A couple of weeks ago I found myself looking through the titles that line the shelves of my little church library. I was early and looking to entertain myself for a few spare minutes until the others arrived for prayer. As I scanned the colourful spines filling the shelves with an ecclectic mix of Biblical commentaries, biographies and Christian Romance fiction, a battered copy of I Found God in Soviet Russia by John Noble caught my eye. I pulled it from its place and was soon absorbed in his story.
An American stranded in Germany for the course of WW2, John Noble found himself behind a new enemy’s lines in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany. Quickly arrested without charges, the young man was confined in an East German prison, and two Soviet-operated former Nazi concentration camps;— until finally he was shipped east with a ten year sentence to slave labour in a Siberian gulag. And, the thing about the gulag—you weren’t meant to survive it. The Soviet penal system intended to wring every last bit of strength from a person’s body before erasing him from memory. Bitter cold, near starvation, hopelessness, and unimaginable cruelty were the daily lot of gulag prisoners. It's a story that none of us would choose for ourselves.
It was in the midst of Noble’s starvation in his first days of arbitrary imprisonment that God intervened. He didn’t send an angel to open the prison door and lead the formerly worldly young man out. Instead, the Almighty God joined him in prison. And thus began John Noble’s sojourn as an ambassador for Christ in one of the most hopeless places on earth;—a place no missionary could be sent. The Soviets sentenced John Noble intending for him to die, but God sent him to tell others how to live.
Noble's account witnesses to the world the existence—and explosive growth—of the Church Behind Barbed Wire. Prisoners of every ethnic, religious and cultural extraction found themselves desperate to worship together in secret without deference to denomination or tradition. Miracles were worked and people were saved even as they died. Orthodox priests served communion to prisoners with water standing in place of wine, and hoarded crumbs of bread for the body of Christ. Nuns who refused to do work for the devil through atheistic communism frightened their captors with their miraculous survival of torture and exposure to the Siberian cold. Lutherans shared their memorization of the Word. Baptists evangelized bringing revival. The Church Behind Barbed Wire had such a powerful testimony that even as the Soviet guards seized the smuggled Bibles—they hoarded them— hungry to read the Word of God themselves.
Wherever you are is not an accident.
It is a commission.
In the midst of suffering, it is easy to wonder about the goodness of God for allowing it. It is more difficult to regard yourself as an agent of light sent undercover into darkness. But that is the truth. God purposefully places His people behind enemy lines to be agents of His Kingdom;
“…to proclaim freedom for the captives and the release from darkness for the prisoners…” (Isaiah 61:2)
