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The message to you from Pastor Anatoly in Kirov, Russia
"A Modern Book of Acts Story"

Before we were free to preach the gospel and celebrate Christian holidays in Russia, I served as a deacon in the Stavropol region (Caucasus area in southern Russia), in the small village of Inozemtsevo. I had a lovely wife named Olga, two sons and a beautiful daughter. Then something tragic happened.

In 1989, I lost my beloved wife and two sons in a fatal car accident. I couldn’t understand why it had happened to me, but when I prayed, God revealed to me that He was calling me into a special ministry and I would be able to dedicate my life to Him.

When I was married, I planned to take care of my family, bring up my children, and build a new house. But God had His own plans. It was time to live for Him, not myself. We have a tendency to focus on our own purpose in life. But when God took my most precious things from me, I didn’t have anything else on this earth for which to live. The desire of my heart became to live ONLY for God and to dedicate my whole life to Him.

A lot of changes took place at that time in our country. When communism fell, we had the opportunity to preach the gospel to those who came to our resort village. We would preach in parks and in places where people came to drink special water used for medicinal purposes.

We organized a group of people for evangelistic outreaches. Young people sang first to draw people and move their hearts to be open when the Word of God was preached. Usually 200 to 300 people gathered to listen. In the beginning people were very interested, because many were hearing about Jesus for the first time. Some argued because they had been taught atheism, and others rejected Him altogether. But many people were looking for God, so our conversations with them helped them find the truth. There just was not enough Christian literature for all the people who wanted it. Some people repented and began to attend our worship services, even though attending church was prohibited. Valia and Viktor Korshunov came to our area from the far northern region of Kirov. They came for health reasons, but it soon became clear that they were seeking God. They came from a city where there was not one believer. When they returned home they started sharing with their friends. Then they wrote and told us that there were many people who wanted to hear about Jesus. We prayed and decided to send four people to Kirov-Chepetsk, a city of over 100,00 people located in the Kirov region about 600 miles northeast of Moscow. I was one of the four.

We arrived to find many people waiting to hear the message of the gospel. Journalists and local TV stations even interviewed us many times, advertising our meetings. People came to talk to us about spiritual matters from early in the morning until late at night. This great spiritual hunger moved us, and we began to pray about how we could organize a church in the city. By the time we returned home ten days later, the very first church in Kirov-Chepetsk had been established.

After we left, the believers discovered they had a lot of questions they could not answer. There was no one to explain the Bible to them, so they sent a telegram asking us to come back. They needed us. We decided to organize a large team, including a choir, and go back to conduct a large evangelistic campaign. When we arrived, we discovered that meetings had been arranged for us in palaces of culture and schools. Many people repented and accepted the Lord.

I stayed to pastor the new church. We were given a place to meet that held eighty people, but so many wanted to attend that we quickly outgrew it. The first baptism ceremony was in June 1991. Thirty three new believers were baptized that day. We were allowed to meet in a palace of culture and the church continued to grow. The people needed to be taught and delivered from their ties with the past. They came into the church with their old ideas and experiences of past involvement in witchcraft, with psychics and with extrasensory perception. Through prayer many of them were set free. In the next four years the church grew to 400 people. I began to train the first converts to take over the leadership of the ministry. We also started to reach out to other cities and villages in the region. Within a few years there were 20 new congregations and only two pastors. Everyone was a young Christian! To meet this leadership crisis, we were able to conduct a Bible institute for 38 promising men. These men then became pastors of the new churches. After evangelistic campaigns in the city of Kirov, a city of 600,000 people, I felt called by God to move to Kirov to help build the church there. I left the church in Kirov-Chepetsk under the leadership of the first convert, Viktor Korshunov.

By this time I had remarried and had two young children. My new wife, Larissa, was a big help as we began to minister to people in Kirov. She started a ministry to the many state-run orphanages in our region. A small team of Christian young people was formed to travel to the orphanages conducting Bible classes. I continue to oversee all the young churches in the Kirov region and she assists me by training and encouraging the pastors' wives. There are now 33 church plants in our region. The biggest desire of my heart is to see people save for Christ, and not only to be saved but to continue to grow in Him, always have a hunger for God, and keep always pursuing Him.

God is always faithful, I always knew how weak I am and how strong and how big God is.