There are nine time zones between Moscow and Kamtshatka and it takes a nine hour flight with the Russian airline “Aeroflot” to get there, so I had enough time to turn my thoughts back to a time thirty years before. I was fourteen and I had just accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. I remember feeling my heart burning all night long, burning with the desire to see the Gospel taken to the end of the earth. At the time for me the end of the earth was Kamtshatka (I lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan). All I knew about Kamtshatka was that thousands of evangelical Christians had given their lives for Christ on that peninsula during the persecution of Stalin back in the thirties, and that in the seventies, when I was fourteen years old, there was not a single evangelical church on Kamtshatka. I was praying. Thirty years later God fulfilled my dream and I am on my way to Kamtshatka for the very first time.
Kamtshatka is the last peninsula of the Russian territory … across the ocean is Alaska. Over 300,000 people live there, 25% of them are military people and their families. Today there are a few evangelical churches, basically home groups, two thirds of them concentrated in the area around the city of Petropavlovsk, the others spread over the peninsula. The evangelical movement began here ‘at the end of the earth’ about fifteen to twenty years ago. Despite the freedom for the proclamation of the Gospel even the number of bears on Kamtshatka is ten times higher than the number of evangelical believers … there are over 10,000 bears and just a little over 1,000 evangelical believers!
Today is a time of worries for the Christians because in almost all the countries of the former Soviet Union new laws are being developed and passed for the purpose of limiting and stopping the development of the evangelical movement. Under these conditions we see ourselves confronted with the question: Are there possibilities to continue doing the ministry? The answer to this question is YES, because the entire development of the ministry is based on the local churches and believers. Even if the time comes when the State closes down all the churches, we would still believe that the ministry we do will be continued, because God Himself is the source of this ministry.
The believers of Kamtshatka are a vivid example of this. Isolated from the rest of the world because of the great distances, and being surrounded by oceans, they still do the ministry that God has entrusted to them, and they do it faithfully, with simplicity and truthfulness. They keep gathering in private houses for Bible study, and by giving testimony about Christ every day they try to fulfill the Great Commission of Christ.
When it was suggested to them to take part in the Project 1:10 on Kamtshatka they responded with much enthusiasm. Bibel Mission provides the churches with the material they need for the training of believers in personal evangelism and discipleship, but it was with much pain that we could offer them only 100 evangelistic sets of literature to reach out to 1,000 un-reached people because this was all that we had available for Kamtshatka, there being a very high demand from churches all over the former Soviet Union for this project. Nevertheless the names of the 1,000 people on Kamtshatka who would be contacted by 100, will be brought before God in the prayers of the believers; 1,000 people who don’t know the truth will hear and be permanently taken care of. This is one more step for the Gospel to be successfully preached even at ‘the end of the earth’.
Pray for Kamtshatka.
|
|
 Small group meeting
|
