The Lutheran Church in the U.S.S.R.
From: Colson, Charles, A Dance With Deception (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1993), p. 274-275.
"Fifty years ago, Josef Stalin decided to destroy the Lutheran church in Russia. The Lutherans were to be a case study in how all the Christian denominations might eventually be liquidated.
First, Stalin had all the pastors killed or imprisoned. Then the church buildings were confiscated. Bibles, hymnbooks, and religious writings were destroyed.
Lutheran families were broken up. Men were forced into the army. Women and children were loaded into boxcars like cattle and scattered throughout the remote regions of the Soviet Union - some to the deserts of the Islamic republics, others to the arctic wastelands of Siberia.
In a shockingly brief time, the Lutheran church of the Soviet Union was wiped off the face of the earth...
But that's not the end of the story. Not by any means.
The Lutheran women worked stubbornly, painfully, to keep their church alive. They had no pastors, no church buildings, no Bibles or hymnbooks. But that didn't stop them.
They sought each other out across miles of desolate countryside. They met in one another's homes to pray and minister to each other. They wrote down all the religious instruction they had learned by heart: Bible verses, Luther's catechism, hymns, liturgies. They held religious services. And, at the risk of imprisonment, they passed on the faith to their children.
Over time, some of the husbands managed to rejoin their families. Some of the surrounding people converted. A community of believers was formed that appointed elders and deacons.
The Lutheran church was reborn.
It now meets in more than five hundred house churches. Western Christians have sent them Bibles. And they have recently established a seminary. Soon they will have trained pastors again.
The church has outlasted communism...
We who are relatively pampered need to get just as serious about our faith as those who are persecuted."
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