Of War & Wallpaper: Part 1

Yes, No or Otherwise

After her first date with James, people warned Lisa she was making a mistake. Her friends and even one of her professors chided her, “Why are you dating a youth pastor? You’re a missions major!”

They had a point. The next time Lisa saw James, instead of greeting him with a hello, she launched straight to the heart of the issue: “Are you interested in missions or not?”

James didn’t consider that a yes-or-no question. “I’m willing to go wherever God wants me to serve,” he told her. That answer earned him a second date, and then another, as they explored what ministry together might look like. A year later, in 1992, James and Lisa became Mr. and Mrs. Walker.

James describes ministry decision-making as the convergence of three elements: where you go, what you do and who you do it with. “For some people,” he explains, “the place solidifies first, and they’re certain, I’m going to be a missionary in this particular country. For other people, the type of ministry lines up first. For us, it was our relationship. We knew God wanted us together. The rest was just real estate.”

New Real Estate

After two years of marriage and youth ministry, the Walkers felt the Lord drawing them to a new ministry farther from home. They joined Pioneers in 1994 and committed to a team in the city of Moigorod in the just-barely-former Soviet Union.

Moigorod wasn’t an obvious location to begin a missionary career. During the Cold War, it had manufactured nuclear warheads and had therefore been treated as something of a state secret. When the Walkers arrived, the city’s location still wasn’t identified on most maps—even though it had a population of well over half a million, about the same as present-day Memphis or Detroit. To make matters worse, as James and Lisa prepared for the move, the team they intended to join disintegrated. Within about six months everyone left except for a single woman whose visa situation appeared quite tenuous. Wow, Lisa thought, This team isn’t even going to be there by the time we move. Lord, really?

The Walkers still had reasons to stay the course. James loved teaching, discipleship and working with youth. Lisa had done a short-term trip to Turkey in college and wanted to serve Muslims. Moigorod brought it all together. The team had established a training institute offering computer and English classes for young adults. The programs allowed them to build relationships with Turkic Muslims living as a minority group in a post-Soviet context. James and Lisa were excited about teaching at the institute, befriending young people and hosting short-term teams from the U.S. They also hoped to encourage the Slavic churches of Moigorod to reach out to their Muslim neighbors. As a practical consideration, James suffered from asthma and that limited their location options to places with relatively clean air. A visit to Moigorod confirmed the air quality would work for him.

James and Lisa weren’t put off by the dispersion of their intended team. When they visited, they connected well with the national staff at the training institute and other local believers. Rebuilding the team would take time, but the Walkers had time. As Lisa explains, “I wanted to be long-term. We saw ourselves as ‘lifers.’” But even she admits, “What we meant by ‘lifers’ wasn’t completely defined.”

Lifers

Lisa Walker remained fully committed to a long-term vision for ministry as they sold off their belongings in the U.S., said goodbye to family and friends and boarded each flight toward their new home. She was excited to be a “lifer” as they rocked along for hours on the Soviet-era train from the capital to Moigorod. She was all in up until the moment she and James walked through the door of their new apartment for the first time. And then she regretted everything.

“It was so ugly,” Lisa remembers. Garish purple and orange wallpaper draped the front hallway, and the rest of the apartment wasn’t any better. “I just remember looking around and thinking, How can I make this home?”

When Lisa crawled into the lumpy bed that first night, she told James, “We made a big mistake. Can we please just go home?”

He assured her, “We can go home tomorrow.”

“It was just shocking,” Lisa explains. She had visited Moigorod before, but it felt so different to be there permanently. “It felt so foreign. And uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I wasn’t up for adventure, and I didn’t need luxury. But the enormity of what we had done hit all at once. I just moved to a different continent. I don’t know anyone. I don’t know the language. I felt so incredibly vulnerable.”

The next night, Lisa repeated her plea, “Can we go home?”

Once again James answered, “Tomorrow.”

James doesn’t remember feeling the same emotional intensity as Lisa in those early days in Moigorod. “Of the two of us, she was the missions person,” he explains. “To me, it didn’t matter where I served God, so it wasn’t as much of a struggle. I didn’t have to live overseas. I also didn’t feel, I want to go home now.”

It took two weeks of “tomorrows” before Lisa stopped asking to go home every night. As they unpacked, the sad little apartment started to feel more like home. Getting to know people also helped pull her out of the slump.

