Voice of the Martyrs

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
As others were fleeing the country. As the bombs and
the missiles came, the faithful believers in Ukraine pushed forward,
both rescuing people and helping them. I talked to a
pastor there that literally had a Russian tank in his
front yard, and I said, why did you stay? And

(00:22):
he said, here is where the Lord called me, Here
is where my people are, and as long as my
people are here, I will stay.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Jesus never promised his followers an easy path. In fact,
he told his disciples that the world would hate them.
He sent them out as sheep among wolves. Jesus' words
came true in the life of the Apostles, and they're
still coming true today in the lives of his followers
around the world. Join host Todd nettletons we hear their
inspiring stories and learn how we can help right now

(00:57):
on the Voice of the Martyrs Radio Network.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Welcome again to the Voice of the Martis Radio My
name is Todd Needleton. We are not in the studio
today in Barloso, Oklahoma. We are actually connected through the
wonder of the Internet with Eric Mock. Eric is the
senior vice president of Ministry Operations for the Slavic Gospel Association.
We are going to talk about what that is and

(01:20):
what they do. Eric. Welcome to the Voice of the
martich Radio.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Todd. I am honored to be with you and your listeners.
What a history Voice of the Mars has in serving
faithful churches and advancing the gospel, and I'm honored to
be on the program with you.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Well, we are honored to have you and you talk
about history, and I want you to give a little
bit of history of the Slavic Gospel Association because you
have quite a history as well.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Last summer I was at Marinatha Bible retreat and conference Centers,
a really neat place, and an older lady came up
to me and said, Hey, we need to go to
the prayer tower. And she says, well, I've got this
old black and white picture of a young Peter Danika,
who was a Belarussian immigrant who was meeting with Paul Raider,

(02:11):
who at the time was the pastor of Moodyam Memorial Church.
And they prayed together in this tower on the shore
of Lake Michigan. And there Paul Raider said, my young friend,
you need to form an organization to help serve and
advance the Gospel to the Russian people, which was under
the Soviet Union at the time, and he did form

(02:34):
that in the back of Headstrom shoes in Chicago. Peter
had immigrated from Belarus to the United States. He had
come to faith as a young man at Moody what
we know is Moody Memorial Church, and he became this
massive man of prayer, and he's taken the Gospel to
his people, and they really rejected him because he was

(02:57):
speaking a gospel that was different than Russian Orthodoxy. And
so we had all kinds of problems came back, and
then we had the Great Purge and the accessibility of
Peter getting to the Soviet Union those times, and then
we had World War Two and all those things happening.
It was during those times they used to say that

(03:17):
the Iron Curtain has no roof, and so with shortwave
radio stations in Monte Carlo and in Keto, Ecuador, they
would broadcast the Bible at dictation speed. In fact, I've
met families across Russia that have Bibles, handwritten Bibles that
were from these shortwave broadcasts. And so SGA up until Perestroika,

(03:42):
was focused on advancing the gospel via shortwave radio. But
in nineteen ninety one it was really kind of a
radical shift. Instead of shortwave radio, it was engage and
it was in that timeframe, especially in nineteen ninety four,
the Bob Provos came to Slava Gospel Association and we
became very involved in supporting the major indigenous churches, which

(04:06):
was known as the Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists, and
they were the persecuted church. But you know the crazy
part is guys like Joseph Stalin became the greatest sending
institution in the Soviet Union because they took believers and
he shoved them out into the far East to perish,
and they planted churches and the gospel went out, and

(04:28):
he shoved him into the muzzlimlands of Central Asia. The
gospel went out and the churches were planted, and then
believe it or not, chased the Jews off. You remember
Fiddler on the Roof. There was a program and the
Jews ended up immigrating to Israel and now there's about
thirty thousand Christians in Israel and Esjay's involved in that.
So that was kind of the genesis of it. I

(04:51):
came in two thousand and two, and now what we
are doing is we're supporting these indigenous churches in thirteen
countries with ministries. They developed over nineteen ministries.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Quite a history, and I'm struck by we're coming up on,
you know, one hundred years since that prayer was prayed,
and still the ministry is going forward. I'm also struck
by just the similarity in our background ministry wise. Voice
of the Martyrs started out as Jesus to the communist world.

