Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

llowed in her father’s footsteps in caring for the poor, also started several orphanages on Sakhalin Island. Mayer, whose preparation for ministry included studying to become a medical assistant and joining a sisterhood of the Russian Red Cross, was sent to the Russian penal colony by a charitable society run by a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, to care for the children of convicts. While serving as director of the main orphanage on the island, with seventy children in her immediate care, she founded two smaller regional orphan- ages, and even more significantly, reorganised the programme of child- raising and trained others to take over and expand the work.* A Pashkovite in Finland also opened an orphanage. In 1890, believer Laura Grundberg opened a childrens home in the village of Kellomaki (now Komarovo, Russia), with the goal of raising the children “in the spirit of evangelical Christianity”.»° As Grundberg herself explained, she received new birth from the Lord in 1883 through one of Pashkov’s sermons, and wished to serve as a missionary in China. God, however, had prepared for her a different ministry. She opened her “Baby Home” in 1889 with four Estonian orphans, soon joined by two Finnish infants. Soon Russian, Polish and Jewish children arrived, all of whom were raised in the spirit of the Gospel. The children's home went through struggles, threatened by hunger and cold, lacking means to sustain itself, but Grundberg reported that the Lord was faithful, the home remaining open for over two decades. Visitors described the songs and heartfelt prayers of the children. Chil- dren raised in the home themselves came to serve as missionaries to those around them. One of these children even fulfilled the early dream of the home's founder, becoming a missionary to China in the early 1900s. Estonian orphan Anna Renberg, raised in the children’s home after her parents’ death in 1889, later served with China Inland Mission, where she experienced God’s blessing in her ministry to Chinese children.** In addition, Russian Pashkovite Nikolai Federov founded an orphanage for Eskimo children in Kodiak, Alaska.” The existence in the early twentieth century of these and similar *4 Sonia E. Howe, “Nachwort’, in Jenny E. de Mayer, Eine Zeugin Jesu Christi in alten und neuen Rufland (Basel: Brunnen- Verlag, 1948), p. 245. °° “Detskii Priut’, Bratskii listok, no. 9 (September 1908), pp. 1-6. (Quote from p. 1). * “Detskii Priut’, p. 2. See also Bratskii listok, no 11 (November 1908), pp. 2-6. *? Coe Hayne, “A Story of the Founding of the Kodiak Baptist Orphanage in Alaska that is Better than Fiction and a Wonderful Illustration of Gospel Power and Providential Guid- ance’, Missions (March 1922), pp. 132-135. 63 a“ 7 institutions tracing their roots directly to the Pashkovite meetings of the 1870s—1880s provides compelling evidence of the movement's continuing influence despite the banishment of its leaders