Passing Faith to the Next Generations

A Prophetic Word (December 1983) 

From my perch in the little café on the town square, Piata Unirii, I watch people shuffle past clutching cheap burlap carry-bags, probably hoping to find bread in the shops. I was there as instructed on the itinerary I had memorized and then flushed down the toilet on the Austrian Air flight to Bucharest. It said someone would meet me at 5:00pm on the town square in Cluj-Napoca, between the old church and the bronze statue of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, mounted on his horse. 

At 5:00pm sharp, I stand beside the statue; a man walks behind me and whispers my name. I follow him without a word, always at a distance. A block ahead, I see him throw his bag into the open trunk of an idling car, climb in, and motion for me to do the same. The driver nods as though he is expecting these passengers. He leaves the city centre and drives for ten minutes, slowing in front of a tall block of flats. At a signal from some window high up in the building that all is clear, we leave the car, stumble up the unlit stairwell to a door standing open on the fourth floor. Unceremoniously, we are pulled into a dimly lit room deeper in the apartment where men are gathered for their evening class. 

I am here on behalf of the C&MA (Canada) to explore involvement with the underground training program for pastors. As the evening unfolds, the reason for my presence―my potential involvement as an itinerant teacher―is explained to the men. I see the surprise in their eyes as they hear this news. I feel an audible gasp from Lucia, the daughter of our host when she learns why I am here. She is filled with questions. Rather than become a distraction, once the men return to class, I suggest we go to the kitchen to talk. 

When the kitchen door swings shut, Lucia asks breathlessly, “You went to seminary and studied the Bible with men? Miriam, these pastors cannot imagine a woman teaching them anything, especially the Bible. They will never be willing to learn from you. Why don’t you do something similar with women?” I will not see Lucia again for thirty-five years. 

Oradea, Romania (October 2019) 

The parking lot of Oradea’s upscale Hotel Imperio is almost full when I arrive. The evening event doesn’t begin for an hour, but women are arriving, eager to get a good seat. The rented room in the hotel will hold three hundred, but some suspect many more will try to attend – so they come early for a seat. 

Most of the women here have one thing in common – they have been invited by Viorica. Vio, as many call her, is an uneducated, unpretentious woman who once a year gathers her disciples in this alumni-style celebration. To be an alumna of one of Viorica’s discipling groups is a badge of belonging among women in the churches in Romania. It is difficult to estimate how many women are actually represented by the three hundred here tonight because many of those present have their own groups. 

As I find a seat, it occurs to me that these women tonight are my fourth generation. My mind moves backwards in time: Viorica was discipled by Ica during the late 1990s. Ica was discipled by Nicoleta during the early 90s, who, in turn, was discipled by me in the 80s. Four generations. 

Passing Faith to the Next Generation (Romania, 1985-89) 

During the eighties, six courageous women in Oradea gathered regularly to study the Bible with women from Vienna who came to teach. The group gathered, always watchful for the secret police in the street. Sometimes, across the street from the apartment block where we met, they’d see a man sitting in an unmarked car or someone wearing dark glasses leaning up against the building as if to make his presence obvious. If you saw anything suspicious, you would continue walking, circling back later to see if it was now safe to enter the building where we were meeting. 

Nearly every time we met, I would take a folded, metre-square piece of butcher paper from my suitcase. The women would gather around as I drew a circle in the middle of the paper and wrote my name in it. From that circle emanated six spokes; at the end of each spoke was a circle in which I wrote the name of one of the six women in the room. 

The women knew what the diagram was about. It was the Apostle Paul’s strategy for multiplying leaders. To his disciple, Timothy, he said, “Whatever you heard me teach . . . pass along to trustworthy people who have the ability to teach others too” (2 Timothy 2:2, VOICE). We saw three generations in Paul’s plan. “Who are the trustworthy people (women) to whom you will pass what you learn in this group?” 

It was a plan for multiplication, maybe the only way to train the next generation in this repressive, Communist country, where engaging in any form of church education with younger people was a crime against the state. I would press them to tell me who was in their second-generation groups. It was a rigorous form of accountability with the women. Nicoleta was in that first group that began in 1985, and Ica was in one of the groups Nicoleta formed near the end of the 80s. Ica invited Viorica to join one of the groups she formed in the early 90s, a third-generation group. This evening I will meet many of the women from Viorica’s study groups, the fourth generation.   