(05:28):
That was the name of the ministry that Richard Wurmbrandt founded,
very much with that same focus of getting the gospel
behind that iron curtain. And I've not heard that. I
love that saying that the iron curtain doesn't have a roof,
so there's ways that we can get over that wall.
How did God bring you into this ministry.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
A lot of the people that were involved in the
in Slaviac Gospel really up until the mid nineties were
those that were of Slavic descent from spoke fluent Russian,
and they had this passion to take the gospel to
their own people. I was one of those guys that
grew up seven years old, I had my first Billy

(06:11):
blast off toy and with my Billy blast Off, I
set my eyes to learning about rockets and about science
and airplanes, and I wanted to go to the moon.
That was my desire as a kid. So I ended
up getting my degree in electrical engineering, and I spent
sixteen years in aerospace, nine years doing a flight test

(06:33):
of military aircraft, and six years on the space program.
But it was there on the space program that especially
I was leading a team of engineers that integrated the
first sections of the International Space Station that I was
sent to Russian and I met with Russian engineers. We
sat down and had a cup of tea. This is

(06:54):
before smartphones. We got our walltown. We started sharing family
pictures with each other and we looked at each other
and I said, boy, I used to work on weapon
systems to destroy you. And he laughed and he says,
I worked on weapon systems to destroy you. And there
was this reality that we had families and all of
a sudden they were close friends. But there I was

(07:17):
on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. The first piece,
the Unity module of space station load up, loaded up,
and there was we were celebrating over a six pack
of beer and looking out over the Atlantic, thinking this
was the greatest thing in the world. And the man
I was with turned to me and said, can you
tell me about Jesus? And I'm thinking, hmm, well, let

(07:40):
me see if I can remember from my high school
days the youth group I went through too, and so
I started saying, well, there's us and we're sinners, and
there's God, he is great, and there's a canyon between
and Jesus is the I remember the picture of the
cross laying down across the canyon. And he turns to
me and he said, it's interesting. You're telling me everything
your father, my father told me, and you're as big

(08:03):
of a hypocrite as he is. He says, I laugh
at your faith. He says, I've never seen a Christian
truly live out their faith. And he said, you're an
example of why I reject Christianity. Well, I set my
bottle down. That was in nineteen ninety eight. I haven't
touched anything since, and I called my wife and said,
I don't think I'm saved. I remember pulling my car

(08:24):
over on the side of the road and I still
had an old cassette tape. For those that know what
cassette tapes are and it was from Keith Green and
it was a song that said I want to be
more like Jesus, and I put it in. I said,
my Lord, I am not like you and I want
to be like you. And I was crying and I
called a pastor and I said, what does a person

(08:47):
do that is used to international work? And they just
came to faith and he says, well, let me tell
you about missions. After that, I had made a short
term trip over and there's a whole story's behind that
to Siberia with my wife, which was a great brave
effort on her account, and we started meeting people that

(09:09):
were just the most amazing people we'd ever met. And
then Bob called me in two thousand and two and said,
would you leave your career and leave everything behind? And
I had two kids that were teenagers and one that
was seven years old, and would you come to SGA?
And that was in two thousand and two.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
We're talking this week on Voice of the Martyrs Radio
with Eric Mack. He is a senior vice president at
Slavic Gospel Association involved in their international ministry. Eric, you
mentioned as you were talking about the sort of evolution
of STA over the years, the fall of the Wall
and the fall of communism. How did that change what

(09:49):
the ministry looked like. I mean, you talked about going
from outside into actually being able to go in and
meet with people. What did that do though to kind
of the the day by day ministry operations at SGA.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Well, it was really a radical transformation, a radical not
in vision and focus. The focus is to get the
Gospel to the people, but at that point it was
broadcasting the gospel. It was working to get Bibles to them,
and whatever it took to kind of under the curtain,
over the curtain, whatever it took to get it to them.

(10:26):
And then everything in a moment changed because when the
wall went down, there was this opportunity for the people
under the years of Soviet Union to look westward, and
this is what they saw. They saw a fluence, and
they saw Western Christianity, and a lot of them made
the direct connection to say, if we're Christians, we will

(10:51):
be wealthy and everything is going to be okay. And
so there was this embrace, this spiritual hunger. If you're
handing out a Bible, you would run out. And in
the nineties a just massive number. And that was the
same time that in nineteen ninety seven the ruble devalued.
Everyone lost a massive amount of their pensions and retirement

(11:14):
and poverty gripped Russia and the Soviet republics or states
or the former Soviet countries. In the middle of that hardship,
there was a hunger for the Gospel. So SGA was
doing whatever they could from ninety four really to about
two thousand, doing everything they could to work with the
national churches that were because there were believers. God had

(11:36):
raised up these people in Muslim lands and remote regions
and all throughout these countries to take the gospel of
their people. So SGA got focused on serving the nationals.
And then what happened was when Putin came in in
two thousand and two, the people began to see that
you could have your coffee and your money and your

(12:01):
without the gospel. So they began taking on kind of
consumerism they had been infused in Westernism. They got their McDonald's,
they got a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They worked around the
clock to get that. They have even have Starbucks, and
so who needs God? And so our ministry continues to work,
But we're serving the churches now in all these regions,

