U.S.-Backed Christian Mission Rescues Thousands of Orphans in Russia, Ukraine in ‘Race against Evil’

by Stefan J. Bos, Worthy News Europe Bureau Chief

MOSCOW/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – A U.S.-based Christian mission says it works to rescue “thousands of orphaned teenagers” across the former Soviet Union from a “race against evil” — a fight to keep them from “being sucked into prostitution, slavery, and organized crime.”

The Slavic Gospel Association (SGA) warned Wednesday that “87 percent of teenagers who age out of state-run orphanages” in war-torn Ukraine, Russia, and other post-Soviet nations “will fall victim to these horrors or even suicide — unless someone intervenes.”

The organization estimates that about 700,000 orphaned or abandoned children “languish in bleak institutions” in the region. Upon turning 18, they are released with no support system.

“Unless someone steps in to help them, these lonely teenagers are easy targets for sex traffickers and criminal gangs,” said Michael Johnson, president of SGA, an evangelical mission agency that has supported orphans for decades.

A U.S. State Department report last year confirmed the dangers, stating: “Traffickers lure children from state and municipal orphanages into forced begging, forced criminality, sex trafficking, use by armed groups… and other forms of abuse.”

Years of neglect, abuse, and abandonment often leave orphans emotionally hardened, making them vulnerable to exploitation, according to Christian aid workers.

ORPHANS REBORN

SGA said it supports “a ministry called Orphans Reborn,” where “trained volunteers from local churches visit orphanages every week, even in the remotest outposts of Siberia.”

“Their mission is to show orphans they are loved, and that there is hope,” Johnson said, adding that “the Gospel is at the heart of everything.”

However, these volunteers sometimes face direct competition from “other visitors with dark motives — criminals who groom children,” Johnson warned.

In one orphanage, volunteers were teaching Bible stories to children in one room, while just down the hall, gang members trained boys in martial arts and groomed young girls for sex trafficking.

“It’s a race against evil,” Johnson stressed in a statement to the Worthy News Europe Bureau in Budapest.

Sergei, a local Christian who asked not to use his last name, knows that “world of evil” all too well — he once worked as a sex trafficker, “using my communication skills to establish connections with the police, transfer money, and make arrangements.”

MEETING GOD

“All that changed,” Sergei said, now a Christian, after he “met God,” an encounter that transformed his life.

“I felt God calling me to help the very girls with whom I once worked,” he explained. “No one else was doing it. I asked for help and only heard, ‘We’ll call you back’ — but there were no calls. Then my wife said, ‘How long will we sit at home? We have two thermoses. Let’s fill them with tea and go.’”

What began with two flasks of tea “grew into a ministry” that helped more than 30 girls and young women leave the sex trade, he said.

Christians confirmed that many of those rescued began new lives and found a “family” in their local church community.

“More than anything, children in state institutions long to be part of a loving family,” said Eric Mock, SGA’s senior vice president of ministry operations and a frequent visitor to orphanages across the former Soviet Union.

Mock recalled a young boy at a church-run soccer camp who ran home to show his mother the prize he had won — only to be beaten unconscious with a stick.

UNWANTED CHILDREN

“In front of her son, she told me, ‘I’m just stuck with him. I don’t love him. I don’t want him,” Mock said. “He ended up as an orphan. Unfortunately, his story is not unusual.”

Through the SGA-supported orphan ministry, local Christians hold “weekly Bible studies, share the Gospel, and build relationships with children who’ve been cast aside and forgotten,” organizers said.

When teens leave orphanages, evangelical churches welcome them, “providing the stable, caring family environment they crave, and helping them practically with such things as food and finding a job,” according to SGA.

“They do much more than just minister to these kids,” Mock said. “At long last, they are family.”

Since its founding in 1934, SGA has been helping “forgotten” orphans, widows, and families in Ukraine, Russia, and other post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

It also supports Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel — “caring for their physical needs and sharing the life-transforming Gospel” — and works through “an extensive grassroots network of local evangelical missionary pastors and churches in cities and rural villages.”

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