A Biblical Model for Disciple Making 

As I stand to speak, Ema, my translator, stands with me. Her presence beside me takes me back thirty-six years (November 1983) to the heavily shuttered room in the little church on Popa Rusu Street in Bucharest. Six pastors were with me at the table – leaders in the evangelical movement in Romania. Ema’s father, Dr. Nic, led the group that day. They were wrestling with the outrageous idea I had just proposed: forming groups like the men’s groups, already meeting, in an underground pastoral training program, but this time for women. 

The idea of training women to serve the church was new to these men. All of them took at face value the Apostle’s words, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak. . . If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. . .” (1 Corinthians 14:34, 35). For these men, the words were timeless instruction: women should learn at home and be quiet. 

But the men around the table were wrestling with another complicated reality: it was dangerous, actually against the law in Communist Romania, to gather a small group for any reason, especially in the church. Groups of more than three were deemed the breeding ground for revolution. The men were afraid that if they allowed women’s groups to be started, the increased number of participants might expose the program they so deeply treasured, their only hope for biblical training. More groups meant more chances of information getting into the wrong hands. If even one woman inadvertently spoke to a less trustworthy person in the church about the group, the authorities might uncover the training program. 

Tonight, I share the words Dr. Nic, Ema’s father, spoke as he leaned forward, palms of his hands firmly planted on the table, his stern face just inches from mine. With a glint of laughter in his eye, he whispered, “Miriam, you can’t train women! They talk too much!” The double meaning in his statement brought laughter to the men seated around the table thirty-six years ago. The women at the Imperio Hotel laugh tonight as I retell the story. 

Tearing a piece of paper from my notebook, I drew the diagram of 2 Timothy 2:2, which the men knew so well. In the middle, I drew a circle with my name in it and six spokes radiating outward to six circles. Then, going around the table, as each man told me his wife’s name, I wrote it in one of those circles. It was as though he was saying on behalf of his wife, “We’re in!”

One year later, I began to meet with the wives of six pastors who crossed the country by train to Bucharest, the first generation of students in a program to train women to disciple new believers in the beleaguered church. Thirty-six years later, I stand beside Dr. Nic’s lovely daughter, who translates my story to a room filled with third-and fourth-generation women. 

The Formation of my Passions¹ 

Passion #1 – The Suffering Church 

Ministry in the underground church in Communist Europe satisfied one of my lifetime passions, the suffering church around the world. I grew up praying for the millions in our world who intensely suffer because they follow Jesus. That passion was nurtured in me from my birth in southern China (1949), as the regime of Mao Zedong came to power. In my first two years, we were house prisoners of the newly established Communist regime. My father grew up in China. It was, even then, the world’s largest mission field. Every day my father would go to the authorities to ask if our family had been cleared to leave China, fearing each time that we had become objects of unfounded extortion. After many months, the day finally arrived. We were given twenty-four hours to leave, part of the “reluctant exodus” of 1951, one thousand missionaries forced to leave China in a single day! My father’s eyes always filled with tears when he told his children about that day. A handful of Chinese Christians had the courage to gather around us to say goodbye. They didn’t know that the church in China was entering a period of unprecedented suffering under Mao. 

I was a baby in my mother’s arms when my parents and their three children walked to the outskirts of Siangyun, southern China, with just the clothes on our backs. Mother flagged down a truck loaded with oranges, and with me in her arms, she pulled another toddler, a seven-year-old, and her invalid husband onto the pile of fruit. We began to hitchhike across southern China – a journey to Hong Kong that took several weeks, a journey that would eventually end in Canada. 