(12:24):
and it's expanding, and the ministries are not ministries we created,
but the ministries of these churches to their people, and
so we structured in such a way to facilitate their ministries.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
What is the relationship between the Evangelical Church and the
Russian Orthodox Church. You know, we've heard some stories of
the Russian Orthodox Church really kind of driving persecution, like
like they are are turning negative attention towards evangelical churches
and Christians. What's going on kind of behind the scenes,

(12:57):
and how does that affect what you guys are trying
to do.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
In the eighteen hundreds, they had their own revival. I
think it's in eighteen sixty four. They got the New Testament.
By seventy six, I think they got the Old Testament
and people were coming to faith by grace. They were
deemed by the Russian Orthodox Church as heretics because they
saw salvation apart from baptism, and in fact, to be

(13:25):
baptized in a Protestant church, in their mind, was to
renounce saving baptism under the Orthodox Church, and you're doming
this person to hell. They labeled them baptists, not because
of their association with any denomination, but because they were
doing full immersion baptism in a sense, that was this
label that they were getting. And so when Communism came

(13:49):
in the Red Revolution game and atheism was being forced
into them, then Protestant Christians as well as Orthodox Christians
were being persecuted. But when freedom came, they again became
their own groups. And now with the war in Ukraine,

(14:09):
we've seen this point where the Russian Orthodox Church has
become analogous with what it means to be Russian. So
in other words, if you are not Russian Orthodox, you're
against the good of the country and you're not being patriotic.
Even further to that, if you're a Protestant church that

(14:32):
works with the West, then you're a Western agent and
you're a Western sympathizer, and you're even even worse. So
you are correct. And now we live in a day
where most people would say, well, sixty two percent of
Russia is Christian, But of that sixty two percent, there's
a large number of people that would claim to be

(14:53):
Christian and don't believe in God. And as I understand it,
Protestant Christianity is about one point at one percent or less,
and so still the old school is especially in this
War of Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church really doesn't want
much to do with the Baptist Church, and they have
been under the gun literally since they began. And so

(15:17):
for them, they shrug their shoulders and say, it's our life,
it's what we do. In fact, if we're following Christ,
we're going to be persecuted. The Lord warned us. And
so why do you Americans feel sorry for us? We're
doing what God called us to do. So stop whining
about all that and just pray that more people hear
the gospel.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
It's interesting to me, Eric that the identity factor of that,
like to be Russian is to be Orthodox, and if
you're not Orthodox, you're not really Russian. It's the same
thing we hear in many Islamic countries. I think of Turkey.
If you know, Turkey is a Muslim country, and if
you're not a Muslim, you're not really Turkish. You're kind of,

(15:59):
you know, betraying your nationality, betraying your people. So it's
interesting to hear that in the context of a Christian denomination.
Basically the same message that we hear or that Muslims
here in a place like Turkey. You mentioned the war
in Ukraine and what what has that done to SGA's

(16:22):
work As far as I'm sure it complicates things, But
how have you responded or because I know you're working
in Russia, you're working in Ukraine, So how has that
How has the war affected that work?

Speaker 1 (16:36):
It accelerated our ministry, not decelerated as others were fleeing
the country. As the bombs and the missiles came, the
faithful believers in Ukraine pushed forward, both rescuing people and
helping them. ESJA had to be nimble and we saw

(16:59):
the manitarian need and we have provided up now is
close to twenty eight million meals since the war began
into Ukraine proper. And the Gospel's gone out to between
one point six and one point eight million people that
had never heard the Gospel before. And what was happening
is it's a modern day Book of Acts because Ukraine

(17:20):
was really the Bible Belt. And so when the attack came,
Ukrainian believers have been spread across Europe. And what are
they doing. They're planting churches where there was a lack
of evangelical Christianity in countries like France and Germany and England,
so all of a sudden there's a revival going on.
And then in addition to that, people in Ukraine who

(17:45):
their house was destroyed, their famili's been wiped out. There's
not a person you can't talk to over there that
doesn't have a relative or family member that has died
in this war. Even one young woman told me of
being raped and her being raped and then watching as
they killed the other women and said, now you live

(18:05):
with this, and children have been taken away, and this
is This war is atrocious and there's a lot of
opinions over what started it, the politics, and what's going
to end it. Diplomats can figure that out, but the
hardship is people are dying, people are suffering. I've been
over there. You can hear the explosions, you can see

(18:28):
the anti aircraft fire, you can hear the drones, and
for them it's daily living. But I talked to a
pastor there that literally had a Russian tank in his
front yard. And after the Russians had withdrawn, I went
to that village and I said why did you stay?
Why did you stay when everyone else left? And he said,

