Mark's Blog

LST Team in Moscow

In the euphoria and surprise of the collapse of Soviet domination, Scott Lambert and some Pepperdine students approached us in the fall of 1990 about sending a team to Russia. We said Yes, let’s try, so I made inquiries and found a brother in Alabama that was arranging visas into Russia.

I visited Moscow in early 1991 to see if LST could be a part of the new story being written there. The stores still had nothing in them—including GUM, the large shopping center on Red Square. Lenin’s body was still in the mausoleum. We carried pencils, pens, and cheap calculators to tip people with for their services. People were thrilled to eat bananas, they took two scoops of ice cream on their cones because they could, and they still only had their version of Tang in their vending machines.  Not much had changed in the few weeks since their doors had opened wider, but the people were open and eager to hear what Christians—and everyone else—were saying to them.

Just a humorous aside:  our Alabama brother got bent out of shape by the visa picture of one young man on the Pepperdine team, who had longer hair and what appeared to be an ear ring—a clash of Alabama and California church cultures.  Fortunately, we determined that the supposed earring was really just large ear lobes and the student agreed to cut his hair, so we were able to keep him on the team and get him a visa.

That first year 1991, LST sent seven Pepperdine students, accompanied by the campus minister Scott and Kim Lambert, along with four Oklahoma Christian students—and Philip Woodward, our 16-year-old son, who had done LST virtually every year of his life with us and was eager to be out on his own. What a way to start!

We made an agreement with a local school to work after classes each day. In exchange we brought them basketballs and playground equipment.  Because there were no grocery stores recognizable to us, hardly any local restaurants, the team ate most of their meals at the old soviet-style hotel where we stayed—where we had the same dinner every day for the entire six weeks.  Well, not quite the same! The first few days, they served  us caviar with each meal, but very few of the workers liked it, so they quit eventually.

We had lots of readers—and they were very open to the Word! Many had never read the Bible and had only the information about Christianity that the Communist Party had fed them . Most had never met Americans and were very curious about the west—for better or for worse.

Because of the lack of variety in our hotel meals, the team did often go to the one McDonalds that was opened in Moscow. You could get a Big Mac, fries and a milkshake for about 19 cents,  so it was a pretty good deal! We had to be careful, however, because our Russian readers could not afford to go there with us!

Although there were people who had been baptized, there was no regular meeting of churches of Christ in Moscow prior to our team’s arrival. We made arrangements with the school to use their auditorium on Sundays and began meeting regularly as a church in the city. I remember preaching through a translator on the first Sunday, but what really stands out is the request of the Russian Christians to video the service, so they could remember what to do when we were gone.

That church continued to meet until it was subsumed into the thriving work which still continues in Moscow,  started by Tim Brinley and Gary Jackson a few years later.

The Japanese Miracle

Oklahoma Christian University had had a long relationship with churches of Christ in Japan. Through that connection two former LST workers John and Kelly Osborne took jobs teaching English in public schools there for a couple of years. During that time, they talked with the church in Mito, Japan, about hosting an LST team.

The Japanese leaders were very cautious though and were not easily convinced that Americans could really help their aging and struggling churches.  Finally, in 1992, the church in Mito, Japan, issued an invitation to LST to send just one team—only four people and only for four weeks—that’s all.

Although excited about the prospects, it did present us with a dilemma:  do we continue to start with the story of Jesus in Luke in a country that is totally non-Christian?? After a lot of struggle, prayer, and conversation, the conclusion was that God had blessed this approach for 12 years, so let’s not change it now. We still believed the power was in the living Word!

Joe and Glenda Watson agreed to take two Pepperdine students and do this pilot project, knowing that no one had ever done anything like this in Japan before.

God did His work: 75 Japanese people signed up to practice English and read the Bible with our team. Fifty of them continued after the team left, reading with the Osbornes and other American Christians in the area.  In the first year, 12 of these Readers were baptized—the most baptisms that the Japanese Christians had seen in many years.  This is why the Mito preacher, brother Suzuki described the first LST project as a “Japanese miracle!”

Japan has continued to be a place where LST has sent many workers. We have worked with seventeen different Japanese churches, encouraging the work in a place where most people do not know Jesus at all!

Next: The 90s – Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa!