Installation

While attending college and seminary, I worked in tech support. Since then I've fallen far behind on the technology curve, but the word “installation” is still more associated in my mind with software and hardware than with church. And so, as I prepared for my installation as pastor here in Novosibirsk, I began to reflect on what the church is doing when it publicly acknowledges a new call in this way.

And I've come to the conclusion that I certainly wouldn't call it “installing.”* In our current usage, installation usually relates to a thing (OpenOffice, a headlight, new carpeting) not a person. And if you look at the roots of the word, it is clear that the reference is to putting something into a specific place. I do not suppose that many pastors would much like to be “in-stalled;” even in rural places no one wants to feel like they've been put into cramped quarters for cattle. The “stall” root also brings to mind other negative connotations, for example a car that has broken down and is going nowhere...

While “installation” is a word with many mechanical associations, what the church is trying to do, I hope, is something more organic. To a degree this is reflected in the way “installation” is said in the church in Russian: введение в должность (vvedenie v dolzhnost'). The first two words are translated as “introduction to,” implying a beginning, a making of new acquaintances, and movement from the outside in. The next word means “appointment” or “official capacity,” but here, too, the root indicates something more than simply a job, it is an “obligation” or “duty.”

For me this new call to Siberia has nothing to do with getting “plugged in” like some new memory module for increased performance. Instead “installation” is a movement towards carrying out a set of holy duties in relationship to the community of faith. In my particular case, in being called to the pastor in Novosibirsk I've been given a fragile gift – a small and rather isolated congregation that is becoming aware of the transitions it is going through now and are yet to come. We do not have a computer for new software or a car for new parts or a building where new carpet would be appropriate. Instead, we have only the seed of faith, our relationships with one another, and our hope that the Spirit will stir new life within us for the good of our neighbors.

Here are a few pictures from the celebration of our new relationship, our faith and our hope.

In the center is a friend of the congregation, Brother Corrado from the Franciscan monastery. To his right is Andrey Filiptsov, my former student and pastor in Tomsk. In the first row is Svetlana, a Bible study leader in the congregation and soon to be a seminarian.  

With the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Urals, Siberia and Far East, Otto Schaude.

Observation and Action

While teaching at the seminary outside of St. Petersburg, I would frequently tell students that after they receive, they will need to spend a lot of time observing - the congregation's inner dynamics and spiritual values, the hidden conflicts as well as the hidden potential for growth. I thought that I was giving them good advice that could easily be applied to their situations in congregations. I did not realize just how difficult it would be to be patient....and I've only been here three weeks! Did I mention that I told the students that this applied to their first year?

In some ways the congregation in Novosibirsk is ready for change. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my predecessors did much to lay the groundwork for change; when I visited the congregation in May, the council decided that we would take the big step of starting to worship in Russian this fall. While I'm sure it will take a number of months for everyone to get used to this new arrangement, it is clear that they're making their best effort. I'm especially impressed by the congregation's older members, the ones that really want the German language to be a part of their spiritual life. These older women (and they are all women) could easily say - “I can read my prayers at home in German instead of taking taking a hour or two to ride on two or three buses in order to get to church. I've had enough of this.” Or, instead, they could still come to the prayer house because of the role it played in their past, but could engage (either actively or passively) in resisting the move into Russian. For example, they could show their resistance simply by saying, “We're old, and we can't see very well.  We're not even going to try to follow the worship service.”  They wouldn't even be making excuses, they'd be telling the truth! Instead, though, they search for the words and the notes that are still unfamiliar to them. Their effort really impresses me and witnesses to the fact that their faith and being a part of the worshiping community are more important to them than questions of language or ethnicity.

That said it really will take a lot of time to change the way folks think about the church and their participation in it. Time will need to go by before they are willing to respond to my offers to help them in their gardens, to come over for tea and fellowship, or to attend Bible study. A large part of me wants to be doing these and other new things (more Christian education, congregational involvement in social justice issues, talking with the council about the stewardship of our resources, getting a team together for visits to the sick and the homebound, etc.) in order to feel useful. But I need to keep reminding myself that at this point my feelings of usefulness are not what is most important. Instead, I need to allow time for relationships to develop, and that will do much to improve the likelihood for success of new ministries.