(18:52):
here is where the lord called me, here is where
my people are, and as long as my people are here,
I will stay. And so that's really what happened. And
so you have all these people coming into these churches
who stood their ground in the middle and still are
standing in the ground, and they're growing. And actually the

(19:14):
biggest challenge for SJA is helping them train enough young
men to begin going to these churches, because you have
pastors that are sometimes covering four or five churches because
there aren't enough pastors and deacons and elders, so they're
going to all these new churches. Aid centers are turned
into churches. So now all of a sudden, you have
all these people coming to faith, and all we can

(19:35):
focus on is national politics, whether it's Russia, whether it's Ukraine.
Who's going to stop the war, the people that are dying,
the explosion and the shipment of arms, flush that all out.
What your listeners need to see is God doing an
amazing work in the most terrible of times, both spreading
his people out to other countries and bringing new people

(19:58):
to faith. Yes, it's terrible, tragic times, just like it
was for the early Church. But what we're seeing is
people come into face so the work of SGA accelerated
along with their need for humanitarian aid, for generators, for
hygiene items, for medicine, and everything we do is serving
their churches as they advance to the gospel to their people.

(20:20):
And so in the middle of a terrible time, we've
seen the Gospel go out to people. And then within
Russia we have very carefully with respect to sanctions, with
respects to all international agreements, we're very careful. We're able
to still help the churches of Russia all the way
into the Far East. In fact, there's even training up
in Yakutiya. Imagine living somewhere where you climb into your

(20:45):
sub zero freezer to warm up, and now these guys
are at advanced training. We're not doing the work because
I can't get into Russia right now, but they are
one of the schools we support. They are doing the
training and the gospels going out just amazing. The worst
times can be the best of times.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
That's so true, and we see that story again and
again here on Voice of the Martyrs Radio. How God
works through tragedy, he works through suffering, and he is
always building his church. We're talking this week with Eric
Mak He is a missionary with the Slavic Gospel Association. Eric.
We always like to equip our listeners to pray, so

(21:22):
as we finish up our time together today, how can
we be in prayer for our brothers and sisters in Russia,
in Ukraine, in Central Asia, in Israel? How can we
pray for the work of SGA. Just kind of equip
us to be able to pray this week knowledgeably for
that part of the world.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
I was visiting a poor church planner just outside Chernobyl,
where life is very difficult. He ministers to seventy five children,
and he's only got five adults in his church because
all these children come from broken homes and wayward families,
drunken parents. And so I walked up to him. I

(22:03):
put my hand on his shoulder, and I said, how
are you, brother? And he got this very stern look,
and he looked back at me. He says, why would
you ask such a question? How I'm doing is not
a factor. Please ask how do I see God moving
in my church? How is God moving among the people?
Ask and pray that many more come to faith. Don't

(22:24):
worry about how I'm doing. I've got Heaven before me.
And so you know, from a prayer point of view,
too often we worry about comfort, we worry about health,
we worry about all our needs being met, and certainly
those are healthy prayers. But they tell us, please please
pray in the middle of these days that they would

(22:46):
be faithful and the gospel would go forth, and many
would believe. It's the heartfelt prayer of each of them.
But secondly, and this is something that I really hope
for your listeners, they feel it's harder to be a
believer in America than it is in their country. They said,

(23:08):
it's black and white. You're in or out. You believe
or you don't believe, because no one would endure the
suffering we endure unless you really believed. In other words,
their faith is tested, and I would posture that their
real faith is a tested faith. That untested faith is
no faith at all. I don't want to get into
theological talks about that. But they instead pray for us.

(23:34):
They pray for us that we would be faithful. Their
prayer is that we here in the US would live
like there's no tomorrow. We would not live like earthly immortals.
We would realize our time is short and today is
the only day to tell others about the hope we
have in Jesus. So pray for them that they would

(23:55):
remain faithful in hardship and many would come to saving
knowledge of Jesus Christ. And then pray that the Gospel
goes forth in the US. With everything going on, the chaos, Please,
we just need to see the Gospel go forward.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
Amen, Eric, It's been such a pleasure to have this
chance to have this conversation with you. I want to
encourage our listeners. You can find out more about the
Slavic Gospel Association at SGA dotorg. We'll also give you
a link at vomradio dot net. That's where you can
come every week to find the show notes for that

(24:30):
week's episode. We give you links to the ministries that
we talk to every week. We have these conversations with
people who are taking the Gospel to hard places, places
where it can be difficult, where suffering is involved. But
also we see how God does it work in those
places and how people are coming to faith, lives are
being changed. It's an encouraging message and I hope you

(24:52):
will come back with us next week right here on
the Voice of the Martyrs Radio Network.