstacles, Shomer Yisrael has grown steadily from 100 members in 1997 to about 400 today, according to Rabbi Efim Litvak.

Both Litvak and American coordinator Richard Glick say a top priority for the 10
Messianic synagogues scattered around the former Soviet Union is to provide Messianic Jews with Russian-language copies of David H. Stern’s Jewish New Testament, which adapts the traditional New Testament to Jewish needs.

“It puts the New Testament in a Jewish perspective. It gives the New Testament back to the Jews,” said Glick, 49, a Düsseldorf, Germany-based missionary who lived in Russia for 3-1/2 years planting Messianic synagogues and who returns about once a month. “We will print a million of them and give one to every Jewish family in the former Soviet Union–if they are believers.”

Glick said “only a small amount” has been raised of the estimated $1 million needed for the publishing of the Russian-language version.

Litvak said his charismatic congregation is still heavily dependent on congregations of Messianic Jews in the United States.

“Everything we have here is thanks to a synagogue in Chicago,” said Litvak, 63, an engineer who still marvels at how quickly Cold War prejudices evaporated. “They taught us that the Americans were our enemies. The Americans threatened us with the bomb. But the Americans brought us the Bible instead of bombs.”

Given the deep-seated anti-Semitism found in Russia’s people and history, Jews here have long felt isolated, embattled and dependent on one another for support. Messianic Jews, by their conversion to another faith, can be rejected by the Jewish community.

“In a traditional Jewish home, if you become a believer in Jesus, you have died. They sit Shivah,” said Glick, referring to the Jewish rite of mourning for the dead. Glick himself is from a Jewish family but said his parents welcomed his conversion 29 years ago because it enabled him to give up drugs.

Because of the profound secularization of Soviet Jews that occurred during 70 years of state-sponsored atheism, missionaries evangelizing Jews here tend to face much fewer obstacles than they do in the West or certainly Israel, Glick said.

The success of missionaries working with Russian-speaking Jews has alarmed some Jewish organizations in the United States. In a recent telephone interview from Brooklyn, N.Y., Alexander Lakshin said he spent two weeks in Russia in May with the head of Jews for Judaism on a fact-finding tour. Partly as a result of that trip, Lakshin said he plans this summer to move to Moscow and open an office

to conduct “anti-missionary activity in the former Soviet Union.”

“Unfortunately, Russian Jews represent an easy target. They have a lack of knowledge of Judaism,” said Lakshin, who will work in Moscow under
the auspices of the ultra-orthodox Chabad Lubavitch branch of Judaism. “These missionaries come and present themselves not as Christians. They call their leaders rabbis. They use Jewish symbols, all kinds of Jewish rituals.”

Litvak bristles at the notion that he is deceiving anyone or that a Jew who believes in Jesus loses his Jewishness.

“A German is a German no matter who he believes in,” Litvak said to emphasize a point. “In Israel today, government officials take the orthodox position that if a person starts believing in Jesus then he stops being a Jew. It is not true. Here in Shomer Yisrael, we are still Jews.”

Local officials are waging a smear campaign, using accusations that church leaders engage in brainwashing

A thriving Pentecostal church in Kostroma, a provincial Russian city on the Volga River, is being threatened with closure by local officials who accuse church leaders of using hypnosis and brainwashing.

“First they refused us registration, and now they are taking us to court to have us liquidated,” said Andrei Danilov, 36, who vows to fight to keep his Family of God Church open.

With the help of Moscow-based religious-freedom lawyers, Danilov predicted his church would prevail over the local department of the Justice Ministry as have other charismatic churches that were faced with similar threats.

“I think any judge will be on our side as long as he is not bought off,” said Danilov, a lanky, clean-cut preacher with an earnest manner. “There is no proof. They haven’t come to our church or even talked to our members.”

Troubles for the 350-member church began in October when a local television station broadcast a highly critical report using footage secretly filmed during a worship service. The footage included a portion of the service in which a woman collapsed as she was overcome with the Holy Spirit.

In subsequent television reports and newspaper accounts, Pentecostal believers are repeatedly referred to as sektanty, a Russian term with a more negative connotation than its English counterpart, “sectarians.”

“It is an insulting word used to describe people who engage in dark deeds, orgies, money laundering, the destruction of families and the encouraging of children to run away from

home,” Danilov said.

Typical of media accounts that perpetuate negative stereotypes about members of some of Kostroma’s newer minority faiths was a large, front-page April 11 article in the Trading Rows weekly newspaper. It was headlined “New Churches: Song and Dance Companies in Christ’s Name” and offered a broad denunciation of newly founded Protestant churches and Western missionaries doing the work of Western governments by spreading Western values in Russia.

The article was vague and included unnamed sources but did close with a reference to a special commission’s ongoing work to determine whether the Family of God Church and another Pentecostal church in Kostroma were using hypnosis to manipulate congregants. That commission of local experts did rule in April that the Family of God Church used hypnosis. In turn, the commission’s finding was used by the Justice Ministry to deny registration and initiate a court proceeding in early June.

Registration with the Justice Ministry as a religious organization is vital in Russia. Without it, the Family of God Church would no longer have the legal right to rent space in Kostroma’s Philharmonic Concert Hall. Danilov said the Philharmonic is one of few spaces in the city that has

space enough to accommodate his congregation and management that is willing to rent to Pentecostals.

