The Reverend Peter Rumachik, who spent more than 18 years
imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag prison, will be speaking Tuesday
evening at Calvary Baptist Church at 7pm, highlighting the church’s
mission conference that begins Sunday and ends Wednesday.
The Reverend Peter Rumachik, who spent more than 18 years imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag prison, will be speaking Tuesday evening at Calvary Baptist Church at 7pm, highlighting the church’s mission conference that begins Sunday and ends Wednesday.
Rumachik was the former vice-president of the Russian Council of Evangelical Baptist Churches (CEBC), which coordinated the efforts of approximately 2,000 unregistered or underground congregations that were against the Soviet government’s laws against organized religion.
Because of his leadership in the illegal movement, Rumachik was singled out and endured some of the harshest treatment delivered to any Christian during the Soviet government’s war on religion.
In 1961, Rumachik was arrested and tried in a highly publicized trial in the USSR. He was charged with starting a church, holding services in a private home and organizing children’s activities and youth work and was subsequently sentenced to five years in the infamous Gulag prison camps of Siberia. In August 1980, he was again sentenced to an additional five years of hard labor in the Soviet prison camps.
He was so brutally treated during this time that he was hospitalized for over three months. Later, he was arrested and tried three more times and sentenced to harsh prison terms in various locations in the former Soviet Union. Rumachik accepted his cruel sentences with dignity, grace and faith.
On February 5, 1987, Rumachik was released as a result of the reforms introduced by Mikhal Gorbachev.
Baptist International Evangelistic Ministries (BIEM), an Indianapolis-based mission agency that has sponsored Rumachik’s visit to the United States, has started several churches in the Moscow area where Rumachik serves as pastor. One of theses new churches meets in the very cultural center where Rumachik was publicly tried and sentenced.
Rumachik will give his moving testimony of how his faith in God sustained him, his family and his church through his imprisonments. For more information, contact the church office at 637-2909.
