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This is Russia, brother!

A report on a visit by Maciek Stolarski to Omsk in Siberia

I had just clicked the camera when an elderly woman came running out of the house screaming.

She demanded to know by what permission I had taken a photograph of her house. She certainly had not consented to this act. There we were, in a snow-covered Siberian hamlet. The place appeared to be desolate. The wooden houses set back, looked too flimsy to withstand the harsh climate.

The eeriness resembled a spooky Hollywood drama. The sudden emergence of this woman broke the silence and sent shock waves through the system. Josif, my translator, tried to reason with the woman. Offering an explanation of a UK visitor capturing the Siberian scene on camera only exacerbated the situation. I was now a foreign agent. As we walked away, Josif was chuckling to himself. 'This is Russia, brother!' he said.

Russian mindset

This was not my only contact with the Russian mindset. I had come to Omsk in Siberia to spend a week with a group of pastors sharing God's Word. It was my first time in Russia, yet I found the place much as I expected - the Russian way of thinking and doing things was different.

One explanation given to me was that Russians are as extreme as the weather, not balanced or temperate. They are an intelligent nation but have been under autocratic rule for hundreds of years. When Communism replaced Tsarist rule, there was no fundamental change as far as the governance of the people was concerned. People did not have to think for themselves, the State did all the thinking for them. They just did what they were told. It will take a generation or two to remedy this problem. What I couldn't understand was how people managed to live when their employers had not paid them for months on end.

Baptist churches

The region of Omsk is similar in size to England yet has a population of only 2.5 million people. The city of Omsk accounts for half the population. The city has a number of Baptist churches with a further 80 churches, or church planting situations, in the region. The Central Baptist Church has a congregation of a thousand on a Sunday morning. In the smaller towns, where churches have been planted in the past three years, one hears of forties and fifties attending. In my short stay, I was aware of 14 people making professions of faith. Coming from the UK to a situation where the fruit of gospel work proliferates was a great joy to experience. The great cry was for men to be raised who would shepherd the flock, teaching sound Biblical truth.

Among the 80-plus gospel centres in the region only 15 men labour in full-time pastoral work. A number of men have to have other employment to provide for their families. Time for study and preparation to minister God's Word is not a practised discipline (we were able to address this issue during our Bible studies). Consequently, people are not well taught and applying biblical principles to working out daily living is not understood. This has lead to a form of legalism in how Christians should live and attend worship. Inevitably, the pattern of society is reflected in church life and leaders have to do a lot of the thinking for the people. Yet the enthusiasm and dedication to serve the Lord to proclaim the gospel would put many of us to shame.

Minority Orthodoxy

The main religion is Orthodox and the government would have you believe that the vast majority of people are devotees of that movement. In reality it is different. Even if the measure of attendance in a church of once a year were to be adopted, it would still be the minority. Consequently, in the city, people do not give strong allegiance to mainstream religion and do not reject out of hand a conversation concerning spiritual matters, dismissing you as a member of a sect.

Registered & unregistered

Sadly, the distinction among the Baptists of registered and unregistered still lingers on. The description of registered and unregistered goes back to 1964 when the Communist government brought in a law about religious groups having to register through recognised bodies. The Baptist Churches formed such a registered body. Not all churches felt it was right to register and this caused quite a division.

Registration did not exempt believers from persecution. There are still those around who remember the Stalinist era. The KGB were clever in the way that they caused suspicion among believers. It was not uncommon for a pastor from an unregistered church to be arrested and as he was brought in for questioning, he was taken past a stage-managed scene where a pastor from a registered church would be seen talking to agents.

Despite 70 years of communism, which tried to silence the gospel, the church has survived and come through the whole experience strengthened. Churches have been able to regain property that had been confiscated. They are free to gather for worship, organise Sunday schools and youth meetings, and can openly distribute literature.

Open confession

Believers start gathering for worship early before the meeting. Services last two hours with two sermons and nearly everyone sits on basic wooden benches. I say nearly everyone, as some have to stand because there are no seats left. The thing that struck me was the open confession of converts, kneeling in prayer at the front.

At the mid-week meeting I attended, 300 gathered. It was a teaching session led by Josif. He does this each week. Before the meeting started, bits of paper were being passed up to him. It turned out that these were questions from the congregation. After he finished teaching, he took open questions from the floor and then answered them.

Break-in

It was interesting to spend some time with the young people. The Central Baptist Church in Omsk has set up a youth office in a commercial building. The idea is to try and reach out to university students and other young people by having a half-way house. We spent a number of evenings with different groups talking about life in Britain.

Just before I was due to depart for the UK, the youth office had been broken into and some items stolen. There was no damage, as if the intruders had had a set of keys. The suspicion was that other users of the building did it, probably with the collusion of the security person. 'With a 24-hour security surveillance do you not have a comeback on the owners of the building?' I asked naively. I received the usual reply, accompanied by a big grin: 'This is Russia, brother!'.

Maciek Stolarski