Dia-Logos Podcast - Ep 17 - Navigating Faith, Loss, and Unity in Siberia

Let's connect around the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent decades of modernization that's really shifted the spiritual landscape.

How has it shifted? If it has at all, Rico, shifted the spiritual landscape in that area, what are you seeing on the ground when you're there?

What we've experienced, especially in the early 90s, was that due to the vacuum created by communism, Russia was like a magnet for anything spiritual.

And so many groups moved into Russia and tried to bring the Russians anything from Russia.

from the gospel all the way through to a lot of Eastern nonsense.

And people were so eager just to learn more and to look for answers.

So they were...

there were mass evangelistic events.

Billy Graham had stadiums full of people and other preachers from the West.

They would have very big reception.

And a lot of small churches grew quite quickly, were established and started growing bigger.

But as time went on, we saw that in Russia, there was trying to move towards democracy.

uh materialism really started to take a hold and um because of the iron curtain falling and people seeing how the west was living they started looking more towards finance and money and job security as reasons for for for success and self-fulfillment so we have many churches in the far east that started quickly.

But we've seen that in the last couple of years, even in the rural areas where people are much more open than in the bigger cities, Ed is...

Harder for people now to come to a point where they open themselves for the gospel and come to a point of repentance.