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Children from the
displacement
camps.
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In the first of a series of articles John Birnie abridges material from his forthcoming book documenting the history of the SGA. He writes:
The 2nd World War brought unprecedented destruction and misery to countless millions. Whole countries were ravaged and cities reduced to ruins. Ethnic groups and communities were broken up and scattered by the devastating effects of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Slavic people were ‘displaced’. Many lost everything as they fled or were driven from their homes, and when the war was over did not want to return to the east. There was nothing there for them. Their homes had been destroyed, and they did not relish living under the new regime of communism established in their home countries.
So there came into existence many ‘Displaced Persons Camps’ especially in Austria and Germany, and Peter Deyneka, founder of SGA, quickly saw the tremendous opportunity for the Gospel in such camps. It was a vast mission field in which Peter could reach his beloved Russian and Slavic people in the context of the free west. He began to visit these camps, and this had an important bearing upon the beginnings of SGA[UK]. Peter’s daughter, Ruth, records that her father would cross the Atlantic from New York to Southampton.
Before going over the English Channel he would meet British pastors and preach in their churches. With every trip he met more and more Christians in the British Isles who expressed the desire to help Slavic people, both in their own countries and on the neighbouring continent itself.
In this way links were established and interest generated among British believers who caught Peter’s burden for the Slavic peoples, and his vision for the work. God was ‘setting the scene’ for SGA expansion!
Throughout the late 1940s contacts and friendships developed with believers in Britain as Peter travelled back and forward using England as his ‘staging post’. In a 1950s Slavic Gospel News report he wrote:
In November 1946 Dr Gavin Hamilton, Scottish evangelist and Bible teacher, arranged special meetings for me in England, Scotland and Wales. Many British Christian friends, when they heard about the work we are doing, expressed their desire to help financially. For this reason we felt we should pray for the Lord’s leading concerning a representation of the work in Great Britain.
Dr Hamilton also introduced Peter to a number of Christian businessmen who became whole-hearted and generous supporters of SGA’s ministry. He also met for the first time the Rev John Thomas who pastored a church in Gravesend in Kent.
John Thomas had been praying much about a growing conviction in his heart regarding evangelistic ministry. He went to hear Peter Deyneka speak at a meeting in Wales and afterwards engaged him in conversation. That conversation had a profound influence upon Thomas, and ultimately upon the development of SGA links with the UK. Before Peter left Great Britain at the end of that trip, he and John Thomas had begun to pray and plan together for a possible tie-up in ministry. Subsequently Thomas met and linked up with other burdened UK supporters of SGA, and he became the Mission’s first British missionary representative.
Peter saw Great Britain as a strategically important base for more effective outreach to Russia and Eastern Europe. Ruth Deyneka Erdel writes:
My father was a man of vision. He wanted to see the Russian world won for Christ. That meant seeking the help of Christians in every part of the world to join together and reach out to the lost, especially in Russia. As he preached in the UK churches he was aware that the British Isles were closer geographically to Russia than the USA. He appreciated the deep spiritual lives of the people he met in Britain and he longed to encourage them to join together to take the Gospel to Russia. Thus he longed to see an SGA UK branch.
In the providence of God, John Thomas was the link through which that branch was established in 1950, and the spearhead of SGA[UK]’s ministry throughout those formative years.
