A two-year project involving 300 young church planters in the former Soviet Union is yielding dividends, a worker for the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Global Mission office reports. According to Jeff Scoggins, a general field secretary for the church’s Euro-Asia area, some 2,800 people have been baptized as a result of the effort, and 291 of 320 small church buildings have been purchased to date.

The buildings, mostly small homes that are converted into a combination church and worker’s quarters, were part of a $3.5 million project created by Global Mission and funded by donations; Scoggins said there has been no debt attached to this project.

Working from a “small group” model of a pioneer, or volunteer, moving into a community and then reaching out to neighbors, the pioneers have established congregations that attract community interest, Scoggins said. This differs from earlier efforts that centered on mass evangelism; such campaigns, though useful in many respects, often left masses of people who lacked understanding of the need for a continuing commitment to the church, Scoggins said.

“These people thought that if one was baptized, that was all that’s needed, and so they got baptized, said ‘thank you very much,’ and slipped away from the church,” he recalled in a recent interview.

The small group model, by contrast, allows for deeper, more personal education in the faith as well as subsequent involvement by members in impacting their community. Also, the pioneers have a motivation to develop good members: these young men are undergoing in-service training, Scoggins said, and “if they get good grades and build a good church, they will end up as pastors.”

Scoggins said that the building of smaller congregations results in the same net number of baptisms that larger congregations gained in a given year. In fact, one-third of new baptisms in the region come from these smaller churches, including more than were expected in areas found in the 10/40 window, an imaginary rectangle that extends from 10 to 40 degrees north of the equator, including 60 percent of the world’s population, while only 1 percent are Christian. However, the establishment of smaller churches “doesn’t concentrate members in one spot,” he said.

Another advantage of the pioneer system is that the church is able to call and then return people from a given area who, Scoggins said, don’t have to learn the culture and language of the people with whom they will work.

While this program is ending—Scoggins said a two-year cycle for a specific program “seems good” in terms of length—the philosophy behind the effort continues: “We will do something different, but we will build on what we’ve done here,” he said.