The reawakened interest in Christian roots

Just a few years ago, most of the peoples of the Caucasus were considered unreached by the Gospel. Professing Christians were virtually unknown among them [1]. This has changed significantly in the meantime. According to the North Caucasian Evangelical Alliance, at the beginning of 2024, substantial groups of locals in almost every ethnic group in the Russian part of the Caucasus professed faith in Jesus.

Among them are 3,000 Ossetians, 700 Adyghe, 200 Kabardians, 100 Balkars, 70 Chechens, 50 Karachays, 40 Circassians, 15 Abazins, 15 Nogais, 3 Ingush, and around 300 representatives of the peoples of Dagestan. The larger groups are already organised into independent congregations, while the smaller ones meet in house churches [2].

The ice seems to be breaking. However, this development is less due to the efforts of missionaries, and certainly not to Western missionary efforts in the region, but rather marks an impressive spiritual awakening among the Caucasians.

For centuries, the many peoples of the Caucasus were Christian. The Gospel reached the peoples of the Black Sea as early as the second century. This was the case, for example, with the Abazins and Abkhazians [3]. It was not until the 18th century that these peoples converted to Islam under pressure from the Ottoman Empire [4].

At the beginning of the 19th century, the German Heinrich Julius Klaproth, who traveled through the Caucasus on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported that only the nobility professed Islam here, while the common people remained committed to Christianity [5]. He vividly describes how pork was eaten in some of the villages he visited, a practice that is completely forbidden in the Islamic world [6].

Other travelers to the Caucasus provide similar information. As late as 1867, the year of the baptism of the first Russian, Nikita Voronin, by the German-Lithuanian craftsman and missionary Martin K. Kalweit (1833-1918) in Tiflis, the Russian State Agricultural Commission reported on the many traces of Christianity in the everyday life of the North Caucasian peoples, including wine growing and wine production, which are otherwise completely atypical for Muslims [7].  

To this day, traces of Christianity can be found in the everyday life and culture of the Caucasian peoples, as Habiba A. Habikirowa's research report on the culture of today's Circassians clearly shows [8]. For example, countless references to Christian beliefs, such as Easter, can be found in the songs, folk festivals, and even the names of the Circassians [9]. And the situation is similar among other Caucasian ethnic groups.

In recent years, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in their own Christian history among the peoples of the Caucasus. It is not only the great-grandchildren of the Pontic Armenians who were forcibly converted to Islam in Turkey who are searching for their true ethnic and religious identity [10]. Similar processes can be observed everywhere and constitute the growing openness among Caucasians to turn to Christ and the Gospel.

Western models of evangelism are proving ineffective

Unfortunately, the openness of Caucasians to the Gospel is met with a growing inability on the part of Russian-influenced Protestant circles to carry out their missionary work in an adequate and contextually sensitive manner. As everywhere in the post-Soviet space, the population's interest in Christian evangelism is declining in the Caucasus.

Catherine Wanner, who has studied the situation of Protestant communities in Ukraine, notes that the declining interest is linked to the inability of communities to align their missionary work with the socio-cultural challenges faced by local people [11].

Russian Baptist missiologist Mikhail Cherenkov believes that the reason for this is that Protestant churches in the post-Soviet space do not have their own missiological paradigm and therefore fail to take their own context into account in their missionary work [12].

Western models of mission and evangelism dominate throughout the country today. The existing literature represents Western authors [13]. Original ideas are rare. And Western concepts are taught in theological schools, partly due to the massive presence of Western missionaries in the country after the opening of the borders.

Peter Penner estimates the number of missionaries in the post-Soviet space in 1996 at 5,600 [14]. This massive Western missionary "competence" stifled any attempt to conduct "homegrown" missions in its infancy.

The massive Western presence has had only a very limited impact on the success of evangelising the local population. Critics such as Baptist mission leader Ruwim Woloschin even see Western dominance as the main obstacle to the limited effectiveness of local evangelism and are calling for a separate Russian or Slavic mission theory [15].

Supporters of this demand point to the work of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which has been striving for a genuinely Russian Orthodox mission theory for years and has already achieved remarkable success in this area.

With the book on missiology published by Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Ginkel, the Church now also has its own textbook on the subject of mission, written entirely in accordance with the Church and its tradition [16]. The authors of the work emphasize the absolute necessity of including the missionary history of one's own church in the formulation of missiological principles for today's work. They call for the healing of missionary memory on the way to a contextual draft of a missionary theory [17].

Healing memory – the way forward

In my opinion, our Orthodox colleagues are also showing the way forward for Protestant circles. An adequate theory of mission does not seek to anchor its foundations solely in Holy Scripture, but must interpret these against the background of God's history with his own people in order to arrive at those forms of proclamation that enable the effective evangelization of people in their immediate surroundings here and now. 

Peter Penner is right when he says: "We must take a closer look at the history of mission in the Soviet Union in order to understand the situation today and prepare ourselves for the future" [18]. And his demand can be applied to the entire history of Christianity in the region. And to include the entire history of God's mission means to focus on the development of all Christian churches, whether Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenian Apostolic Protestant, or Free Evangelical.

As far as the Caucasus is concerned, we will probably have to go back to the origins of the Christian faith in the region and restore God's history with the peoples of the region. Only in this way will they return to their own identity and thus also to the lost faith of their fathers. And only in this way will today's missionary community find those instruments of evangelization that will convince and renew the country. The willingness to do so is growing in the region. We need such a journey through Caucasian history in search of memory, to quote Karny [19].

Theological College for the Caucasus

With the founding of the first Theological College for the Caucasus by the North Caucasian Evangelical Alliance (NKEA) in April 2025 in Karachayevsk, Karachay-Cherkessia, entirely new opportunities are opening up for the young Protestant churches in the region to discover their own Christian history and thus heal the missionary memory among their own people.

The many old church buildings and monasteries in their immediate surroundings, which have survived for centuries, still bear witness to the once vibrant Christian history of their people. And traces of Christianity in their everyday culture offer numerous points of contact for missionary dialogue. Discovering and naming these is an urgent task for the first generation of Caucasian theologians. In this way, a mission theory can soon be formulated that will show the Caucasians the way to their historical roots and thus to their lost faith in Jesus Christ.

Of course, willing helpers from the worldwide community of Jesus are needed along the way. The Caucasian churches are still too small and too weak to carry out such plans on their own. They need theologically and historically knowledgeable helpers from abroad who can assist in building up both the university itself and the Mission History Institute located there.

Testimonies of their long and rich Christian history were forcibly removed from their tribal territory by foreign rulers and are now in museums, libraries, and archives in Istanbul, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. The Ottomans, the Russian tsars, and the Soviets have robbed the country of its history. Any clue, no matter how small, as to where these written records remain can be of crucial importance. The Caucasians themselves have only limited access.

Christians and, above all, missionaries and church historians from other countries are needed, especially from Russia and Turkey. But there is probably also valuable material on their history in Western Europe. The German occupiers in World War II took with them many things that they considered valuable when they withdrew. It will be worthwhile to take a closer look.

The Caucasus is awakening spiritually. People are beginning to reflect on their Christian history and are thus also opening themselves to the Gospel and to faith itself. It is a kairos moment for all missionary-minded churches and congregations. We should not sleep through it.

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