The congregation's prayer house before the congregation arrives

In the meantime, I'm trying to fulfill my need to feel useful in other ways, outside of the official boundaries of the congregation. Besides learning my way around Novosibirsk (you can find a few street scenes below), I'm also trying to develop as many contacts as possible outside of the congregation. Since community and special interest groups are significantly fewer here than in the U.S., I cannot necessarily start with those things I already know or am good at, but instead must try to determine what the needs are here and what efforts are already being made. As it turns out, in a country where new infection rates remain among the highest in the world, HIV prevention is a priority. Later in the week I'll be attending a roundtable discussion to see about participating in an intensive new testing effort in October and November.  

Next week I'll let you know more about how the roundtable went, as well as say a few words and provide a few pictures from my official installation service this coming Sunday. Until then, here are a few pictures from around the city.

One of my favorite scenes in Russia - playing chess in the park. I'm glad to see that they do it in Siberia, too.

This is the "Composer's House" in Novosibirsk. I think it is cool that there is a building specially dedicated for composers to meet and work.

The fountain in front of the Russian Academy of Sciences of library where I do research for my dissertation when I have time.

A typical street scene in the center of Novosibirsk - the enormous, Soviet-era "Theater of Ballet and Opera" is the background while a tram makes its way down the street at about the same speed as pedestrians. On the right is a building under construction.

A picture of the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin, at the subway station named in his honor.

Ascension Cathedral. Russian Orthodox Church.

Worship in Siberia - a slowly evolving tradition

I prefer to keep my blog entries colorful and relatively short. This one, though, will need to be a little longer, and at the moment has no illustrations. Moreover, it is probably of interest mostly to those for whom liturgy and forms of worship are important topics.

Well, how's that for "selling" this blog entry? :)  I simply want to say that what I'm posting today is certainly not typical.

And, so, the reason I am writing this is in order to take a "snapshot" of congregational life as it has evolved here over the past century, in particular since it is clear that the congregation is on the verge of making a significant shift in its worship practice.

In order to understand what the congregation has been doing when it meets, it is important to know where they've come from. And where they've come from has been, primarily, ethnic minorities (e.g., Finns and, in my case, Germans) in the Russian Empire. Despite having been in Russia for many decades or even multiple centuries, Lutheran congregations as a rule were made to worship in the traditional language of their people. That means that Lutherans in Novosibirsk had no strong tradition of church life in the language that all had in common - Russian. The repression of the church that started after the Bolshevik Revolution led to the closing of all the churches, but when large numbers of ethnic minorities were deported to Siberia in the late 1930s and early 40s, underground congregations began to gather again. German-speaking Lutherans in Novosibirsk, for example, were gathering secretly by 1941 and openly by the early 1960s. After their official recognition by the Soviet state, they revived an intensely pious spirituality that included at least three weekly meetings, with much of both Saturday and Sunday dedicated to church. At first they had an educated pastor in their midst, but later the congregation was run by a group of elders, in particular one to three "brothers" whom the congregation acknowledged as their leaders. As the brothers grew older, they passed on leadership to the next generation. By this time, though, the piety of the congregation's leaders was to a large degree focused on preserving the heritage of the past rather than bringing the congregation into the modern world and keeping its worship accessible to those who knew neither German nor the "brother" traditions.  By the 2000s, then, while a large number of Russian Lutheran churches had updated their liturgical traditions and moved into Russian-language worship, the congregation in Novosibirsk remained relatively isolated from these developments. The general attitude was that as much from the past as possible much be preserved, even though many of the now elderly congregation members lacked the physical strength to make the hour + trip to church more than once a week.

All that does a bit to explain the way worship looked when I arrived there my first Sunday, the 2nd of September. That day, we had agreed that the German-language liturgy would be led, for the most part, by Sister Emilya, a faithful 85 year-old member of the congregation. But before the liturgy actually began at 11.00, the older women who had begun to gather at 10.15 or so started to sing hymns. This was an adaption of the Saturday meetings the congregation had in the past, which (as I understand it) were very much focused on singing. The women sang from two of the three hymnbooks they have, always a cappella, the hymnbooks having no notation. The largest and oldest hymnal, the German Volga Songbook, is apparently what was primarily used at the beginning of the century and then throughout the Soviet Period. In addition, they have two small, modern hymnals of which I do not know the origin (only that they are not the modern, official state-church hymnals used in other places). As I sat there an observed the way that the hymns were chosen, I was not sure whether to be puzzled, disturbed or amused; whenever we finished signing a hymn, there was always some debate about what would be sung next. Now I've been in Russia long enough to know that both the language itself and the manner of expression make it seem like people are expressing themselves in rude ways, and this not not usually true. However, it seems like the way they choose the hymns is likely to cause some hard feelings, even among these thick-skinned women; some suggestions were rejected for some reason (e.g., wrong time of the church year), but sometimes suggestions were simply ignored, and whoever felt they had the authority to decide or the guts to start signing first was the “winner.” 

