Past, Present and Future

This month I've come face to face with questions of the past, present and future of our church.

Pastor Gernot Friedrich on one
of his trips to the USSR.
Picture from a recent feature
 in the German magazine Spiegel. 

Pastor Friedrich, holding his book,
during his visit to Novosibirsk.

The past came alive to me when our congregation in Novosibirsk had the privilege of welcoming back an old friend, Pastor Gernot Friedrich. Pastor Friedrich is a man with a very adventurous spirit. He has visited dozens of countries and learned a number of languages...but not just for the sake of his own entertainment. In fact, Pastor Friedich was one of the rare people from the West (if one can consider East Germany to be the West!) who had the gall to travel illegally in the former Soviet Union, making friends and visiting Christian congregations along the way. He wrote a book about his adventures called “Through the Soviet Union with a Bible and a Camera;” I had enjoyed reading this book a few years ago...but I was very surprised when he showed up once again in Novosibirsk! It was from him that I learned that he continues to make trips here every other year; he no longer has to sneak Bibles in through customs, but he still brings spiritual (sermons, postcards, home visits, his wonderful singing voice) and material (his offerings helped the congregation install energy-efficient windows a few years ago) support from Germany. Pastor Friedrich knows about the “good old days” of the congregation, when the prayer house would be overflowing with brothers and sisters in Christ, united around their German identity and their Lutheran faith. His faithfulness even in times of drought, like now, is an important sign for the congregation not to lose hope, and not to find value only in being successful in the ways they imagine that from the past. Gernot also by his example continues to live in the present – he went with the new pastor in Novosibirsk to the banya, for example, and after Russia he be traveling on to other new adventures.

The students picked questions at random from each of
the 5 major disciplines taught at the Seminary. They then
had 40 minutes to prepare their answers, which they
presented to us orally.

I was touched to receive a "teacher trophy" from the
students, who also sang a song. 

Then, just last week, I had the opportunity to think about the past, present and future all in a very short time and in one place – Novosaratovka, the Theological Seminary where I worked for most of 8 years. I was invited by the ELCUSFE to go there to take part in the graduation exams of the full-time students. I knew these students well, and had maintained contact with a number of them. The students and staff at the seminary had a very hard year – it was the first year of an experiment with one-course-at-a-time curriculum, developed both with the hope of expanding the potential for participation in the seminary's educational program as well as being the result of simply having too few full-time teachers. Together with the on-going financial and leadership challenges the church faces, it is not quite certain what lies ahead for the seminary – more of this experiment? A different experiment? A pause in educational plans? But for the students (all of whom passed their exams, by the way), there is the burning question of the present – the beginning of their internships. When they finish, they will continue to carry the church towards its future by taking on important leadership positions, as have seminary graduates in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Odessa and Astana, Tblisi and Baku, and to serve as faithful pastors to their flocks throughout the former Soviet Union. Knowing what these graduates have done and will continue to do, I will certainly be an advocate for theological education in this church. How or whether this will be related to Novosaratovka I do not know, but I am convinced that Lutherans in this part of the world will continue to need educated lay and ordained ministers, and I hope that solutions can be found for the financial and leadership problems currently being faced.    

Siberia as Urban Space

In Russia every large urban center finds a day, usually in the summer, to celebrate their “city day.” Novosibirsk's was this past weekend.

Founded in 1893 as “Novo-nikolaevsk” (“novo” meaning “new” and “nikolaevsk” in honor of Tsar Nikolai II), it must have been hard to imagine at that time that the city had the potential to grow into Siberia's largest city. To the north (Tomsk), south (Barnaul), west (Tobolsk, Omsk) and east (Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk) were cites more than a century old that already functioned as trading and cultural centers for the vast region. Novo-nikolaevsk had really only one reason to be established – to serve as a base for building the railroad bridge across the Ob River. This, apparently, was one of the tricker parts of the building of the Trans-Siberian, and as the bridge was being built it became clear that the location of the settlement provided a number of serious strategic advantages for commerce and transportation.

The city grew quickly in the pre-Revolutionary years, but it did not earn its place as the region's unofficial capital until after World War II. Today the city is a large and growing metropolis of more than a million and a half people, but at the same time it is still in some sense seeking its identity. A recent article I read "Waif-cities" (“Goroda-besprizorniki.”A. Kozmin, S. Chernyshov, A. Popov. Ekspert.#24 (336). 18-24.06.2012. 10-18) put it this way: “Novosibirsk, born almost 120 years ago...quickly turned into a large trading center thanks to its advantageous geographical position. During [World War II] the city gained its industrial identity as a result of factories being evacuated from the European part of the country. Then Academgorodok,” one of the Soviet Union's most significant centers of scientific research, “was built there... but despite all these obvious advantages, there is still no true synergy between these parts of the city, they have been 'sewn together' by history in a chaotic way.”

