Second in a continuing series examining how Western Christians are helping reshape the former Soviet Union.
For the past decade or more, conservative Christians in the U.S. have grown increasingly dissatisfied with public education. Abandoning public classrooms in favor of private or home schooling, their reasons for leaving can be summarized in a single word: values. At the same time, Christian teachers have felt pressure to keep their beliefs under wraps as lawsuits have driven religion from the schools.
But today in the former Soviet Union, Christian teachers are being welcomed—faith and all—into schoolrooms as virtual saviors. And in many cases, the reason is values. Whether Christianity is true or not is often irrelevant to Soviet educators. Its values are widely regarded as indispensable in a country desperate to recover some semblance of morality in order to function.
Jesus In Class
The sweeping changes taking place in the new Commonwealth of Independent States have thrown open the schoolhouse doors to Christians from the West. For example: Campus Crusade for Christ evangelists have shown their Jesus film in Russian public schools. At least 16 schools belonging to the Christian College Coalition have launched programs in the former Soviet Union in such areas as student and teacher exchanges and curriculum revision. The missions organization International Teams has sent Russian-speaking teachers of English and business to all levels of education in Russia and Kozakhstan.
Professors placed by the International Institute of Christian Studies (IICS) are now teaching at Kiev State Pedagogical Institute, Moscow State University, Novosibirsk State University, and the Institute of Foreign Languages at Nizhny Novgorod, covering subjects such as educational psychology and philosophy.
Kent Hill, executive director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, is teaching Christian apologetics at Moscow State, once a bulwark of atheistic, communist ideology. He is also teaching a high-school ethics course.
Negotiations by the Slavic Gospel Association (SGA) with Alexander Abramov, director of educational curriculum for Russia, helped produce a requirement that all seventh-graders read the Gospel of Mark and the Proverbs, as well as classical Russian literature representing a Christian perspective. In cooperation with David C. Cook Publishing Company, SGA has produced a book that includes the Gospel of Mark and 46 Bible-study lessons on Christian values for children.
In addition, SGA has also been authorized by the Russian Ministry of Education to place small Christian libraries in all 65,000 elementary and secondary schools in the Russian republic.
Campus Crusade and Walk Thru the Bible Ministries have worked together to prepare curriculum for public schools. Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles has sent hundreds of youth to Russia. They made such an impression that education officials in Moscow have begun incorporating the organization’s family-life principles into the city’s public schools.
In addition, a private-school movement appears to be taking root in the former Soviet Union. SGA and the Association of Christian Schools International sponsored a January conference on private schools. The response from Christian teachers representing various regions of the former USSR was overwhelming, according to SGA’s Tony Bryant.
Business With Values
Among the most ambitious educational efforts from the West is a Christian College Coalition (CCC) project to establish a master of business administration (MBA) program specifically designed to help Russia move in the direction of a market economy. It was the concept of values in business education that caught the attention of several Russian educators who made an impromptu visit to Eastern College in the fall of 1990. During their visit, the CCC-sponsored group could scarcely conceive of an MBA program like the one Eastern professors described to them: education interwoven at every point with values. But they knew the approach was something they wanted and their country needed.
When the coalition announced the proposal for a 12-module program early last year, applications poured in from Christian college educators. A group of 12 professors representing nine schools arrived in Moscow last August on the day of the attempted coup. In those uncertain times, they chose to stay—a move that earned them respect from their Russian counterparts.
Eastern College graduate professor James Engel returned from Russia in January with a positive progress report. Despite the troubled economy, the Ministry of Science, Higher Education, and Technical Policy of the Russian Federation has pledged to allocate the funds to complete the development of the program, scheduled to begin this fall in seven Russian universities.
When the doors of freedom opened in the former Soviet Union, the instinct among Western Christian organizations was to rush in as quickly as possible. Yet some, conditioned by the U.S. concept of the separation of church and state, have struggled with the idea of proclaiming Christ openly in the classroom (CT, Nov. 25, 1991, p. 22).
There is concern in some quarters that Christians are wrongly exploiting a society in chaos. But Bob Young, who last year taught at Nizhny Novgorod under the auspices of the International Institute of Christian Studies, disagrees with that assessment. “I wouldn’t call it exploitation,” says Young. “After 73 years of darkness and atheistic teaching, people are hungry. They are looking for truth, looking for meaning in life, looking for security. Nobody has forced anything on these people. They have invited Christians into their classrooms because communism robbed them of morality and values, and they’re curious about what they’ve been missing.”
Young is encouraged by all the Christian activity in the educational field. But he observed: “We’re talking about a country of 280 million people, spread over 11 time zones. There are hundreds of institutes and colleges that have not been touched at all. What we need are career missionaries who will learn the language and the culture and dig in.”
Mark Dyer, president of International Teams, says that schools throughout the former Soviet Union crave teachers from the U.S. “We could send 1,000 people right now if they were available, and if we had the money to do it,” he says. “The problem is not the demand; it’s the supply. The fields are as white for harvest as they can be, but there are too few laborers.”
This missionary concern is no doubt in the minds of virtually all Western evangelicals working in and with educational structures of the former Soviet Union. In his report on his recent trip to Russia, Eastern College’s Engel noted for the record that one of the Russian faculty members with whom he has been working “now has assurance of her salvation.” He noted also that an associate dean from Nizhny Novgorod University “now is in church every Sunday, and wanted to be sure I knew that.”
Randy Frame.
