Russia Field Purpose Statement: We are called to cultivate an Evangelical missionary church movement in key cities and regions of Russia and among their under-reached peoples. The Alliance majored in church planting in the southern-most provinces of European Russia from 1993-2003. The group of eleven churches that organized the Evangelical Christian Missionary Union in 1994 has now grown into a family of 60 churches. As well, during that first decade, a small Bible school was developed into an accredited Christian University, a camp facility was purchased and developed into a year-round, self-sufficient ministry, and evangelistic and church-planting ministries were carried out among two unreached non-Russian people groups. In all, over 3000 new believers were baptized in that decade as a result of these ministries.
Together with leaders of these new churches, C&MA missionaries recognized that similar, regionally-based church planting ministries had risen up in other areas of the country. Many of the founders and key leaders of these groups were invited to study in a Master’s degree program sponsored by Alliance Theological Seminary. As a result, they began to think of their ministries as part of a larger movement. As these new groups gained a vision for planting churches that impact the new, post-Soviet culture emerging in Russia’s major cities, the C&MA moved into partnership with three additional of these groups, beyond the ECMU.
Our purpose in the second decade of Alliance work in Russia is to spearhead creative outreach and church planting in the country’s key cities, as well as to see these churches fulfill their calling to take the Gospel across Russia and beyond Russia. We are seeing a broad movement of missionary churches raised up in this country – churches that are sending their own across town, across cultural boundaries, and now across borders, to touch lives with the Gospel of Christ.
