OCTOBER '26 PART 2: New Roles and New Challenges with the Evangelical Free Church
Did it ever take you an unusually long time to make a decision that was seemingly obvious from the start? Even though Moscow Bible Church helped launch the Association of Evangelical Free Churches in Russia, somehow we remained an independent church and never did join the association until last year. It is rather strange that it took us so long to join the denomination that grew out of our ministry, and quite frankly, I do not really have a suitable explanation for why it took us this long. I wish I could blame some of my predecessors for this decision, but I was a pastor at Moscow Bible for well over 12 years before we joined this wonderful group of churches. Be that as it may, it was a long and winding road to what should have been a very simple decision all along.
However, we joined the association with the immediate intent of serving this group of churches. Back in November of 2025, we helped put together a theological committee of pastors that revised the statement of faith of the Evangelical Free Church of Russia, making it more aligned with the statements of faith of the Evangelical Free Churches in Europe and the United States. The next step was developing a set of theological distinctives of the association, which we recently completed and approved at our biannual meeting. Next, we are going to work on our theological position on various crucial topics along with the theological vision for the association. All this work led me to two new roles in my life as I am now in charge of this theological committee for the Evangelical Free Church of Russia and am also in charge of external relations.
We are looking to double the number of churches in our association both this year and once again in 2027. The association was not started by attracting existing churches. Moscow Bible Church was planted because there were too many college students who recently put their faith in Christ and who simply could not fit culturally into very rigid churches at the time. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of churches within the association were brand new church plants. So we are hoping to continue this trend. But we are also open to like-minded churches joining our denomination. And in the meantime, it is exciting to see how Moscow Bible Church is finally doing what it should have been doing for a long time – continuing to serve this growing group of churches and molding the shape of the association of the Evangelical Free Churches of Russia
Yours in praying and hastening the day of revival in Moscow and Russia,
Constantin and Alexandra
P.S. You may be curious about my time at the Missionary Forum in Moscow and the European Intensive for Church planters. I will share more about both events in my upcoming newsletters. You will find the story of the European Intensive especially interesting because I got to facilitate a couple of sessions with Juhani, who a pastor from Finland and whose church is part of the Evangelical Free Church of Finland. We discovered that when we were preparing for this Intensive.
THREE PRAYER REQUESTS:
Please take a moment right now, after you fnished reading this e-mail, to join us in praying for God:
- Sasha as she handles 3 kids along full workload while I am in Istanbul at the meeting of hub city leaders with "City to City" movement.
- To raise necessery funds for us to purchase our own building. I shared in one of my previous newsletter about our capital campaign that we just launched. Check it out if you have not yet and if you can please share about it with as many people as possible especially with the missions board of your church.
- To bring peace to Russia and Ukraine. Moreover, ask God to use this conflict by bringing reconciliation and revival to these countries.