The state of cities in Siberia is quite important for the fortunes of the territory as a whole, despite the fact that a significant amount of the region's vast mineral resources are located in very isolated areas. Approximately 70% of the population of our state is urban; this is consistent with the rest of Siberia... and urbanization continues. Yet, few of the cities have actually planned well for the changes that have faced them in the past two decades; instead, they've been busy “putting out fires.” Despite a dramatically improved economic situation, there are whole aspects of life that are difficult even to consider (e.g., the state of apartment buildings built in the 1950s-80s), though these problems will only increase. In the meantime the long-term problems of city development affect people on a daily level. To quote from the article again: “morning for a resident of any large Siberian city is full of inconveniences. Leaving his apartment building, the city dweller immediately falls... into infrastructure hell. He has a choice – either to go to work on public transport that is so overcrowded that to he  must use force to push his way through, or else to go in his car and inevitably stand in traffic jams for an hour or two. Just outside of his apartment door he runs into the "charms" of utility companies, Soviet clinics, dying factories, run-down parks and dozens of other urban problems, all of which make it impossible to feel comfortable. At the same time the official press turns out a stream of positive information – about constant road repair, building new bridges and interchanges, opening up new hospitals and parks. But from a subjective point of view it seems that the problems of cities are not being solved in a systematic way. And the government, distracted by impressive, but isolated projects, is not capable of finding real, serious solutions.”

One local architect, Tatyana Taychenacheva, says that the problem is that “we do not have a clear definition of a contemporary city.” This is in contrast to the “subjective feeling that we get from visiting, say, European cities – a person feels comfortable there on an subconscious level.” As the article notes “the economic growth of the 2000s did not bring about an equivalent growth in the level and standard of living...The expectation of people have risen together with their incomes, but their places of living (cities, towns, villages) have almost not changed at all. They still fail meet contemporary demands either in terms of their infrastructure or in terms of the quality of services. The result – a stable migratory pattern to the western part of Russia and to places abroad.” 

This post is getting rather too long, but I hope that it does a bit to explain the context in which I am working...and I cannot help but wonder, perhaps in the case of Novosibirsk, some of its problems could be solved by considering its origin. It was founded in order to build a bridge. If Novosibirsk, located directly in the east/west geographic center of the country, could be the bridge city today, it would be a meeting point for Russia's neighbors from relatively near-by Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan and Central Asia while still being a part of Russia's (mostly) European culture. Of course it is my hope that our churches, too, might make a positive contribution to this bridge-building work between cultures as well as providing a moral voice that calls for the protection of the most vulnerable as new ways of development are sought.  

Russia Day

The paradoxical nature of Russia was well-captured in the
recent art exhibit "Rodina" ("Motherland,") which opened
at the end of May after twice being banned.

It is appropriate that the holiday named "Russia Day" is one that provokes ambivalent or even paradoxical reactions among those who live in the nation for which the holiday was named. It couldn't really be Russia Day otherwise.


While June 12 was never officially "Independence Day," that is what many people called it for a number of years. And they asked themselves - "Independence? From what? From whom? Wasn't it better to be together (even with tension) than to 'enjoy' the kind of 'independence' we have now?"



The images above contrast various aspects of society
and culture today and in Russian history.

And now, more than 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, on a day that was intended to invoke national pride and be a signal of a new way of organizing society, some opposition leaders and ordinary citizens are being harassed just because they want to make their voices heard. On the other hand the country is working hard on many fronts to improve its image and the standard of living of its citizens. There are many, many ways in which Russians can now truly celebrate independence.

Paradox exists both on the level of society as a whole and on the level of interactions between individuals. I've frequently been surprised here both by the way upstanding people could be openly aggressive and offensive, while I've had some of my most interesting (and sometimes quite intellectually and spiritually challenging) conversations with those are drunk or who live a life of crime.




A fire blazed on the upper levels of one
of Novosibirsk's most modern
buildings...while a Soviet-era firetruck
 stands by helplessly.

The fact that this country is full of paradox is why I was attracted to it from the beginning. Russia provides no simple answers. In fact, it is much better at supplying no answers at all, but instead dwelling on the "eternal questions" - "Who is to blame?" "What is to be done?"
Because of this, very little is settled and stable here. As a consequence few people experience a true and deep happiness. Even as a guest in this country, I am not immune to this situation. And, of course, Russia's complicated past and paradoxical present affect the life of the Lutheran church here as well. We as a church still do not“fit in” in so many ways, and it sometimes feels like Lutheranism could fall between the cracks of all of Russia's contradictions.


Yet, maybe we don't need to fit in exactly. Maybe it is enough to share a love for the questions and to avoid the easy answers. We might not be happy, but we are authentic. And true to life, with all its paradoxes.

That is what I will be celebrating as this “Russia Day” draws to a close here in Siberia.



Even after living here more than a decade,
I am sometimes confused by the
things that I see. This picture is
from my neighborhood.



If you look very closely at the picture with
the car parts, you'll see this church
 in the background.

May Flowers

In my last blog post I promised to provide pictures of May flowers. I've been suprised to see here in Siberia how much time and energy people put into growing tulips, narcissus,  etc. even in the public courtyards that are otherwise simply bare ground, weeds or worse. Perhaps in this way they compensate for the harshness of the winter. In any case I know that observing their efforts to cultive beauty despite real challenges (social and climactic (!) conditions) is one of the things that brings me happiness. The first two pictures are from outside our church building.