20

The Genealogy of Faith

I heard more stories in Russia. For example, I was told about an incident that happened in the early 1950’s when three charismatic pastors were organizing house churches. While they were experiencing exciting growth in the larger movement and regularly adding new house churches, each individual house-church “congregation” consisted of the same ten or twenty people week after week, year after year. For security reasons, many of the house churches consisted entirely of people who were related to one another and were, therefore, known well enough to be trusted.

In that setting, I imagined how teenagers or young adults might understand the church and the Body of Christ. Their entire faith experience had been defined by a lifetime of weekly worship in the front room of the house with mom and dad and a few others relatives. In their eyes, that was church. There was no awareness of a larger Kingdom of God, no knowledge of what God was doing in other house churches—or even in other countries. These young people were surely in need of spiritual peers and a larger sense of community, but they likely felt isolated, lonely, and discouraged.

The three pastors who were helping to lead this movement realized what was happening, and they decided to try something. They came up with a very bold (some people would say foolish) idea. They planned and organized a youth congress in Moscow and invited all of the young, unmarried members of their various house churches—from eighteen to thirty years of age—to meet and encourage one another. They hoped that there would be some spiritual cross-pollination between the different house-church groups and that these younger believers might learn what God was doing on a broader stage.

What some people judged to be “foolish” about the idea was thinking that a week-long meeting of almost seven hundred young believers in Russia during the early 1950’s could possibly escape the notice of the communist government. Sure enough, the authorities did take notice. When the event was over, all three organizing pastors were arrested and sentenced to prison for three years each.

The people who were now telling me the story claimed that the pastors would have eagerly suffered the same punishment over and over again, because, as they explained it, “The Holy Spirit fell on that conference.”

The primary purpose in bringing the young people together was to gather the scattered parts of the Body of Christ in one place. The goal was to hear what God was doing with other people and to simply enjoy the experience of Christian community. At the beginning of the conference—evidently without much forethought or planning—the young people were given an interesting challenge. None of them had owned a Bible. They had never had hymnbooks or songbooks or recordings of religious music. So, in an off-handed way, the three pastors decided to determine how much Bible truth was present in that group of young people.

They said, “This will be like a game. Every day this week, we want you to gather in small groups. And we want to see how much of the four New Testament Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—you know and have memorized. In your groups, see how much of the Gospels you can recreate. And then do the same thing with songs and hymns. Let’s see how much of that can be reproduced by memory.”

At the end of the conference, when they compared and combined the efforts of all the different small groups, the young people had recreated all of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with only a half-dozen mistakes. They had also recreated the lyrics of more than twelve hundred songs, choruses, and hymns of the faith from memory.

It became clear to me in an instant why and how the Christian faith had survived and often thrived under decades of communist oppression in the Soviet Union. I also understood what had enabled so many Russian believers to remain strong and faithful.

On the day I heard the story about that conference, I was able to visit with some young people. The younger ones were excited about the chance to meet a real, live American; they wanted to practice their English language skills. Many of these young people were the grandchildren of the pastors who had been telling me the stories from those earlier days. I asked the grandchildren of the men who had so proudly told me how much Scripture and how many lyrics the young people in the house churches had been able to reproduce back in 1950’s: “Tell me, how much Bible do the young people in your churches know today?”

They looked at each other and rather sheepishly admitted, “Not much.”

I didn’t want to put them on the spot or embarrass them by asking how much of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John they might be able to quote. So I asked them how many different stories from the Gospels they could think of and list. They came up with a handful.

“How many books of the Bible can you name?” I asked.

“Only a few,” they said.

I don’t know if those young people were embarrassed by their responses to my questions. I did see, however, what the Russian church had lost in its first decade of “freedom.” Under communism, the church had found a way to survive and often thrive. Scripture and holy song was its lifeblood. Now, in a much freer day for the church, Scripture and holy song did not seem nearly as important. This coda to the earlier story was sobering and sad.

Many of the stories that I heard in Russia celebrated God’s faithfulness and provision.

One pastor was arrested and placed in prison, while his wife and children were sent to live (or die) in Siberia.

One wintry night in their remote, dilapidated wooden cabin which now served as their home, the three children divided their family’s last crust of bread, and drank the last cup of tea in the house before climbing into bed still hungry. Kneeling to say their prayers, they asked, “Where are we going to get some more food, Mama? We’re hungry! Do you think Papa even knows where we live now?” Their mother assured them their heavenly Father knew where they lived. For now, He was the one who would have to provide. They prayed and asked for God’s provision.

Thirty kilometers away, in the middle of the night, God woke up the deacon of a church and instructed him, “Get out of bed. Harness your horse, hitch the horse to the sled, load up all the extra vegetables that the church has harvested, the meat, and the other food that the congregation has collected, and take it to that pastor’s family living outside the village. They are hungry!”

The deacon said, “But, Lord, I can’t do that! It’s below zero outside. My horse might freeze and I might freeze!”

The Holy Spirit told him, “You must go! The pastor’s family is in trouble!”

The man argued, “Lord, you’ve got to know that there are wolves everywhere. They could eat my horse and if they do, they’ll then eat me! I’ll never make it back.”

But the deacon said that the Holy Spirit told him, “You don’t have to come back. You just have to go.”

So he did.

When he knocked loudly on the door of that rickety cabin in the pre-dawn darkness the next morning, the banging must have terrified the mother and her children. But imagine their joy and amazement when they fearfully, hesitantly opened the cabin door to find one very small, very cold member of the Body of Christ standing on their front step. His food-laden sleigh was behind him. He held a huge sack and announced, “Our church collected this food for you. Be fed. When this runs out, I’ll bring more.”

