Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism

Chapter Six. Ambassadors of God

Chapter Six Ambassadors of God The largest evangelical church in Europe today started in Kyiv. In many ways it illustrates a number of growing trends in global Christianity and emerging religious sensibilities in post-Soviet society. Known as the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations, or “Embassy of God” to its nearly twenty-five thousand members, the church was created quite recently, in 1994. It draws on a Pentecostal-charismatic tradition of expressive worship. As of 2006, the Embassy of God had opened over three hundred daughter congregations, most of them in major Ukrainian cities, such as Kharkiv. At least thirty of them are located abroad, including six in the United States. Missionaries from the Embassy of God compete with Soviet evangelical refugees for the souls of unchurched Slavic immigrants in Philadelphia, Sacramento, New York, and elsewhere.1 The founder and senior pastor of this church, Sunday Adelaja, came to Soviet Belarussia from Nigeria to study journalism in 1986. After the collapse of the USSR, he founded the Word of Faith Church in Belarus in 1989. It wasn’t long before he encountered severe difficulties with the authorities there even though in his first four years he was not able to convert a single Soviet citizen, only other foreign students. Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenka had declared himself an “Orthodox communist” and presided over a regime that welcomed neither foreigners nor Pentecostal pastors. Adelaja’s possibilities for evangelizing were highly restricted in Belarus, so he decided to head south. In 1993 he relocated to Kyiv, where he started up a Bible study group with seven people and began preaching in the open air throughout Kyiv. Indeed, in winter 1994 I remember seeing an African preaching to the swelling crowds that clogged the corridors of the Zoloti Vorota, a metro station in downtown Kyiv, when the weather had forced him indoors. I now understand this to have been Adelaja building the beginnings of his church. Later that same year, he reopened his Word of Faith Church with fifty members. His goal was to convert one hundred people a month and make them members of his church. After one year, the church had over one thousand members, and membership has continued to soar ever since. In 2002, he gave the church its current name to signal the church’s new mission : to establish a public role for religion and to bring the faith to “all nations ” through extensive missionizing. In time, Sunday Adelaja also incurred the wrath of Ukrainian authorities . Unlike in Belarus, however, efforts to deport him from Ukraine were definitively blocked in 2004 by thirty-one members of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, including former Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and former Prime Minister Yevhen. Zviahil′skyi. On three occasions they petitioned the State Committee for Religious Affairs in opposition to the treatment the Ministry of Interior Affairs had meted out to Adelaja, which included twenty-two lawsuits for various offenses and three years of close surveillance by the SBU, the Ukrainian successor to the Soviet KGB. Meanwhile , Adelaja’s growing and increasingly vocal following took to the streets to protest threats of deportation, efforts to keep him from preaching, and the extensive bureaucratic difficulties and delays by city administration of- ficials that effectively blocked Adelaja’s church from purchasing land and obtaining a building permit to construct its own building. In 2004 the popular protests and high-level government interventions yielded the intended result: Sunday Adelaja was granted permanent resident status in Ukraine and the Embassy of God was allowed to pursue its plans to purchase a large parcel of land in downtown Kyiv with the intention of building a hypermodern Ukrainian Spiritual Cultural Center, a religious “stadium” slated to seat fifty thousand people. As of 2005, the Embassy of God held thirty-eight services every Sunday in thirty different locations throughout Kyiv, and a central church building was meant to streamline and simplify the process of congregating. It is not just the enormous size, the rapid growth, and the leadership of this church that makes it distinctive. This church represents a compelling Ambassadors of God 211 example of innovative missionary dynamics and conversion practices at the dawn of the twenty-first century that have thus far met with spectacular success. Of all the vibrant evangelical communities taking root in Ukraine, the Embassy of God is perhaps the most vivid illustration of how...