At 11 o'clock, when the liturgy officially began, Sister Emilia stood up in front of the congregation and led opening prayers, a hymn of praise and the Psalm of the day more or less as they exist in our current, Russian liturgy. After this the congregation recited the confession of sins in unison (again, without any printed materials to read from - all the older members know it all by heart), though it seems that there were no words of absolution (unless I missed it – since everything was in German, I was always sort of guessing). Then we sang a song a had a reading from Scripture. After this we had the Lord's Prayer, a concluding prayer and the blessing. In short, this was basically a full worship service without a sermon or Holy Communion. Afterwords, though, the church council president got up and read a 19th century sermon. This sermon was from a book that acted as the sermon book for very many Lutheran congregations during that time when they were without pastors. After that sermon, I was given a chance to preach, after which we sang a Russian hymn. Except for my part here, I think that this "middle" part of the service is what reflects what traditional Siberian congregations would do on Sunday mornings. 

But we still had another whole part of the liturgy left to go. After the Russian hymn, sister Emilia led the “prayers of the people;” these prayers had a formal, general introduction, “let us pray for...” and then almost everyone got on their knees (a few remained standing) and prayed in a very interesting way – each person prayed aloud in a half-whisper in either German or Russian. It was a bit like prayer in a charismatic church insofar as everyone was speaking at the same time, though everyone was speaking in a language that they, at least, understood. After that we said the Lord's Prayer again, sang another song, and then I gave a blessing to the congregation. Again, with the exception of my blessing at the end, this part of the worship service is also clearly left from the old tradition, and was either from another day (Wednesday) or perhaps reflects some of what would happen on Sunday afternoons. 

And so - that's where we were at the beginning of September. After church, the council said that we would move into Russian language worship next week, which we did. I'll write something (shorter!) on that in a week or two. First, though (in the coming days) I'll write a bit more about the Siberian context in which I am serving. 

Another Russia

After my first 10 days in Siberia it is clear that I've moved not only to a different city and a different climate, I've also made a significant change in culture.

On the one hand it seems that I've traveled backwards in time as I moved east; there are aspects of life in the city that seem to have disappeared from the bigger cities in European Russia. One example – there are probably 50 people between my apartment and the nearest subway station 5 minutes away who spend their days on the street selling their garden vegetables, the mushrooms they've collected, or (if they are really desperate for cash) nick-knacks from around the house (in that last category is a woman who sits near my apartment and attempts to sell, among other things, an old computer keyboard and a single, warn-out shoe.)

The flower sellers are the most photogenic!

Another example would be the prominence of Soviet-era buildings in the city. This trait is especially clear if one is driving or riding on the bus, since the city is organized around a series of squares...that are actually circles – roads flow out of the circle like spokes on a wheel, and lining the diameter of the circle is a row of impressive “stalinki”. “Stalinki” were the apartment buildings built during Stalin's rule and almost all have a similar look about them (you can see one particularly colorful example below), and are highly valued by the people here because they are well-built and comfortable (compared to the later Soviet apartment buildings). 

A poorly maintained, but still in-its-own-way-impressive "Stalinka" in Novosibirsk.

St. Petersburg has plenty of old buildings, too, but those old building in the center of the city might be 18^th, 19^th or early 20^th century. In other parts of the city (the residential regions), you'll find many more buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s, including the infamous “khrushchevki” (named after Nikita Khrushchev, who decided to build cheaper residential buildings in order to help with the housing shortage in the Soviet Union.)

This postcard says - "A Khrushchevka - Khrushchev saw buildings for refugees in America
 and decided to build the same kind for us in Russia."