Passion #2 – Unreached Peoples 

In 1951, we settled in Three Hills, a small town in southern Alberta, home to one of the largest missionary-sending institutions in North America, Prairie Bible Institute. My parents joined the faculty; over the next twenty-five years, their seven children attended elementary, high school and Bible college. It was here that another passion began to take shape: the millions in our world who, through no fault of their own, have never heard of Jesus. It was impossible to be at Prairie Bible College for twenty years without getting “infected” with a passion for the lost, for unreached people. ²

My scholarly father encouraged each of his children to train the mind in a discipline that would become a productive place for spiritual gifts to flourish. I went to the University of Calgary after graduation from Prairie Bible College (1971) and, to my father’s delight, chose to study linguistics, the science of language. Did my father recognize in his middle child an apostolic gifting (otherwise known as the “missionary” gift), which included the easy acquisition of languages, an adventurous spirit taking one where no one else dares to go, and an ability to cross cultural barriers without angst? 

An Unusual Love Affair 

And so it was that in September 1971, I walked through the front doors of Foothills Alliance Church, located strategically across from the University of Calgary (U of C) campus – and I suppose I have never left. Pastor Gordon Fowler and his wife, Eleanor, introduced me and others in the college group ³  to the ethos of Alliance churches in that era: the week-long, yearly “gala” they called the missions conference and the rich theology and sombre hymnody of A.B. Simpson with hymns like “To the Regions Beyond” and “A Hundred Thousand Souls a Day.” Foothills became the place where my passion began to grow. 

I got involved in ministries in the church: music, college and career, teaching Sunday school, clubs. . . I had never experienced a church that noticed whether I showed up or not – or expected me to contribute to the work. I fell desperately in love with this church. I was there every time the doors were open. I graduated from U of C and was hired by the Calgary Board of Education. Deep within me, I knew that teaching French to junior high students was not my career. I knew that ultimately God would take me to either an unreached people group or to the suffering church somewhere in the world. But where? And when? And how? Meanwhile, ministry gifts were being honed and made visible in this Body of believers with whom I had fallen in love.

The Local Church Discerns and Affirms (March 1978) 

One Sunday morning in March 1978, a leader met me at the church door and told me the elders wanted to speak with me after the service. My heart was racing as the men gathered around me in the lobby. The chairman of the board asked a simple question: “Are you planning to teach French the rest of your life?” Without stopping, he continued, “We’ve been watching you for seven years here at Foothills, and we can see that you have gifts for ministry. We think you should consider going to seminary and explore ministry options.” 

I was dumbfounded. My gifts were affirmed. I felt the tug of the nations! The elders made clear that if I was willing to go to seminary, the church would pay the bill! If in exploring ministry options, I discerned that this was not my calling, their investment would be an interest-free loan. However, if God clearly directed me to ministry, it was an outright gift from God’s people. I was launched on a six-year journey to the nations that included two years at Canadian Theological Seminary, one year there on faculty and three years of “home service” at First Alliance Church. I had been launched by a local church to the nations, a journey that landed me in Communist Europe in 1983. 

A Man Ahead of His Time: An Understanding of Partnership 

The advocacy of Dr. Arnold Cook in those years was significant. The C&MA had no ministry in Communist Europe. Before it was talked about much in mission circles, Arnold believed in partnership with like-minded organizations. Years of comity agreements between missions were over. He proposed to the Board of Directors that the C&MA (Canada) enter a partnership with B.E.E. (Biblical Education by Extension), an inter-mission educational ministry providing pastoral training to churches in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Russia. They had developed a comprehensive plan to train pastors in countries where Soviet-style governments had closed seminaries and Bible colleges. They knew how to smuggle curriculum to pastoral groups who took risks to receive teachers from the West. Teachers travelled on the pretence of business or study to offer a solid educational program for men in ministry. “Why recreate the wheel?” was Dr. Cook’s response. The local church had affirmed God’s call; a group was already doing what I felt called to do; why should the Alliance not enter such a partnership? My initial trip to Romania in 1983 proved my suspicion that men in Romania would never accept teaching from a woman. In the wonderfully prophetic word of Lucia, God unveiled the plan for me to establish a parallel program for women, a preposterous idea in those days. ⁴

The revolution of 1989 unfolded; Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife were executed on Christmas Day. Romania was free after forty years of Communist oppression. Churches in Eastern Europe emerged from decades underground, leaders equipped through the ministry of BEE. Eastern European churches in post-Communist countries were among the best-equipped churches in Europe to weather the encroaching storms of secularism and consumerism that plague Europe today. 

