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Years of labor and lies
In Latvia’s capital, Riga, Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag is easier to spot than Latvia’s own banner of carmine red and white.
On a Sunday afternoon, young men wrapped in Ukrainian flags walked the cobblestone streets of Riga’s old town, near the Museum of the Occupation, asking tourists for donations to help refugees.
A few blocks away, five Christians gathered around a table in a fifth-floor apartment for Sunday worship. Minister Victor Barviks led songs in Latvian and offered prayers for the Lord’s Supper. Others, including Agra Vāvere in Ogre, joined the service via Zoom.
Ivars Landorfs, 81, has been a part of the small Church of Christ for at least two decades. As a child, he spent time in Siberia on a collective farm with his family. The backbreaking work wasn’t the worst part of it, he said. It was the lies — the constant lies he heard that things were going to get better, that prosperity was on the way.
“In the Bible, private property … it is holy,” Landorfs said, mustering as much English as he could rather than asking Barviks to translate. “I am Christian (because) I like honest people, not liars!”
Two of the five at the Sunday table, Ēriks and Inguna Rozalinskis, were formerly part of a Pentecostal church and are learning about Churches of Christ. Inguna had family among Latvia’s intelligentsia — dentists, engineers and physicians. They were deported in 1949. The Soviets killed Ēriks’ great-grandfather, he said, and one of his grandmothers died in Russia.
“If they come to Latvia,” Ēriks said of the Russians, “they’re gonna get their nose broken!”
Landorfs wasn’t as confident. He remembers the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Though they ultimately withdrew, the Soviets fought for 10 years. About 2 million Afghan civilians died.
Not ‘if’ but ‘when’
To Latvia’s north, the former Soviet nation of Estonia also shares an eastern border with Russia — and Churches of Christ there share the concerns of their brothers and sisters to the south.
“For Estonians, it has never been a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ about a war or a threat to their freedom,” said Hope Goode, a U.S. Christian who works with a congregation in Tartu, about 35 miles west of the Russian border. She’s part of a team that graduated from Sunset International Bible Institute in Texas. Like Agra Vāvere in Latvia, Estonian Christians bear no ill will toward Russians, Goode said.
“In our spring countrywide church retreat, it was beautiful to see Ukrainians, Russians, Estonians, Americans and one Egyptian all worshiping together,” she said.
Unlike Ukraine, the Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The political and military alliance has 32 members, including the U.S. Article 5 of the treaty states that an attack on one NATO member is considered to be an attack on them all. A Russian incursion into the Baltics could result in a disastrous global war.
NATO member Germany is sending troops and tanks to Lithuania — the country’s first deployment outside its borders since World War II. And Western European countries are building factories and moving workers to the region, said Ilia Amosov, who ministers for the Klaipeda Church of Christ on Lithuania’s Baltic Sea coast.
“I personally do not think that Putin wants to invade the Baltics,” Amosov said, “and I hope I am not mistaken.”
He cited Ecclesiastes 3:17: “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.”
As they wait for God’s justice, Christians “have the Kingdom of God,” Amosov said. Those who worry about a possible invasion “lose their peace.”
Randall Dickey echoed that sentiment. An American sponsored by the Westbury Church of Christ in Houston, he also works with the mission in Tartu, Estonia.
“I can’t speak for all Christians here,” Dickey said, “but I can say that I’m not worried because God is ultimately in control.”
Ukrainians serve in Estonia
In Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, a predominantly Russian-speaking Church of Christ ministers to some of the 60,000 Ukrainian refugees who have come to their country. Recently, Ukrainian minister Oleksander Piletsky and his wife, Irina, moved to Tallinn to assist in the work.
A little more than two years ago, the couple crouched in the hallway of the Mariupol Church of Christ with more than 30 other Christians. They sang hymns and read Psalms as artillery shells obliterated the city. The church members spent 51 days trapped in the building before they were offered safe passage through Russia to Estonia. They took refuge with a Church of Christ in Sopot, Poland, before returning to Estonia.
Oleksander Piletsky wears the scars from a bullet or a piece of shrapnel that struck his head during the siege of Mariupol.
The Piletskys and 11 other Ukrainians who escaped from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine now worship with the Church of Christ in Tallinn, said minister Nikolai Vasjutin.
“We constantly support and help those in our community,” Vasjutin said, “as well as, to the best of our ability, our brothers in Ukraine.”
In an email to The Christian Chronicle, Oleksander Piletsky said, “The general atmosphere in Estonia is calm. This is reminiscent of the situation in Ukraine in 2021, when no one fully realized what a tragedy awaited people in 2022.
“I understand now that the fate of the Baltic countries is being decided by the war in Ukraine. The Estonian government is aware of this and helps Ukraine in every possible way.”
Estonian church members, including Vasjutin and his wife, Olga, provide “an atmosphere of God’s love and care,” Piletsky said, as he and his wife pray for their daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren in Sumy, Ukraine. Sumy is near the Kursk region of Russia, which the Ukrainian army invaded in August.
The Piletskys recently received a message from their daughter.
“Right now in Ukraine missiles or bombs can fly everywhere,” she said, “and only God can protect.”
“We pray and thank God for his love, mercy, care for us,” Oleksander Piletsky said, “and we rejoice in every day that we can spend in serving him and his church and when we can talk about his love to the people around us.”
This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.