Our first day in St. Petersburg has been spent in the city buying train tickets, exchanging currency and trying to stay awake J. We decided to leave five days before the team because we weren’t sure how Will would do with the time change and wanted to be ready for when the team arrived. He has done exceptionally well with staying awake and switching over for the first day.
Being back in St. Petersburg today was kind of overwhelming, mostly because so much of being in Russia is different from America. The estimated population of St. Petersburg is four to five million people and because many people walk everywhere over here the streets are extremely crowded. The city itself has amazing architecture but within five minutes of being on any street corner you can tell that there is a lack of moral consciousness. What we consider immodest in America is nothing compared to how women dress in Russia. Many times men will reek of alcohol and that is because the alcoholism rate here for males is about forty percent and sometimes higher in the villages. The divorce rate is around ninety percent. The average woman has six to seven abortions, as their means to birth control. These are just a few of the facts that show the moral decay of this nation. There is also just the feeling of spiritual oppression while being here. It is hard to explain unless you are under it but for many of you who have experience it, you know exactly what I am speaking about.
John’s Dad (Bill) was speaking to some Norwegian’s this past week about Christian students who were arriving at this particular Bible school that were never taught (in church) they shouldn’t have sex before they are married. From the mouths of the students they said they thought that because that is what they saw on television and in movies that this was normal, it is what people did and considered it okay. Typically the Russian Orthodox churches over here do not touch on or talk about things like saving yourself for marriage, let alone actually use the Bible in church. The churches with the largest attendance (Russian Orthodox) are the ones that do have more to do with “religion” than an actual relationship with Jesus Christ. There are churches here that proclaim the Truth but they are small and there are not many of them.
We take for granite in America that we have the CHOICE to go to any evangelical church we want, can find Pastors who teach the real meaning of scripture, have multiple Christian bookstores to choose from and can find tons of materials to help spur us on in our Christian walk. This is simply not the case here in Russia. To many of you Americans who are reading this it is hard to comprehend and even for us being here in being in the middle of it all it is hard to fully take in. It is easy to find yourself saying, “Shouldn’t they know its “wrong” to do that? Or why so many women think it’s okay to dress that way? ” This all comes from an American Worldview. We have a Judea Christian foundation and because of that there are many things that we have been raised to fundamentally know as right or wrong, whether we grew up being Christians or not. This is the polar opposite of having a Russian worldview.
Life is considerably different here but our hope and prayer is that we can enter in and minister the way the Lord wants us to. Ministering here is much about relationships and trust which are two things we desire to build with the people we come into contact with. Because there is no “foundation” of Biblical truth in this culture it can make it difficult to minister. We ask you to join us in prayer for this specific thing.
Greater is He that is in us than he who is in the world.
Russian Fact #1: “Forty million Soviet men died in the three cataclysmic events of the Soviet era - 1) the collectivization of the agriculture, 2) the political purges, and 3) World War II [known as The Great Patriotic War] - creating a severe shortage of men for two generations of women.”