A Man Ahead of His Time: An Understanding of Academia 

Soon after the revolution, in 1994, I drove Dr. Cook and two other leaders from the Alliance World Fellowship across Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland on a Caleb-style trip to evaluate what the C&MA might do in post-Communist countries. I had relationships with pastors everywhere in the region. The time was ripe for the Alliance to venture into these post-Communist countries. I assumed I would be a part of this expansion. But Arnold Cook had a different idea. Standing in the doorway of my living room in Vienna, I heard him say, “Sister, it’s time for you to retool. Have you ever thought about pursuing a Ph.D.?” 

Dr. Cook was looking at least a generation ahead to the day when our Alliance schools in Canada would need an academic who understood the DNA of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, had practical experience in missions and the credentials required by accrediting agencies. He had benefitted from the same kind of forward-thinking at the end of several terms in Latin America. Dr. David Rambo (then Vice President for Missions in the C&MA) suggested he think about doing doctoral work. Arnold recognized my love for learning and my gifting as a teacher. He shared how those in the Global Ministries Department placed great value upon the equipping of a few to seek higher degrees. If I were willing, Global Ministries would fund such studies. As a bursary recipient, I was to promise to return to work in Alliance higher education, at least one year per $10,000 invested, to pay off the debt. 

In September 1992, I set off for Trinity Evangelical Divinity School to study under the leading scholar in the field of nonformal theological education, Dr. Ted Ward. Ted shared my growing passion for churches in the developing world where totalitarian regimes do not allow for the overt passing of Christian faith to the next generations. New approaches to education had to be explored. The days of building costly campuses for pastoral education were coming to an end. It was a new era. 

A New Day in Missions: A Different Approach to Pastoral Education 

My Ph.D. dissertation: Theological Education for New Protestant Churches of Russia, Indigenous Judgments on the Appropriateness of Educational Methods and Styles, addressed issues in theological education that the church in post- Communist societies faces. ⁵  I moved to Russia, learned Russian and searched Russian libraries for never-translated literature about Russian understanding of learning and their relationship to Western education. Russians were never sure if they were “West” or “East.” The impact of seventy years of Marxist-Stalinist dictatorship on epistemology needed to be understood by those with a vision for theological education in Russia. My ethnographic study during the first five years after the dissolution of Communism involved the first cohort of students finishing undergraduate programs brought by Western educators to the Russian church, often without asking nationals what was appropriate. 

I was finishing language study as the first class of students from three fledgling Bible colleges/Christian universities (two in Russia and one in eastern Ukraine) completed their studies. One was the newly established school of the Russian Alliance in Krasnodar, southern Russia. In some cases, well-meaning Westerners flooded the region, believing they knew best what Russia and the Ukraine needed to “catch up on” after seventy years of limited or non-existent pastoral/theological training. Groups from North America raised millions of dollars to establish schools with buildings, curriculum, and educational approaches that were direct imports from the West, forgetting that “Russia is not Europe.” Nor did Russian Bible college students, who had grown up in Soviet-style education, their very souls impregnated by Eastern Orthodoxy, respond well to the predominantly Calvinist/ reformed theology embedded in most textbooks that were hastily translated into Russian for these schools, often without consultation with Russians. Students could not verbalize what didn’t sit well with them. A good ethnographic interview was an amazing tool to help them discuss with me their innate dis-ease. 

My Alliance colleagues from Canada and the USA set about raising millions of dollars to build a Bible school in southern Russia which was deemed to be the “future of the newly-established Alliance church in Russia.” It was what we did in those days. My heart and my dissertation suggested a better way forward. But who was I to give direction? Alas, I was a woman. 

I Am a Woman 

With the newly minted Ph.D. degree, I was ready to jump in and improve my ability to teach in Russian (a devilishly difficult language that takes most Westerners a decade to perfect). I assumed I’d find a place in theological education for pastors and Christian workers in Russia. Imagine my surprise when our American field leader, quoting the National Church president of the Russian Alliance Church, refused to even discuss my desire to teach in the recently-established Bible college in Krasnodar – “unless of course, you are willing to teach women in the areas of child-rearing, prayer, or English language.” During that interaction with the field leader, speaking for the National Church president, he forthrightly suggested that “if God has called you to Russia, you will be happy to clean toilets for Him.” ⁶

Very quickly, it became abundantly evident that no one had a plan in mind for this woman in whom they had invested $50,000 for a Ph.D. I was encouraged to do some exploring in the field and see if I could find “something to do.” I was asked by American C&MA leaders to consider leading the soon-to-be-established Polish field. However, in personal conversation with a new mission recruit, with no experience in missions or Europe, I learned that this younger, inexperienced man had already agreed to fill the post. 

