Seventh-day Adventists in Euro-Asia are taking steps to improve the church's ministry in major urban centers.
Seventh-day Adventists in Euro-Asia are taking steps to improve the church’s ministry in major urban centers. Regional church leaders voted last week to create a new Moscow mission territory, which will be administered separately from the surrounding rural areas of central Russia.
Adventist leaders hope the move will encourage church members to honestly confront the challenges of evangelism in a secular city environment, according to Valery Ivanov, director of communication for the church in Euro-Asia. “We already have about 4,000 Adventists in the Moscow area,” he says. “But the population is around 11 million, not counting nearby cities. That means Adventists are like a few particles of sand in an ocean. Many people have probably never met an Adventist,” he says.
The new Moscow Mission, headed by president Aleksander Zhukov, will focus on practical ministries designed to meet the spiritual needs of diverse city dwellers.
“Residents of large megalopolises have different psychological and social attitudes from other people,” says Ivanov. “All day they receive continuous information from the media, both good and bad. Their lives are fast, they move around a lot, and they spend a lot of time traveling to work. They have a lot of entertainment available. And another feature of our megalopolises in Euro-Asia is that we have so many refugees from other regions and cultures. We cannot use a single method for taking the Christian message to all of these people.”
Ivanov adds that Seventh-day Adventist churches and members tend to be clustered in just a few regions of large cities. One goal of the Moscow Mission will be to start churches in neglected areas. “Ordinary people don’t travel an hour or more to church,” he says. “We need to be in each neighborhood so we can meet people where they live.”
The city of Kiev, capital of Ukraine, has also been organized into a separate urban mission. Plans are underway for a similar mission to be established in St. Petersburg, Russia.