Next year, Slavic Gospel Association [UK] will celebrate its 70th birthday. In 1950, Peter Deyneka, the founder of the mission in the USA some 13 years earlier, visited churches in the south of England. Believers caught the vision for reaching Slavic peoples for Christ and the UK branch of SGA was formed in that year.
The initially small efforts to bring encouragement and help to Eastern European people displaced by the Second World War and living in camps in England, Germany and Austria, quickly blossomed. It then burgeoned into a ministry which took Christians through the Iron Curtain, and into situations where the churches were severely persecuted for their faithfulness to Christ and the gospel.
Training leaders
The need and heart cry of the churches was for the training of leaders and Bible teachers, as Communism had attempted to kill off the church by strangling the leadership.
As a result, in the mountains and forests of Romania, a secret training programme was commenced. That initiative, in a non-Slavic country placed geographically in the heart of Slavic ‘territory’, was to become the launchpad for SGA’s teaching and training ministry. Such training has been greatly used not only in many countries in Eastern Europe, but also in Central Asia. One of the striking features of evangelical church life in these regions is the persistent emphasis on church planting. SGA[UK], in its relatively short history, has been at the forefront of the drive to equip missionaries and evangelists for this vital, Bible-validated ministry.
In most Eastern European countries there are very large communities crying out for more ‘lights’ in the spiritual darkness. Our friends there and in Central Asia constantly remind us of great swathes of territory where the gospel has hardly penetrated. Some of these regions are to be found, not in the far-flung corners of our mission field, but virtually on our doorstep.
Take Poland, for example, where the vast majority of almost 2,500 municipalities [gminas in Polish] have no evangelical witness whatsoever. Despite striking progress in Moldova since the fall of Communism, thousands of villages remain bereft of any permanent gospel church. In Central Asia the picture is the same. Here not only are villages and outlying areas unevangelised, but also densely-populated districts of large cities. For example, Almaty, Kazakhstan, has a population in excess of 2 million. SGA (UK) wants to support the churches across the geographical spread of its ministry. For this reason a 70th Anniversary Project has been launched.
Evangelists and planters
The aim of the project is to support the financing of an additional 70 evangelists and church planters to enable them to reach into communities still untouched by the gospel – one for every year of the Mission’s ministry. Existing church leaders across Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been asked to identify suitable individuals to benefit from this funding, and to outline something of the pioneer ministry in which they will be involved. Of course, finance is only a part of the programme. The desire is that those who undertake sponsorship of these additional workers will also covenant to pray for them. For that reason, each worker will be asked to supply regular reports of their ministry, and to identify issues which particularly need prayer.
We believe that an increased volume of support will make an impact upon communities where there is still no gospel church. SGA’s long-established principle of helping the national churches to fulfil their God-given role in mission is effective for many reasons:
• Local missionaries know the culture and the communities well
• Locals often have already established contacts in the community, or ways of creating these, and they have the prayer backing of their local churches
• Locals do not need long periods of language study and practice
• Economically the support of a local missionary makes sense and is good stewardship, since it costs much less than sending and supporting one from the West.
We are commanded to pray that the Lord of the harvest will send workers into the harvest field. We implore you to do that. We know that in that ministry they need the practical support of fellow believers, who will invest financially in their labours, to the end that a great spiritual investment will be made for eternity.
