For the first time in 50 years the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Baltic states will graduate Adventist pastors from a local training program. “This is a major milestone,” says Joseph Gurubatham, president of Griggs University, one of the partners in the venture. “This is a service to a part of the world field that had been greatly disadvantaged because of communism.”

The first group of 10 students will receive their bachelor of arts degrees in theology this July. Students are from the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as well as Albania, Finland and Greece.

“We were cut off from the worldwide church for many years,” says Valdis Zilgalvis, president of the Adventist Church for the Baltic states. Church members had to go underground, some were sent to Siberia, and the Baltic Theological Seminary in Suzi was shut down in 1940. “Now we are preparing pastors for worldwide church work,” says Zilgalvis.

Griggs University, the Adventist Church’s international, distance-education institution, based in the United States, teamed up with the church in the Trans-European region, and Newbold College in England to provide a curriculum. Teachers from Newbold College spent three-week stints at the training center at the Baltic Union office.

“This is a good system because it’s practical work,” says Zilgalvis. Students are trained during the school year and study at the church’s Baltic regional headquarters in Latvia during the summer. Zilgalvis says this work is helped by private donors in Denmark and in the United States.

These three republic states gained independence after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today 6,500 Seventh-day Adventists in the Baltic states worship in some 80 churches.