Budapest, Hungary, 1997 

In August 1997, I was invited to the annual gathering of presidents and deans of newly-established Bible colleges and seminaries in former Soviet bloc countries. They gathered in Budapest to discuss establishing an accrediting association for the theological schools established since the end of Communism. I was invited by the executive officer who thought my educational background and experience ideally fitted me to lead this group of men who had little experience in theological education or accreditation issues. Many of these presidents and deans knew me from in-country encounters during the ten years prior to the fall of Communism. Each one had received a copy of my dissertation on floppy disk, with its recommendations for the future of theological education for the post- Communist church. As I sat and listened to them debate in the only language they had in common, English, I heard things like, “She is well equipped; we need the kind of experience she would bring to us; but. . . she is a woman.” 

I returned to Calgary, downhearted and confused. So much had been invested in me, but it seemed there had never been a plan for how to optimize the education I had acquired and the experience I had in formal and nonformal theological education in post-Communist societies. I was crushed. 

The Local Church: A Good Husband (1997) 

For nearly twenty years, I had described the church as a “good husband” to me. Foothills Alliance Church had affirmed God’s call on my life, and for nearly twenty years Alliance churches in Canada had loved me, prayed for me, provided for me, protected me. . . everything a good husband would do. Back in Calgary, I turned to the elders of First Alliance Church in this time of disappointment. Seventeen elders surrounded me in the pastor’s study. I told them my story of rejection; I wept; they listened. It was as though I was receiving the wisdom of seventeen husbands. They went around the room—doctor, dentists, lawyer, businessmen, mission personnel, tradesmen—each of those seventeen godly men brought insight to the decision I needed to make. At the end, a retired mission leader summed up their comments: “With all your investment in education and mission, it does not seem wise to us for you to continue with an overseas posting with The Christian and Missionary Alliance.” They invited me to join the church staff again, this time as pastor of discipleship and education, while we waited to see what God had for me. 

Canadian Theological Seminary – Toronto (2000) 

I healed and thrived in those two and a half years back at First Alliance, implementing a 2 Timothy 2:2 type educational model for local churches that wanted to discern among their people who were called to ministry and equip reliable people who could teach others also. Then, in late 1999, I was invited by Canadian Theological Seminary (still in Regina) to establish a branch of the seminary in Toronto. The invitation came from Alliance workers in Ontario and further east who highly prized a seminary education with Alliance history and thought embedded in it. But it needed to be more accessible. Could they get an “Alliance” theological education without uprooting family and leaving ministry positions to move across Canada to Regina? Many were Chinese and Vietnamese pastors. 

When I arrived in Toronto in July 2000, I had a laptop and a printer in the trunk of my car. Classes were offered on weekends to accommodate men and women who worked during the week. Professors travelled to students, and students travelled to cities where classes were available. Classes were offered in Toronto, Georgetown, Ottawa, Montreal and as far east as Halifax. It had elements of theological education I had dreamed of for Russia. Pastors appreciated the possibility of quality extension education near to home. This model opened up pathways for accreditation and ordination within The Christian and Missionary Alliance without travelling to the mother institution in Regina/Calgary. 

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (2006) 

Passion #3 – Mobilizing and Equipping the Next Generation 

 In 2004, I was invited to join the faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, Illinois, to give direction to the Ph.D. program from which I had graduated. I moved in 2006, soon realizing this position opened strategic doors for working within my third passion – investing in the next generation. Two aspects of the invitation were particularly appealing to me as the years at Trinity unfolded: 

1. The program I led attracted presidents, deans, and faculty from theological schools around the world. These schools had been established by white, Western missionaries, often steeped in a Western philosophy of education that took little account of the impact of culture on learning and teaching styles – not to mention the need for indigenous theologies shaped for a non-Western culture. ⁷ What a privilege it was to help educators thinkthrough issues that impact the direction of schools, especially in the developing world, schools emerging from the influence of colonialism. National educators looked ahead to theological education that was more appropriate to the cultures in which their graduates would serve.

