church and related things

Some of you have asked what my Sundays look like. Most/all of you know that, in general, the parts of my life that are not school are church and things related to church. And it has been this way for the past 10ish years. Now that I’ve been dropped in the middle of Orthodox Land, and now that I am no longer attending a Christian school, and now that most of the people I see every day are neither religious nor under any sort of impression they should be… where has half my life gone?

Before coming to Russia, I met a couple through my great aunt and uncle. They were going to St. Petersburg to study Russian and work in campus ministry things. At that time, I didn’t know what city I was going to, so we chatted and then parted ways. But lo and behold, I’m in St. Petersburg! So the first Sunday I had the chance, I called them up and asked about going to church with them. It turns out that was exactly the right thing to do.

Explanation Interlude: In St. Petersburg, most of the churches are Russian Orthodox. This makes sense. And, despite years of being an officially atheist state, Russia still has as part of its national identity the practice (or at least name) of Russian Orthodoxy. So the non-Orthodox churches are, in large part, expat churches. The 3 local Lutheran churches are Swedish, Finnish, and German, respectively. The Catholic church across the street has services in most of the Romance languages, plus Polish. The “low” Protestant churches are mostly either in English or have the whole service translated into English. I have stumbled upon one of very, very few Protestant churches in which the main/only language is Russian.

So every Sunday at 1pm I leave for the metro and ride up a few stops to “Calvary Chapel Northwest,” where at 2ish we begin worship (in Russian), followed by a decently long sermon (in Russian), followed by more music (also in Russian), and then food/talking (in the language of your choice, but, when you’re talking to Russians, in Russian). At 4:30 or 5pm, I get back on the metro and either go to my home or to the home of whatever kind grown-up invited me over for dinner.

It’s been a very good place for me. About half of the membership is under the age of 8, I’m convinced. Also, the pastor is from Belgium; while he speaks very good Russian, he speaks slowly and uses simple sentence structure, so it is easier to understand him. Also, it’s small… after only a month, I think I have had decent conversations with 85-90% of the regular attenders. Because people notice you, and if they don’t know you, they want to figure out who you are. While some of the things about it would be very difficult for me (we’ve sung one hymn during the last 5 weeks, we take communion very infrequently, there is hardly a shred of liturgical structure, etc), the Church there is beautiful. That is, the people are undeniably acting as the Body of Christ. They have helped me in very simple ways (feeding me) and very deep ways (introducing me to people, challenging me, supporting me in my language learning). It’s wonderful, and I’m very grateful for it.

One excellent side effect of going to this church was meeting a few lovely people on staff with Cru in St. Petersburg, although here it’s called “Compass” or “New Life” or something I can’t exactly remember. Anyways, it’s an evangelical all-campus campus ministry, for the whole city. Its main weekly event is English Movie Night, where the draw for students is “come practice your English.” This means that having native English speakers around is very helpful. I’ve gone every week since it started… it’s awesome.

AND (this is the thing I said in my last post I’d talk about soon), there are often events just for women. On Saturday, the event was a Blini Party. We cooked blini, ate blini, played games with blini, sat around and talked, played games with not-blini, and danced. There were 15 or so of us, only two of us from America—which meant we talked in Russian the whole time. But was it great? Yes, very. I’m almost at the point where the prospect of having basic conversations with people in Russian doesn’t scare me a little, which I consider great progress. Also, one of the girls there didn’t figure out I wasn’t Russian for like 3 sentences, which was super exciting (and means that my accent isn’t horrible, yay!).