Breaking the Pavement in Ukraine

Breaking the Pavement in Ukraine

Publication: The Lookout

Date: November 13, 2005

Column: First Look

Category: Missions; Sergei Golovin

I met Sergei Golovin last summer when I taught a class at Haus Edelweiss, a training center for Eastern European church leaders near Vienna, Austria. After meals we dried dishes together in the kitchen, laughing and trading stories.

A native of Ukraine who was indoctrinated in materialistic atheism, Sergei earned a master's degree in geophysics. When a work assignment took him to an Arctic island about 600 miles from the North Pole, he drove a snow scooter across the mountains to a Norwegian settlement where he noticed a road sign that said, "The northernmost church in the world." He stopped in, and there he received his first complete Bible in Russian.

"After installing geophysical recording equipment," Sergei says, "I was alone with little to do, and I started to read from Genesis. I found this book told the truth about everything I could put to the test. So if I was looking for a reliable source of information on matters I could not test, this was it. From Genesis I found out why the gospel is so important, and why Christ came and sacrificed his life. Through science I came to the Bible, and through the Bible I came to Christ."

"After three months, everything I read in the New Testament made personal sense. So I went to a Russian Orthodox Church—the only church I knew. I told them I believed in Christ, and asked to be baptized. I didn't join the congregation, though, because this church seemed unlike the church in the Bible—more like a state church."

Why did he decide to be baptized? "Because I read about it in the Bible! It's right there, so I had to do it," he says matter-of-factly.

Continuing his work in a university research department, Sergei wanted others to discover Christ too, but the school authorities wouldn't allow him to share his faith publicly; so he held secret meetings with students and professors. When this was discovered, Sergei was told that if he persisted, he could not continue his doctoral studies. His thesis was already completed, he had patented inventions in geophysics and laser optics, and he had authored several professional journal articles. However, he left the university and began ministering with the church. His wife Olga, a physicist, sewed clothes to earn food for the family.

His academic colleagues wouldn't talk to him about Christ or creation, so Sergei hired some of them as translators and scientific consultants, which forced them to read the material. He says, "Several became baptized Christians as a result."

"Capitalism alone is not able to fill the spiritual vacuum left by Marxism's collapse," Sergei observes, "and the result is the growth of crime, drugs, occultism, and suicide."

"In Ukraine," he continues, "we now have 1.3 divorces for every new marriage, and about two abortions for every child born. Plus a lot of abandoned street kids. Our ministry is involved in missions to street kids and orphanages, but this is fighting the symptoms. To fight the disease itself we have to change the worldview, to restore the foundations of society and the family. When people believe they are nothing more than evolved animals, they tend to behave accordingly, and to act increasingly less human."

Today Sergei Golovin leads a ministry in Ukraine called the Christian Center for Science and Apologetics. After seeing Sergei's "Science and the Bible" video series, a Latvian man said, "It's right—God created us." The next day he went to church, repented, and was baptized. "For 10 years his wife had preached the gospel to him," says Sergei, "but the seeds fell on the pavement. But as soon as the pavement was broken by the creation message, the fruit came."

Sergei's personal testimony is available on his website, www.scienceandapologetics.org.