1. Passing through a school like TEDS were Alliance international workers, administrators, and nationals from countries in the Alliance World Fellowship (Canada, USA, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Congo, Guinea, Gabon, Cote d’Ivoire, many European countries, Russia, Indonesia, etc.). They were delighted to discover that while doing their advanced degrees at TEDS, a faculty mentor understood Alliance history and thought, the Alliance educational context, and the denominational shift in their educational institutions from Western leadership to national leadership.

The years at TEDS were pressured years attempting to balance the demands of scholarship with my secret passion of mentoring the next generation of educational leaders. I wrestled with the expectations to publish so as to achieve tenure when I was surrounded by so many students wanting nothing more than someone who could help them think through educational strategies and structures for their unique educational context. When reflecting on the relentless and understandable pressure to write books and papers to achieve tenure, I was once quoted that “some people write books ― others write in the lives of students, some invest in institutional change.” It was not an “either/or” decision, but when forced to choose, I found myself gravitating to the investment in people, helping them in their processes of navigating institutional change. 

Return to Canada (2012) 

As the official age of retirement appeared on the horizon, another word from Arnold Cook was in the foreground of my thinking: “When it comes to retirement, before the moment arrives, move to the place where you think you’d like to retire; settle down there; re-establish relationships; begin to invest in the people among whom you want to serve on this last lap of the journey.” It was a no-brainer. I would return to Calgary, to Ambrose University and to Foothills Alliance Church. 

A position at Ambrose University appeared in 2012, teaching in and giving leadership to the Intercultural Studies program (undergraduate level.) My own beliefs on cultural adaptation were personally challenged as I returned for a four-year term at Ambrose University: 1) transition from the USA to Canada; 2) from lecturing to doctoral students to lecturing to undergraduate students in their first year(s) out of high school; 3) teaching in the disciplines of education and philosophy to teaching in the discipline of intercultural studies. It was the most stretching transition I have ever made; one I am glad I made at 63 years of age and not later. Arnold Cook was right! 

The Story Never Ends 

My greatest joy in returning to Canada in 2012 was to return to Foothills Alliance Church. It had been thirty-four years since I regularly attended this remarkable community of believers who “tapped on the shoulder” of a twenty-nine-year-old French teacher, affirmed her gifts for ministry, sent her off to seminary, and launched her into ministry. I re-established myself in this church that was instrumental in my call to mission. It is now a very different community. Many of the leaders who were in the church in the seventies are in Heaven. I enjoy face-to-face friendship with my former pastors, Gordon and Eleanor Fowler. My pastor is Ian Trigg, who encountered Jesus at Camp Chamisall (1973) and began attending Foothills as a teenager (1974). He now pastors this church in which he was nurtured, and I was called. 

From its beginnings, Foothills has been a “missional” church where teaching on the intersection between the deeper life and the sending of harvesters to the ends of the earth happens. Its second building in Calgary (built in 1992) is strategically located in the suburb of Edgemont (neighbouring on the Hamptons). The 2011 census shows that 37% of the residents of Edgemont and 44% of the Hamptons were born outside of Canada. 

Foothills recognized an opportunity on its doorstep. Its Intercultural Ministries Department offers many classes each week to serve the needs of newcomers to Canada. I love involvement in ESL classes where students come from people groups we call “least-reached peoples.” I teach a class for immigrants called “Transitions to a New Culture.” Tuesday afternoons, I host “Tea and Talk” time from my home, to which primarily Asians come by Zoom. When a participant in an ESL class reaches a certain facility with English, I invite them to an ESL-sensitive Alpha table within the church’s Alpha program. What joy when a couple from Iran decide, without coercion, to follow Jesus and ask to be baptized – or a businessman from Taiwan announces with urgency he must invite Jesus into his life “now” because he will return to his workplace in Taipai in two days. Discipling happens on the internet. 