Novosibirsk is too young for old buildings. By the standards of European Russia (Novgorod, the first city I lived in, is at least 1150 years old), it is just a baby. Novosibirsk's development is tied with the rise of trade and railroad in this region a little over 100 years ago. Yet, you don't get the feeling here that Novosibirsk is behind St. Petersburg in terms of its development; instead, it feels like they are on different paths. One gets the impression that Siberians benefit, to a degree at least, from being far away from the seats of power. I'm reminded of that great line from “Fiddler on the Roof,” when the Rabbi indicates what would be a proper blessing for the Tsar: “May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!” While distance from the capital means less access to some of the resources that are offered there, one gets the impression that this area suffers less from bureaucratic pressure of Moscow and from the “brain drain” affecting western Russia. Overall (and, I must admit, maybe it is just the beautiful fall weather that creates this impression) there seems to be a greater degree of calm here; people seem less stressed out and, therefore, less aggressive. If this turns out to be true, this will be a great help in my life here.


These are some of my first impressions, and perhaps it will turn out that they are way off target. Probably the winter will give a more realistic impression of what life in Siberia is really like. In the meantime, a few pictures:

Another example of feeling like I've stepped back in time - "Montana Jeans" and "Montana Coffee" have disappeared from St. Petersburg, but they were here to welcome me in Siberia. 

The sign in the foreground is all over the city - inside the heart are the letters Новосибирск (Novosibirsk). In the background is a large sign on top of a building on the other side of the street. It's a leftover from the Soviet era, and the store name was дружба ("friendship.")

There are birch and berry-heavy rowanberry trees all over the city.

And pine and cedar trees on the banks of the "Ob Sea," the large reservoir on the Ob river that flows through the city.

A decade in Russia and a new beginning

It was on the 1^st of September 2001 that I arrived in St. Petersburg to begin my year-long internship as a part of the ELCA Horizon Program. I was excited; I was returning to the country I had fallen in love with while a student at St. Olaf, and I would be contributing to the development of the Lutheran church as it re-emerged after 70 years of repression. It would be just one year, but I was aiming to make the most of it – to meet the other interns, to develop good relationships with my supervisors (one from the ELCA and another from Germany), and to be of use in the congregations (first in St. Petersburg and then in Novgorod).

Leading Worship in Novgorod. 2002.

Well, that single year commitment to the church in Russia has now stretched in to its second decade. So much has changed; both at St. Nikolai's in Novgorod and at the Novosaratovka Seminary, there were many moments that inspired and many others that brought disappointment. And now, as I start a new ministry as a pastor in Novosibirsk, I've decided to be more deliberate about publicly reflecting on the life of the church in this country. When I was located in European Russia, I at least had the illusion of being close to the West; now that I'm in Siberia, it is clear that I am far, far away.

Over the next few months, I hope publish updates here no less frequently than once a week. I'm sure that this discipline will give me the chance to pause and get a bit of perspective, while I hope that it will give you a window into life on the other side of the planet.  

Autumn Notes on Summer Impressions

While usually my time in the United States is focused on talking with congregations about ministry in Russia, this time around I found myself being more alert to some of the specific traits of my home country that I have not always appreciated. While I make no claims to any degree of depth here, a few observations: 

• Public drinking fountains are great. Why buy bottled water?
• Chicago is impressive; NYC – perhaps more so.
• At the same time, for this rural boy at least, the drive between Havre and Lewistown through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana was perhaps even more impressive than the cities.
• The lack of sidewalks in many urban and suburban areas perplexes me
• Iowa should grow more tomatoes (even at the expenses of growing less corn)
• I think being in Minnesota in the summer is more difficult than being in Russia in the winter. 
• Ben and Jerry's is actually too sweet for my taste.
• I'm thankful that I had the discipline not to even touch a few of those addictive food (Doritos and Oreos primarily) that I made not have a chance to eat again for three years.

Besides that, a few things about family:

• My grandparents are taking full advantage of life even at their advanced age. I'm happy for them and find that they are a great example. 
• It was really good to dedicated a few days time simply to spend with siblings and nieces/nephews this time around. I miss them.

And then, about the trip to and from the U.S.

• After having a couple of significant layovers in the airport in Amsterdam, Natasha thinks that the Netherlands might just be the best country in the world to live in. It seems that everything there is focused on the comfort and happiness of travelers, and it was really a treat to spend some hours there.
• My flight took me through Munich as well; free coffee and newspapers there means that I feel a special connection to Bavarians.