Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

migrants from the Soviet Union who organised mission societies in Germany specialising in cooperative work in the FSU.* They included Logos mission that emphasised theological education by extension (TEE) and the founding of schools, especially SPCU. Another mission formed by Soviet German immigrants, named Hilfskomitee Aquila emphasised sending material aid, enabling workers in the Karaganda oblast of Kazakhstan to maintain an extensive programme of tent evangelism in * The mission divided into regional bodies, Donetsk Christian University becoming a sepa- rate organisation and the original mission in Rovno [Rivno] dividing into two programmes. One, Hope to People, became part of the Association of Missionary Evangelical Churches of Ukraine (http://www.hopetopeople.org). * Peter and Anita Deyneka with key colleagues in 1991 left Slavic Gospel Association (founded by Peter's father in 1920) in order to establish Assotsiatsiia “Dukhovnoe Vozrozh- denie” [Association for Spiritual Renewal] (ASR), intended to functions not as a mission, but as a facilitating organisation to foster support of the indigenous unions. Headed for a time by George Law, it soon became a mission engaged in major church planting work in southeast Russia. *4 Svet na Vostoke [Light in the East] was registered as an independent mission in Ukraine, purchased a building in which other local ministries could rent space (also a pattern for ASR in Moscow) and the home office in Korntal, Germany, raised support and offered coor- dination. *° Slavic Gospel Association also became the major financial supporter for Odessa Baptist Theological Seminary. *¢ The earliest missions, founded in 1975 and 1995, were-Friedensstimme and Friedensbote, the latter forming following a split within the CCECB supporting churches, whose focus was on sending literature and relief to the CCECB. 204 summer, and to systematically visit all villages and towns in Kazakhstan, done as a programme of the Kazakhstan ECB Union with financial assist- ance from Aquila, Licht im Osten and other missions.” In other cases, local congregations in Germany sent workers back for shorter and longer-term ministry in those localities where they had formerly lived. One recent attempt at repositioning the means for leadership of the evan- gelical churches emerged from the formation of new evangelical churches seeking ways to assist each other. In 2001 an essentially new denomination of evangelicals, strongly influenced by the Christian and Missionary Alli- ance, invited other mission societies to meet for the purpose of forming an interdenominational missionary association. Several meetings have been held since then, and the association has helped to coordinate work between communities of churches in south Russia and east and west Ukraine - all linked to the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA). Churches near Krasnodar, in Kiev and Rovno oblasts may well develop like the CMA