Afterword 

Only in 2021 do I understand why God allowed me that strategic moment in Romania (in the 80s), the final decade of the Communist era, to begin a disciple-making movement among women. It started in 1983 with six humble women who loved Jesus but never thought about the lostness of people around them. Over thirty-eight years, the movement has grown exponentially to include thousands in the country, even to the fourth and fifth generation. 

But there is a reality today in post-Communist Romania which we didn’t anticipate in the eighties – the migration of people. One in five Romanian workers lives outside of Romania today because of local poverty and corruption. Thousands emigrate each year to the West in search of a better life. Initially, it frustrated me that women in whom I had invested left the country. But it doesn’t take long for them to realize that the society of Western Europe is secular and the Church in the West is weak.

On my return trips ⁸ to do research for my book, I saw that God’s covenant with Abraham is true for the Romanian church in diaspora. To Abraham, God said: “I will bless you. . . and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:1-3). God is shuffling the nations in His sovereign way, placing Romanian women in hard places like Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. It doesn’t take them long to realize that they have been placed in those hard places to infect society with a disciple-making movement for all peoples. They know how to win and disciple people. Many of the women they introduce to Jesus and invite into their discipleship groups speak only a national language like German or French, or Italian. These are no longer Romanian-speaking discipleship groups. 

The eyes of Romanian women who have fled from poverty and corruption have been lifted from seeking blessing for themselves to embracing the lostness of Spaniards, Italians, Belgians and Germans. God’s blessing upon Romanian women and upon all who call themselves children of Abraham (Galatians 3:19) is for one reason alone: that all peoples on earth will be blessed.  This is an excerpt from the book, On Mission Volume 3. Download your free copy today.

1. By passion, I refer to that which means more to me than anything else. 
2. An Unreached People Group (UPG) is a group that has little access to the Gospel; there is no possibility, given current conditions, to hear the good news in their own language in a way that makes sense to them. UPGs don’t have enough followers of Jesus or the resources required to evangelize their own people; they need help from the outside to do so. 
3. Others in the college group at Foothills in the 1970s who were similarly “infected” with this ethos of missions and the local church were Larry Charter, Pixie Hoath Charter, Ron Brown, Myra Elliott Brown, Jim Elliott, Carol Brown Elliott, Harvey Matchullis, Brem Frentz, Garth Crundwell, Clayton Nordstrom, Rick Love.
4. See the full story in reGeneration: Stories of Resilient Faith in Communist Romania, 2020, Word Alive Press, Winnipeg, MB. https://regenerationbook.ca/ 
5. A PDF copy of this dissertation is available on request through https://regenerationbook.ca/
6. Twenty-four years later discussions with Russians still involved in theological education but who remember that era raise many questions about why my involvement was not allowed. I was reminded that wives of missionary men (Maddie Dreger and Brita Hoekema) were teaching in the college at that time. Were they allowed as part of the contract forged for their husbands when the newly established Bible college reached out for professorial help from the West? Was my intention to serve long-term in theological education in Russia a threat to both the field leader and the National Church? Recent dialogue with one of the leaders at Kuban Evangelical Christian University (the evolution of the Bible college in Krasnodar) indicates that during the years in question the attitudes of Russian churches toward women in teaching roles were “generally reserved.” He suggests that in that era women were teaching but the range of permissible subjects was limited to church history and children’s ministry. This may explain why my involvement was not welcomed.
7. For example, while in Russia doing doctoral research at St. Petersburg Christian University, I befriended Alexander Negrov, Professor of New Testament and Exegesis (later Rector of the university). Our lengthy discussions centred on the noticeable lack of a truly Russian “Protestant” theology in Russia, due to the strong influence of Russian Orthodox theology and the impositions from multiple Western theological traditions, none of them really arising from the Russian “soul.” He asked questions like, “What does indigenous even mean in our context?” I encouraged him to write on the topic but at that time he shrank from doing so, feeling he had no voice in the Western world, a world dominated by English journals. I agreed to co-write on the topic with him. See: Why Is There No Russian Protestant Theology in Russia? A Personal Outcry by Alexander Negrov and Miriam Charter (1997) Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe: Vol 17: Iss 1: Article 1.
8. I returned in 2018 and 2019, living a total of three months in the country for research.