Judging from the enthusiasm of the congregation during a recent Sunday service at the Philharmonic, closure of the Family of God Church would be a severe blow. Beginning with a rousing, rocking musical program, Danilov led the mostly young congregation into an eloquent sermon in which he openly discussed the attacks being made on the church.

Using direct language, Danilov urged his listeners to examine their own lives and think about issues of pride, tolerance and being overly concerned with outward appearance.

Stepping near the edge of the Philharmonic’s stage and leaning forward, Danilov told believers to speak openly of their membership in the Family of God.

“Say, ‘Yes, I’m a fanatic.’ Say, ‘Yes, I’m crazy–crazy for the sake of God,'” he told them.

After the service concluded and the aisles emptied, one of the older congregants, Sofia Alexeyeva, 64, spoke of how puzzled her Russian Orthodox friends are about Spirit-filled worship.

“For them, it is very difficult to understand,” said Alexeyeva, a pensioner who barely survives on 600 rubles ($21) a month from the government. “They only go to church for the holidays. Here, they open our eyes and ears through the Bible.”

Alexeyeva said her life would suffer without the fellowship offered by the Family of God Church, especially since she just discovered that she has diabetes.

A court should have little cause to shut down the church, especially since the church is part of a Russia-wide centralized religious organization and is therefore immune from the sort of local review the commission applied.

Danilov predicted the process would be a long one.

“I think they will use any kind of means not to register us. They will keep searching for reasons. The worse case is that they will use the money we get from America to make a case with the Tax Inspectorate,” said Danilov, explaining that his church receives about $400 a month in support from various U.S. churches.

THE NEW LEADER HAS SHOWN FAVOR TO CHURCHES, BUT AN AIR OF MYSTERY SHROUDS THE EX-KGB OFFICER

Religious leaders here say it is too early to tell what kind of president Vladimir Putin will be for Russia’s several hundred thousand Pentecostal and charismatic believers. But his KGB background as well as his membership in the Russian Orthodox Church have left many leaders pensive.

Putin was elected March 26 with a decisive 53 percent vote out of a field of 11 candidates. His past career as a colonel in the KGB, the Soviet-era secret police, could turn out to be a mixed blessing, said Bishop Sergei Ryakhovsky, head of one of Russia’s two largest Pentecostal associations.

“It is a difficult question. For us, Putin is a puzzle. His past very much worries us,” said Ryakhovsky, whose association includes 1,200 congregations spread across the world’s largest country.

“But Putin’s past is also a plus in that he knows this great country much more thoroughly than most people,” said the bishop, referring to the fact that KGB officers typically were much better informed and more pragmatic than the average communist functionary.

Ryakhovsky estimated that many of the people in his flock voted for Putin, while very few would have cast their ballots for communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who came in a distant second. In 70 years of communist rule, religious expression of all kinds was rigidly controlled, and thousands of Christians died or were imprisoned for their faith.

A key issue for charismatic communities throughout Russia is the ongoing registration of religious organizations as required under a controversial 1997 law on religion. Under Russian law, registration is necessary for religious groups to function as legal entities with the right to enter into contracts, open bank accounts and hire employees.

The deadline for registration had expired on Dec. 31, 1999, with

only 60 percent of the country’s religious organizations having passed through the cumbersome process. On election day in March, Putin signed a law extending the deadline until the end of 2000.

Ryakhovsky estimated that 400 of his congregations didn’t make the first deadline. Bishop Vladimir Murza, head of Russia’s oldest Pentecostal union, said about half his congregations still require registration.

Especially in the provinces, Pentecostal congregations

have run into trouble winning registration from local bureaucrats who take issue with aspects of Pentecostal worship, such as speaking in tongues. Clerics from the politically powerful 1,000-year-old Russian Orthodox Church also sometimes pressure local governments to crack down on minority faiths, said Tatyana Tomayeva of the Moscow-based Slavic Center for Law and Justice.

Prominent charismatic leader Igor Nikitin, head of the 200-member Association of Christian Churches in Russia, estimated that a sizeable number of the groups he represents would opt not to get entangled with the government at all.

“It can get quite expensive,” said Nikitin, referring to Russian bureaucrats’ legendary appetite for paper. “You must report to the tax inspectorate once a month, for example. And even if you don’t owe any tax, you still need to hire an accountant just to fill in all the forms properly. For some of the smaller groups, this is just too much expense.”

God’s Family Church in Kostroma has endured persecution from local media and the government, pastor Andrey Danilov said. A local TV station secretly videotaped a service at the church, then paraded the report of it on their broadcast as an example of “sect and heresy.”

Danilov pleaded with the station managers to recant their report and letters to the public prosecutor, justice department and federal security service.

“Let all enemies of the church be scattered,” Danilov proclaimed. “Let the fear of God come down on every false witness. And let this situation turn into good and cause revival.”

Officials at the Keston Institute in Moscow, however, warn not to view Putin’s extension of the registration deadline for churches as a sign that he is supporting a new policy of tolerance toward religious minorities. Only time will tell which direction Putin will go when it comes to religion, they said.