Galina Obrovets
The role of women in evangelical churches and ministries in Russia has definitely and positively changed over the past 20 years and continues to grow in a healthy way. It has become normal practice for Evangelical Christian-Baptist and Pentecostal women to gather at regional and local conferences for the discussion of vital problems. More than that: All the information women need concerning projects and conferences may now be found on the web. For example, websites of the Evangelical ChristianBaptist Union of Russia include a section on women’s concerns (http://www.hve.ru/ministries/women; and http://baptist.org.ru/faith/about/ministries/ women),while Pentecostal websites do the same (http://www.hve.ru/ministries/women; and http:// www.hve.ru/ministries/women/3595-zhenskayakonferentsiya-proshla-v-izhevske). Women have become very active in social ministry and have become leaders and directors of such ministries more often than men. Ministry to orphans and Christian counseling are two areas in which evangelical women are in the lead.
In the past 20 years the ministry of women within evangelical churches has become pronounced. Church choir conductors were rare in Soviet times, whereas now up to 95 percent are women. The same tendency may be seen in children’s Sunday schools where the majority of teachers are women. Also, some evangelical churches have restored the ordination of deaconesses.
In Russia Charismatic, Lutheran, and Methodist churches now ordain women as pastors. In contrast, very few Pentecostal churches ordain women pastors, and no such ordinations occur in Evangelical Christian-Baptist churches. The question of women’s ordination was raised at the conference, “Women: Christian Perspectives,” held at St. Petersburg Christian University, 21-22 April 2016. At this gathering most men reacted negatively to the idea of women’s ordination. The 1997 conference, “Women’s Role in Church, Family, and Society,” at which Shirinai Dosova was one of many speakers, marked the beginning of significant, positive changes for women in evangelical churches. This meeting gave a wonderful impulse and direction for the development of various women’s ministries: organizing conferences on social work, counseling, women’s educational programs, and the launching of the publication of women’s magazines. One example of fruit from the conference involved Christian women from Siberia who took the collection of published presentations from the conference, Rol’ khristianki v sovremennom obshchestve [The Role of Christian Women in Contemporary Society] (1998), and used it as a springboard to further develop their own outreach. These Siberian sisters listed all women’s ministries described in the conference publication as a blueprint for an expansion of their own work east of the Urals.
The 1997 women’s conference, for which I served as coordinator, also prompted my own greater involvement in women’s ministry through my work with the Moscow-based Center for Biblical Resources (www.sestra-m.ru). In 1998 I organized an all-Russian conference in Moscow for evangelical women leaders, with a published collection of presentations from the Moscow conference appearing afterwards. In 2000 I worked with others to hold an International Women’s Conference in Moscow for 300 participants, which included my presentation of the first issue of the Christian Women’s magazine, Sestra [Sister], which I serve as editor. This magazine was published quarterly in full color for ten years until 2010 and was distributed in Russia and other former Soviet republics. Sestra is now available on the web: www. sestra-m.ru; email:
Galina Obrovets is editor of Sestra magazine and a member of the Second Baptist Church, Moscow, Russia.