Friday, September 18, 2026

It is the 18th of September 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

One thing that totalitarian governments seemed to have learned in the last century is that outlawing and persecuting the church tends to have the opposite effects to the ones desired by the government that wants to stamp out all belief.

 

Instead of a full frontal attack, these governments found that a better approach was to come alongside the institutions, feign support, and slowly guide them towards being arms of state propaganda. Such was the case with the Soviet Union with their “Council for the Affairs of Religions and Cults” and the creation of the All-Union Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists. Baptists had grown exponentially in the Soviet Union after World War I (that’s a story for another time, but in large part due to missionaries and especially missionaries evangelizing soviet prisoners of War who then took their faith back home).

 

Baptists- usually known for their rejection of state intervention- staged a defiant act in petitioning for the abolition of their own legal mode of existence! Contemporary Soviet reports call them a “generally backward and shamelessly deceived people” who met on this, the 18th of September in 1965, to create their own private council of churches of the Evangelical Christian Baptists. The group was headed by Georgi Vins- a man neither backward nor deceived and part of a lineage of missionaries with ties to Russia, Canada, and the United States.

 

The patriarch was Jacob Wiens- a Mennonite evangelist near the Ural Mountains in Russia in the 19th century. He and his wife Elizabeth had a son, Peter, who would follow the family when they immigrated to the United States in 1911 and then settled in Saskatchewan in 1912.

 

Peter would return to the States to attend the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville and was ordained. He had an early call to Pittsburgh, where he ministered to Russian immigrants. This, in the 1920s, led him to consider returning to his native land to serve as a minister. By 1928, he and his new wife, Lydia, had moved to Russia, settled near the Manchurian border, and gave birth to a son, Georgi.

 

Peter was routinely arrested for his evangelistic work; in 1935 he was arrested for the last time and never seen again. Georgi and Lydia moved to Ukraine, where Georgi studied engineering. He was married, had five children, and could have settled down for a quiet life in the job for which he had trained. But he felt the call in the early 1960s and decided to become a secret evangelist like his father. By then the government was cracking down on dissidents, and the state-sponsored All Union Council tried to bring them all into the fold. Georgi, one of the leaders of the dissent, was there on this day in 1965 to reject it and create their own independent group.

 

Within a year, he would be arrested and sentenced to three years of hard labor. Upon being released, he continued to preach and reject the state-sponsored union. In 1974 he was arrested again and sentenced to 10 years of labor. His son, named Peter after his deceased father, also entered the family business of illegal preaching. He was arrested and sent to a camp with the charge of “parasitism” (that is, not doing real work that was considered beneficial to the community).

 

In 1979, he received a shock when he was taken to a new prison where he was told to shower and then given a suit to wear. Ushered to a plane, he soon learned that President Jimmy Carter had arranged a prisoner swap. Georgi’s family would soon join him, but he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

 

With the coming of Gorbachev and his reforms, Georgi and his family were allowed to come back- he did so numerous times in the 1990s to preach and tell his story (it’s collected and translated into English as “The Gospel in Bonds”). Georgi would live until a brain tumor took his life- he died in Indiana in 1998. His son Peter lived with his family in Ukraine until the recent invasion- the fourth generation of Vins ministers was last known to be working with a Catholic charity in Portland, Oregon. Today we remember that remarkable Wiens or Vins family and the dissent that led to the underground Baptists and Georgi’s arrest on this day in 1965.

 

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and another Psalm- this is from 105:

1 Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
 make known among the nations what he has done.

2 Sing to him, sing praise to him;
 tell of all his wonderful acts.

3 Glory in his holy name;
 let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice.

4 Look to the Lord and his strength;
 seek his face always.

5 Remember the wonders he has done,
 his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced,

6 you his servants, the descendants of Abraham,
 his chosen ones, the children of Jacob.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 18th of September 2026 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who knows the Soviet creed was “We believe in one state, almighty, maker of five-year plans”; he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who knows that in Soviet Russia, you do not separate church from state; the state separates the church from everything. I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.