The blue hues of dusk reflect off the walls of the small apartment where believers gather to pray. On bended knees, they form a semicircle around the coffee table, voicing the names of those who used to be neighbors but now live hours and in some cases, days away.
But no matter where these believers have settled across the former Soviet Union, they share a common church home with those positioned around the small living room table in Balti, Moldova.
Since 1987, Bethany Baptist Church has sent nearly 80 members of its congregation to serve as missionaries throughout Moldova, Ukraine and Russia.
“There is a very big need [for the gospel] in other parts of the former Soviet Union,” said Eugeni Munteanu, pastor of prayer at Bethany Baptist. “So the brothers here left their houses and their apartments to go over there.”
In 1997, Bethany Baptist children’s minister Andrey Malanciuc and missions pastor Vasiliy Sazikin began a prayer group of four families who met weekly to pray for missionaries sent out by their church. Today this prayer group involves 13 families who regularly intercede for these missionaries.
Sending out missionaries
Because of the poor economic state of their eastern European nation, believers at Bethany Baptist are unable to support their missionaries financially. But rather than hindering the work of Moldovan missionaries, some would argue that Moldova’s economic crisis has actually spurred some believers on to become missionaries.
“There’s a tendency for those who don’t have jobs here to go to Russia to work,” Sazikin said. “So we encourage the families to go and serve as missionaries there.
“Just like the persecution in the Jerusalem church, the Lord uses the financial needs here for the ministry, for us to go out to different countries and serve.”
In addition to using economic hardship to call people to missions, Sazikin also believes God will use the shared Russian language of the former Soviet Union to give Moldovan believers access to the lost.
Without a language barrier to deter them from serving, several believers from Bethany Baptist moved their families to different parts of the former Soviet Union, where they now serve as missionaries.
Vitalie Ifdeula, pastor of Jesus Savior Baptist Church, also noted the Russian-language connection.
“Now we Christians finally understand why we had to learn that language,” he said. “We can speak to anyone in the former Soviet Union — we have a common language. We can be missionaries and bring the Word of God — even to Muslim countries.”
And while Moldovans are reaching beyond their borders, they are also witnessing at home.
Planting churches
The goal of the Moldovan Baptist Union is to have a church or mission point in every village or city, officials noted. There are 1,600 villages and cities in Moldova. In 2006, the Union of Christian Evangelical Baptist Churches numbered 400 churches and 250 mission points. There are 21,000 baptized believers.
Church-planting and evangelism efforts take on various forms. Churches use everything from computer classes to Tae Kwon Do to reach out to the communities. All of the classes use the Bible as the textbook and include an inductive Bible study. There’s even a computer class using the Book of Numbers to teach Excel.
“We use lots of ways to introduce Christ to people,” said Anatol Malancea, one of the mission leaders at Holy Trinity Church. “We use sports, computers, English — anything that will help Moldovans. All of these classes use the Bible and introduce people to a hope through Jesus Christ.”
Malancea has helped to not only start new mission points but has passed on the passion for evangelism to another generation of believers. His church routinely takes the youth out to visit villages and do door-to-door evangelism. The youth are often teachers in the computer and English classes.
Malancea said some villages are very resistant to evangelism and starting evangelical churches. He and many others have had stones thrown at them. Missionaries sent out from the churches have been beaten up and told to go back home.
“The toughest soil is most blessed,” Malancea said. “All we can do is be obedient and plant the seed.” (WMU)
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