To Russia With Prayer

Upon our return from Florida I received two letters that gave me both excitement and concern. The first was fromDr. Galina Chentsova, M.D. who heads our ministry in the former USSR and the second from The Moscow Times.

I am enclosing part of the Times story. You can get the details from their web.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/10/002.html

Evangelical Christians Fight for a Church


By Stephen Boykewich Staff Writer

Dozens of evangelical believers stood stunned on Tverskaya Ploshchad across from City Hall, their protest banners lying in police vans, their pastor being carted off to a holding cell.
"This time it was pretty," Yelena Purshaga said last Thursday. Her husband, Alexander Purshaga, is the pastor of the Emmanuel church.

"You should have seen the way it was yesterday," she said on June 2. The church had sought -- and thought it received -- permission to hold a weeklong demonstration across from City Hall over the loss of land that it had hoped to use to build a house of worship.

But on May 30 and June 1, police and OMON special forces violently broke up the demonstrations, throwing women and children to the ground and swearing at them, parishioners said. One of them, Marina Karandayeva, raised her sleeve to show an ugly ring of bruises around her arm.

For Emmanuel's believers, it was the latest indignity in a decade-long struggle to build a church for their 1,000-member Moscow parish. For some religious liberty organizations, it was further evidence of a mounting, and in some cases violent, trend to persecute Protestant religious minorities.

In mid-May, a group of young men stormed into the Moscow office of the Russian Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith, a main umbrella organization for evangelical churches in Russia, and announced that they had been sent to "beat sectarians."

At about the same time, Perm regional authorities said they wanted to buy back a former palace of culture building that had been sold to an evangelical church -- a decision that came after the church was criticized by the local Russian Orthodox bishop, the mayor of Perm and city legislators. A Baptist home church went up in flames in an apparent arson attack in the Moscow region town of Lyubuchany in September.

Emmanuel's saga began in 1994, when it applied for land to build a church in Moscow. Protestant church membership was growing rapidly at the time, thanks in part to a 1991 law on religious organizations that has since become far more restrictive.

Lawrence Uzzell, president of International Religious Freedom Watch, said Emmanuel was far from alone in its plight. "Securing a meeting space is probably the most common type of problem that Protestant organizations in Russia have," Uzzell said.

Protestant churches throughout Russia have complained that owners of theaters and former cultural palaces have refused to let them rent rooms for religious services because of the opposition of local Orthodox priests or bishops, he said.

"In effect, Orthodox clergy were being given veto power over their competitors," Uzzell said.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II's chief spokesman, Mikhail Moiseyev, denied such practices.

Regarding Emmanuel's difficulties, he said: "Construction in Moscow is a problem for everyone. If in this case there are problems, it's by no means connected to the Orthodox Church."
He noted, however, that "more than once the most holy patriarch has expressed the idea that the activities of many religious groups -- evangelists, neo-charismatics, pentacostals, whatever they call themselves -- have absolutely no historical tradition beneath them and are alien to Russian spiritual life."

Emmanuel's members disagree. Protestants have been active throughout territory of the former Soviet Union for over a century. The Russian Assemblies of God have been registered in the country since 1933, and the families of both Purshagas have worshiped in evangelical churches for generations.

"They ask us who our foreign sponsors are," Yelena Purshaga said. "They say we've come from America to bring a democratic revolution. We don't want anything of the kind. All we want is the land they promised us."

In 1996, the church was granted a plot on Prospekt Vernadskogo, and spent "many millions of rubles" over the next few years preparing the project, said Alexander Purshaga, who is both Emmanuel's chief pastor and president of the Russian Assemblies of God, an organization that includes 38 other parishes nationwide.

But when the Moscow parish was ready to start construction in 1999, authorities in the local administrative district said that residents opposed the project.

"We went out to collect signatures," Yelena Purshaga said. "We did everything by the book: last names, addresses, passport numbers. People knew us because of the charity work we had done with orphans and veterans. Out of the 10,000 people we asked, 6,000 said they weren't against construction."The church was then abruptly told that the land had been previously promised to the city government for public use, Alexander Purshaga said.

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Pray for freedom to reign in Russia.
Pray for Galina and her team of dedicated volunteers.
Pray for my trip in August.