TEN YEARS IN RUSSIA - From FSOF blog
Otto Ljungholm's Diary - Moscow
1918 Page
47
Adding today: Kiev
Ukraine March 28, 1993 (74
years since the last entry)
I
don't know if I'm allowed to do this grandfather, to write on these pages, but
I wanted to share our victories with you and perhaps just somehow, to bring the
diary up to date - to in some way keep it alive to inspire others.
It
seems
a bit strange that after only a year since our official re-opening
ceremonies in Moscow that so many Muscovites accept our presence as both
necessary and almost commonplace. A year ago the uniformed presence of
my wife Kathie or me in the Metro (subway), Red Square, or Gorky Street
would solicit both
quizzical stares and flurries of questions. Since that time, however,
the
Army’s presence in more than 40 Moscow soup kitchens, a nightly soup run
to the
Leningradsky Vachsal – railway station, and monthly visits and
distribution of
aid to more than 360 institutions and organizations, including the
notorious Boutirka
Prison have made the Army’s Christian social work commonplace.
Coupled
with the very active and visual social services have been snippets aired on
television and in media columns, sharing highlights of our Sunday School and
Holiness meetings. Therefore, perhaps one shouldn't be surprised that uniformed
soldiers of Moscow’s Central Corps are often asked by fellow Muscovites: “Where
is your church located – Is it on Gorky Street near Красная
площадь, Red Square? The question is a valid one, however, one that cannot be
answered concretely with respect to the inquirer’s assumptions.
Bishop William Temple said: “The
church is the only organization in the world that doesn’t exist for the sake of
its members.” And that recently established branch of the Christian church
whose soldiers march forward in Jesus’ name on Moscow’s Gorky Street, and soon on
the streets of Ukraine and Moldova, is no different. General Eva Burrows has
made clear: “The Salvation Army exists
for others. Its people are the despairing and the dispossessed, the homeless
and the hopeless, the lonely and the lost.”
On October 17, 1918 Adjutant Otto Ljungholm conducted the first Salvation
Army meeting in Moscow in the 250 seat auditorium C in the Polytechnic Museum,
filled to overflowing…. Within weeks the Bolsheviks moved on government orders
to force the expulsion of the Salvation Army from Russia.
Seventy three years later, almost to the day, Salvation Army
meetings were reinstated in the very hall where Adjutant Otto Ljungholm welcomed
the first Russian penitent to the Mercy Seat. The rented ‘hall’ used when the
Army was reinstated in late 1991 in Moscow was filled with an equally expectant
standing room only crowd of more than 200. And the sermon notes were built on
the notes in grandfather Otto’s diary from that first meeting.
On reflection a year later I see clearly that God’s message to
us on that day when Kathie and I ‘re-opened fire’ was that He, can and will
shape the church when and where He pleases.
And we’d disproved Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claim that “you can’t
buy a ticket to yesterday”.
I recall as though it was yesterday when our Toyota van first
cross Red Square, weighed down with 1000 Russian New Testaments, song sheets, a
few hundred blankets, our two suitcases and an Army flag! Nineteen months has
flown by since Kathie and I first stood on Gorky Street, surrounded by the
needy, Moscow’s needs wondering where do we start? And “who are we to have been
entrusted by our leaders to begin such a work?”
TO
BE CONTINUED
