In May of 1994 I travelled to Moscow to teach a Survey of the New Testament course. This was just two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Church of which I am a part was among the Western Christian churches and groups who rushed to send missionaries to Russia and other former communist states. Within those two years there was a significant group of young people who had come to faith in Jesus Christ and who were eager to learn more of the meaning of this faith. I was there as a part of the response to this desire, and as part of the Church’s desire to provide access to quality education for the sake of an informed and mature Church capable of taking responsibility for its own life as soon as possible.

Many people I met on that visit described Moscow as the ‘wild West'-- meaning there were cowboys riding all over the place with little regard for the law. This applied to Russians, including government bureaucracy as much as to Western entrepreneurs, which made life a constant challenge for our people in Moscow who never knew from one day to the next which laws would prevail and which would change. Of course, the ‘cowboy’ description was applied to Western missionaries as much as anyone. It seems everyone wanted to get a ‘piece of the action’. A few people would land with a lot of money and boxes of Bibles to give away; stop in a public place to give away the Bibles; preach a few words; invite people to raise their hands to ‘accept Christ’; count the hands; move on to the next town; then return to the West to tell stories of the thousands who had been converted under their preaching.

This was not my reason for being there, nor that of my Church. The course I taught was just the first of a programme of education which has grown to three education centres in Russia alone, preparing people for leadership in their own churches at the same time as providing a stepping-stone for full-time study for a degree. But, at that time, this was merely a plan needing to be put into action. For my part, the course was as much a learning experience as a teaching responsibility. For most of the students this was the first time they were reading the Christian Scripture clear through. Since I grew up within the Church, I cannot remember my first encounter with Scripture. It was exciting to me to experience the freshness of the gospel through the eyes and minds of the students.

But those were not easy times for anyone. My dollars were able to buy a lot of rubles. The rubles would not buy a lot, for there was not that much there to buy.

I had not been back since, so when the invitation came to teach again this Summer, I could not turn the offer down. I landed at Sheremetyevo Airport, north of Moscow, and was given a tour of the city on the way to my hosts’ home on the south of the city. Last time I travelled by underground everywhere, so it took a little while to orient myself to the bits I remembered. But one thing stood out: the city now looks like a Western city, at least on the surface. New cars, billboards offering luxury goods, new buildings with building cranes visible from every direction—this was a bustling city. There is really no comparison to be made to what I remembered. I could be almost anywhere in Europe now.

But, I did not spend much time in Moscow. The teaching centre is a dacha 50 km south of Moscow. A dacha! My picture of a dacha was a place where the wealthy people of Tolstoy’s time, or the political elite of the Soviet era, would take a holiday. And so it was—but not just the wealthy. Now, to be sure, it appears to be a preserve of the burgeoning middle class. But, the Church has taken two newly-built dachas and extended them into a high quality retreat centre where the intensive teaching weeks take place.

Most of the housing around is new dachas, but built around local village housing typical of most rural villages. The atmosphere was instantly relaxing. There were sweet scents in the air, extensive forests of pine, cottonwood and birch, and broad horizons. In the distance the spires of a Russian Orthodox Church towered over the countryside. From the distance the church looked to me to be fairly new. Towards the end of my week there I went with a group of students for a walk to the village to see the church. I was amazed to discover, close up, that it was in a state of serious disrepair. A new corrugated tin roof kept out the elements, but otherwise bushes still grew out of stonework, the entrance gate leaned dangerously, and rough wooden steps were erected over the crumbling stairs to the door. This church predated the Revolution. It had been left standing, but neglected, through the Soviet era. And now—it was once again a place of worship, even though it was in danger of falling around those who worship there. One of the students pointed to some graffiti high over our heads.

She translated something like this: ‘We have not forgotten you, God’. This was not vandalism, but the testimony of a Believer in the depths of the grip of Stalinist Communism. I suddenly felt awed by the place.

And, I also felt wonder as I listened to the students, from many backgrounds. I had wanted to see what has happened to people in these twelve years. And, again, I learned much. My students came from Volgograd to the East, Ukraine to the West, and Armenia to the South. They were proud of their nationalities (the Armenians reminding me somewhat of the Scots in their certainty that their nation is the source of all that is good in comparison to the larger nations across the border). But nationalism was never an issue that divided. There was great camaraderie, based on shared worship.


We were studying from the Old Testament this time. The Old Testament offers ample opportunity to discuss subjects that are not unlike current events. The war in Lebanon was going on, and we did not avoid talking about how the biblical material we were studying related to that conflict. Some aspects of the Bible do read like contemporary Fundamentalist actions and attitudes, of Islamic and Christian varieties. We talked about this. An important aspect of discussion was the apocalyptic vision of the near future that fundamentalism offers—the world is divided into two stark opposites of good and evil, and evil must be destroyed; somehow, it seems, God needs help from his keen disciples in initiating the destruction.

In the course of discussion, I was suddenly struck by the importance of the setting we were in. Here were people from across what was once the Soviet Union. Barely twenty years ago a President of the United States spoke of these people as the ‘Evil Empire’ seeking to destroy all that is dear to lovers of democracy and freedom, and contemplated nuclear war as a means of destroying that evil. Even if he really meant it was the Communist government that was evil, the explosion of even a single nuclear weapon would have meant the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Yet, within a few years that ‘evil’ regime had collapsed (some say thanks to that president’s rhetoric); today this imperialist capitalist Westerner (well, that is what they thought of us!) is able to sit and learn and worship with Christians from all corners of that evil empire.

Once I had thought of this, I was struck by the rhetoric now directed towards Islam—so-called Islamist-fascist-terrorist countries are identified as part of an evil alliance seeking to destroy all that is dear to lovers of democracy and freedom, and bombs are dropped in many Muslim countries as a means to kill off the evil people. And I wonder…

What if ‘we’ had bombed Russia…What about all these people who are now my brothers and sisters in Christ…Is there such a thing as an evil empire…What might God already be doing in the new evil empire…?

Somewhere in the Bible Jesus calls his disciples to ‘pray for you enemies’. And, what does he ask them to pray for?