The challenge of freedom

Freedom did not solve every problem for the church. When the borders opened up, everybody and everything could enter: religious sects, pornographic literature, drug dealers, the mafia.

Galina (see Galina's story) had been imprisoned in the Soviet era. Years later she wrote, "Please pray for the children in our town. In recent years, there has been much less interest in God, in the Bible and in the church than during the period shortly after the fall of communism. Prosperity is taking its toll. Children are so quickly distracted by the things of the world."

The same was true of some church leaders. Western missions poured in, looking for contacts, offering education and travel. The new materialism was a temptation.

Brother Andrew reflects, "Outside pressure had pushed them together; freedom brought a lack of cohesion. In one sense they became like the Western church. Do we have a message to their failure when we ourselves have failed?"

There were painful issues of fellowship to resolve. How did those who had resisted relate to those who had compromised?

But twenty years on there are also signs of the church making the most of freedom. Some indigenous churches have grabbed the opportunity to reach out with the gospel. Open Doors linked up with missions from Russia, Siberia and Ukraine to deliver one million children's Bibles to the former Soviet Union.

Pavlo Unguryan, a Christian and a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, recently announced that there is now a prayer group in the Parliament building in Kiev. "This is truly a miracle of God," he says. "Every Tuesday morning, we unite to read the Bible together and pray the Lord's Prayer."

Ukraine is one of the former states where the church experienced persecution that is now active in prayer and support of the persecuted church in other parts of the world. It has been a real joy to see the Open Doors Handbook of Prayer being translated and circulated in these places.

New hope, new restrictions

But some of the old habits have not died out. Last month two Baptist preachers in Russia's Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad were fined after their community preached, sang, played musical instruments and handed out gospels in the town centre.

They were disrupted by police four times. One of them pointed to guarantees of religious freedom in international and national law, but a police officer retorted, "You have the law, we have instructions!"

This experience could be echoed in many of the Central Asia states that were once part of the Soviet Union. There is a continuing lack of religious freedom in many of these countries: the presence of Religious Committees; the never-ending influence of the security services; the emphasis on registration; and the introduction of restrictive religious legislation.

This is prompted partly by the growth of militant Islam in many of these states – after the fall of communism Muslims travelled from Tirana to Tashkent using petrodollars to reopen mosques and to train new mullahs, while Saudi Arabia donated one million Qurans to Soviet Central Asia.

But the church has also been growing. In 1989 there were less than 1,000 Christians among the traditional Muslim populations of Central Asia; hardly any Turkmen, Uzbek or Tajik Christians were known. Since then the indigenous church has been born in Central Asia, Scriptures and Christian literature have been translated and produced.

In Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, where there were so few indigenous believers, there are now dozens, hundreds – in most of these countries, thousands. Where there was perhaps no more than a Gospel in the national language, now there are New Testaments – even complete Bibles.

Open Doors recently carried out a survey of a small group of church leaders in these areas. In 1989 nearly all were under 25, and nearly all became Christians after that date.

They were asked what they hoped for. One said: "I'd like to see a registered, officially recognised, national church."  Another added: "I want our church to be a missionary church and I'd love to see more ethnic Christians in our church."

A third leader commented, "I want the people in our church to have a vision and a fresh view on God's work. I would like them to be free of the law so that grace will grow in our country."