Long after I heard that story, I kept thinking about God’s final instruction to the deacon: “You just have to go.”

You don’t have to come back. You just have to go.

As it turns out, he did come back. Even so, the instruction is so clear. You just have to go. You just have to go. Even if there is no clarity about your return, you just have to go.

The memory of that deacon’s courageous obedience lives on in his story. The story has been told by his family for generations. And the story is also told by the extended family of those who were saved by his gift. The story celebrates one man’s obedience and God’s miraculous provision.

Viktor took me to meet Katya on one of my last days in Russia. Based on the records she had, the events that she described took place in 1917.

Katya said that she was seven years old when her protestant pastor grandfather received one day’s notice that the police were going to arrest him and lock him up. He used what little time he had to get his affairs in order and to bury the family Bible in the field behind his house. His hope was that the authorities would not be able to confiscate the Bible when they took him into custody. It didn’t seem to me that Katya personally witnessed the arrest or saw the police take her grandfather away to jail.

Several weeks later, his family was granted permission to come and bring the old pastor clothes, food and money to last him through the harsh winter. Katya described how “armed guards watched carefully as brothers, sisters, children, and grandchildren lined up to say good-bye to this man of God through the barbed-wire fence.”

I interrupted her to ask: “Have you ever told this entire story about your grandfather to your family?”

She told me that she didn’t think she had. I then suggested: “Before we go on, call your daughter and your son-in-law in from the kitchen and call your grandchildren in from outdoors.”

I had been hearing these life-changing stories long enough by that point to recognize that this was a special opportunity. “Your family needs to hear this story,” I told her, “from the time you were born, about your grandfather, about your life and your faith over the years. So let’s just let your family sit in here with us and listen as you and I talk.”

She was living on a small pension and was pleased when I offered to send one of the children to the shop for tea bags, sugar, milk and cookies.

Soon, after we had all had a cup of tea and some cookies, Katya’s four grandchildren and their parents filed in and sat on the floor of the little parlor room. I asked Grandmother Katya to start over from the beginning. As she talked, I found myself paying as much attention to her family’s reactions as I did to the old woman’s story.

She told again of her own grandfather’s arrest and imprisonment, the family’s visit to the prison camp, the armed guards, the family lining up at the fence to say their good-byes. Katya went on to say, “When I carefully reached my little hand between the sharp strands of the fence to touch my grandfather, I did not know that I would never see him again.”

She said that none of the family could have imagined that he would be martyred two weeks later. But they know that he was. Katya had been given copies of the official police and prison reports. She unfolded those documents and passed them around for us to examine.

Katya remembered that the last person at the fence was her grandmother. When the old woman’s hands touched her husband’s hands for the final time, Katya’s grandmother felt a little piece of folded paper which she clenched tightly in her fingers and quickly slid into one of her pockets out of sight.

In the privacy of her own home, Katya’s grandmother pulled the message out of her pocket. The note explained where Grandfather had buried the family Bible. It also instructed her to dig it up, gather the extended family together, and read the pages that he had written, folded, and hidden inside the Bible’s front cover. That’s what Katya’s grandmother did. “There must have been thirty family members all together,” Katya told us, “as my grandmother opened the Bible, unfolded the paper that Grandfather had left there, and read his last message to us all.”

Katya described her grandfather’s letter as sort of a spiritual last will and testament to the family. “And the very final thing he wrote at the end of his letter,” said Katya, “his very last message to the family was that we should all read and forever remember Revelation 2:10—here’s what I require of you, that you should ‘be faithful unto death.’”

Seventy years later, not only did Katya clearly recall her grandfather’s final words, she told us that other people in her community still approach her on the street to remember her pastor grandfather, to tell her how much they admired him, and to thank Katya and her family for his example of faith that is still honored and talked about all these years later.

As Katya finished her story, I watched her daughter and son-in-law get up and embrace her. Her daughter said, “Oh, Mama, we never knew all that.” The grandchildren crowded around to hug Katya’s neck and kiss her cheeks and tell her how brave she was as a little girl.

Being a part of that special family scene was an especially holy moment for me. I felt that I had just witnessed the genealogy of faith that Katya’s grandfather had provided for her seventy years earlier. It was now being passed on to strengthen the faith in that family’s fourth and fifth generations.

The Moscow airport didn’t feel any warmer when I left the city than it had when I arrived. Most of the Russians I passed still had that tired, down-trodden look. They still lowered their gaze and avoided eye contact.

But my own heart was encouraged. I don’t know that I would have been able to explain why at the time. Looking back now, I know that my time in Russia—and my time with the believers that I had met—had changed me. Or, at least, my experiences there had started to change me.

I realized that it would take a lifetime to process what I had heard, to connect the dots, and even to begin to understand what I had learned. I had started my trip with a long list of carefully-formulated questions that I intended to ask. By the time I met Dmitri—my fifth interview—I realized that my questions were not the key to what I was seeking.

I wouldn’t find the truth I was searching for in the simple, direct responses to my precisely-worded questions. The wisdom, the guidance, and the insights had come beautifully gift-wrapped in layers of narrative and personal stories that believers had shared with me before and after I asked my questions.

I had arrived in Moscow with great anticipation and much uncertainty.

I left feeling sure of one thing: that I was on the right track, even as I realized that my journey had just begun.

My next stop was the Ukraine, a place that would turn out to be as different from Russia as spring is from winter.