About
Mission Statement
Our mission is to fulfill the Great Commission: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…” (Matt.28:19) by helping the brotherhood of the International Union of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists by supporting evangelism and planting of new churches in Siberia, Central Asia, the Far East, Caucasus, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Central and Northern parts of Russia.
Redemption Evangelistic Ministries seeks to achieve these goals by supporting native missionaries from the persecuted Evangelical Baptist church and by equipping them with necessary tools for the ministry. The missionaries are sent to locations without any existing churches. With God’s help, they sow God’s Word by the way of open evangelism on the streets, in city parks, and other public places. The missionaries are accountable to their local churches and the ministers of the persecuted church.
Statement of Faith
A bit of history
The persecuted Church in Russia:
The Bible was translated into the modern Russian language only in 1876. Just as it was beginning to gain wide distribution, the Communists came to power in 1917 and unleashed a period of severe and sustained persecution against Christians in the country. Baptist Christians who did not compromise with the Soviet authorities had to go underground and had to pay a heavy price in persecution.
For much of the 20-th century, Christians in Russia experienced one of the most severe religious persecution in modern history. From the turn of the century, tens of thousands of believers were martyred. In the last quarter of the century alone, the total number of years spent by Baptist Christians in prisons equaled to more than 5,000 years. Hundreds of pastors and lay people were held in prisons away from their families and churches. The persecuted church in the Soviet Union paid a high price for keeping the candle of the Christian witness burning in the darkness of Soviet atheism.
Meet the Founder
Rev. Vladimir A. Okhotin, the Founder and President of Russian Evangelistic Ministries, was born in 1942 in a small town of Volzhsk, approximately 400 miles east of Moscow. Even though his family did not know the living God, Vladimir’s mother was instructed in the basic tenets of the Russian Orthodox faith. In 1957, the family met Baptist believers and Vladimir, along with his father and mother, accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior.
By the age of 17, Vladimir began to preach the Gospel at the local Baptist church and was asked to lead the church choir. His music studies at a local college ended abruptly when authorities learned of his involvement in the unregistered Baptist church.
In 1966, Vladimir was arrested in Moscow for participating in a delegation of more than 400 persecuted Baptist Christians who came to petition the Soviet government for the release of Christian prisoners. Following the mass arrest and confinement of the entire delegation, two senior ministers were sentenced to long prison terms while the rest of the delegation, including Vladimir, was released.
After being freed, Vladimir continued to serve the Lord in the persecuted church. In 1976, he co-founded the Department of Music within the persecuted church to provide music training to church choir directors. In subsequent years, he organized and led dozens of underground seminars and month-long training courses for choir directors from all over the country. These courses were instrumental in improving the quality of music ministry in the underground churches. The book Vladimir co-authored with his wife for choir directors was published by the underground Christian press, and it continues to serve as the core instruction manual for church choir directors in Russia to this day.
In 1984, Vladimir was arrested and sentenced to 2 ½ years of forced labor for his ministry. Serving the sentence in a notorious labor camp known as “starvation prison” Vladimir lost most of his health. Despite harsh treatment, he continued to share the Gospel with fellow prisoners, and several of them converted. As a result, Vladimir was repeatedly sent to punishment cells. In 1987, he was one in the last group of more than 200 Baptist ministers to be released in the USSR.
After coming to the United States in 1989, Vladimir founded Russian Evangelistic Ministries to support church planting in the former Soviet Union by native missionaries from the persecuted church. Today, Russian Evangelistic Ministries supports 65 missionary families.
Area of Ministry REM
The peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East of Russia
Siberia extends from the Ural Mountains on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east and covers more territory than Canada. At least 31 indigenous ethnic groups call this vast area their home. These people lead a nomadic way of life, and engage in traditional occupations such as hunting, fishing, reindeer breeding and herding. Tragically for them, they also practice paganism.
In 1993, REM provided funds for the first missionary team to Evenkia, Polar Siberia. Since then, the ministry has been supporting a number of long-term missionaries who have relocated with their families to this area to live and minister among the indigenous people. In addition to other hardships, the missionaries have to endure the harsh climate and the vastness of the area: the population density in Siberia is less than 1 person per square mile.
The Muslims in the Caucasus and Central Asia
Since 1993, REM has also been supporting missionaries in the predominantly Muslim regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
The mountainous region of the Caucasus, located just north of Turkey and Iran, though relatively small in size, is home to approximately 100 different ethnic groups. The countries of Central Asia – Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyztan, and Turkmenistan – are also home to more than 100 different ethnic groups.
Middle Eastern nations, most notably Saudi Arabia, are financing construction of mosques and are supporting Muslims missionaries in an attempt to reclaim the people of these regions for Islam. Despite these efforts, people are still open to the Gospel and churches are being planted among the indigenous people of the Caucasus and of Central Asia.
The rapid pace of change makes ministry in these two regions a matter of urgency. Today, most adults in these regions can still understand the Russian language, but they are gradually reverting to their native languages. Since the Bible has not been translated into most of these ethnic languages, the message of the Gospel should be communicated now so that it can take root.
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus
While the populations of these countries were historically Orthodox, the Communists destroyed 95% of the church buildings after they came to power in 1917, and then for 70 years indoctrinated each school child to believe that there is no God. Today, there are large regions of these countries in which the population is completely unchurched. In addition to REM’s focus on reaching Muslims and ethnic groups that do not have believers among them, the ministry also supports full-time missionaries among Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians in the areas without a single church in the vicinity.