Daily life in Moigorod still wasn’t easy. The Walkers’ apartment was so small they could vacuum every inch of it without changing electrical outlets. The washing machine wandered across the kitchen floor during the spin cycle and pulled its drainage hose out of the sink unless someone sat on it. Grocery stores seemed designed to prevent customers from buying things. James and Lisa had to stand in line at the counter in each department and request items by name. The salesperson would bark out a five-digit price which they were expected to remember while standing in line for the central cashier who totaled the amounts they reported on an abacus. After paying the cashier, they stood in line again at each department to show the receipt and receive their groceries—assuming they had done everything correctly. They soon learned to read an abacus upside-down to make shopping more efficient.

But the Walkers’ new life also had its perks. During the gloriously long winters, a near-constant sprinkling of snow covered the industrial grime and reflected every particle of light. It was like living inside a snow globe. When the weather turned too cold for snowflakes to form and fall, the moisture froze suspended in the air, and the sky itself sparkled. Moigorod also featured a vibrant performing arts scene—a city orchestra performing classical masterpieces, one of the best ballet companies in the former Soviet Union and dance troupes representing the Slavic and Turkic minority cultures in the area. James and Lisa learned to ski, bought fur hats and drank gallons of hot, sweet tea.

After about a year in Moigorod, Lisa learned she was pregnant. Complications brought the Walkers back to the U.S. for the delivery of their son, Daniel. That’s when James knew their transition to the field was complete. Lisa wanted to go home again, and this time she meant Moigorod.

The Good, the Bad and the Suspicious

Most of the Walkers’ first two years in the field were devoted to language study and cultural adaptation. Like most cities in formerly Soviet republics in the 90s, Moigorod functioned in Russian, but it had no organized language-learning programs. James and Lisa improvised with a hodge-podge of private tutors and a few books they had brought with them or inherited from other foreigners. Just weeks after their arrival, James was asked to teach a computer course on Microsoft Windows at the training institute. He thought, “I know Windows. I can teach that,” not realizing that all the labels and menus would be in Russian. Some of his first vocabulary words were the Russian equivalents of “File” and “Edit.”

The Walkers’ ministry efforts got off to a rocky start as well. Soon after they arrived, the government passed a law prohibiting proselytization by foreigners. It suddenly became illegal for James and Lisa to pray out loud unless a local person specifically asked them to. They could only share their faith in response to a direct question. “It made the start of our missionary life a little bit odd,” James admits. “We had thought the country was wide open for ministry, but by the time we got there, it wasn’t anymore.”

Despite the challenges, the Walkers were fully immersed in ministry and the local community within a few years. James summarizes life in Moigorod as “something good and something bad always happening at the same time.” When the anti-proselytization law first came into effect, the Walkers were concerned. But as time went by, they saw it wasn’t going to impede their ministry. If anything, the law encouraged them to work in closer partnership with the local Slavic churches so they could truthfully say, “The church asked us to do this.”

The Walkers’ visas were sponsored by the training institute, so James spent a lot of his time teaching English and computers. His classes provided opportunities to get to know students and share about his faith when asked. Outside of his work commitments to the institute, James helped teach local believers to share their faith, study their Bibles and plant new churches among the Turkic Muslims and other minority peoples near Moigorod. The Walkers also hosted a short-term team from the U.S. every summer and recruited teammates. By the early 2000s, the Moigorod team had grown to 10 family units. James and Lisa also added a daughter, Brittany, to their own family.

But as ministry opportunities grew, so did pressure on foreigners suspected of being missionaries. Police enforced the anti-proselytization law with enthusiasm and in some cases malice. The Walkers heard stories of authorities planting drugs on Americans and then arresting them. Rather than feeling intimidated, they became bolder. James explains, “We were trying our best to follow the law. But we decided if they wanted us gone, they would frame us for something. I would rather get kicked out of the country for doing what I came to do than for what they might make up.”

It wasn’t as if the police didn’t know how the Walkers spent their time. Their phone was bugged. “Everybody’s phone was bugged,” Lisa clarifies, “It wasn’t really very special.” When James’s dad was planning a visit, they asked him over the phone to bring a good tape measure because they hadn’t found one for sale in Moigorod in three years. The following week, every store in the city suddenly stocked tape measures. Street vendors sold sunflower seeds, cigarettes and tape measures. At one point, the Walkers met a young man who said his job was to translate recordings of phone calls from English to Russian.

“Phone calls about what?” They asked in surprise. He started to recount one, then stopped abruptly and changed the subject.

“It was stressful to be under surveillance,” James admits, “But you find ways to get used to it.” The Walkers sometimes paused during phone calls to explain jokes or cultural references their uninvited listeners might not have understood. It didn’t seem to interfere with the ministry. Lisa started an English club for moms and young children with a teatime programmed into the curriculum. She says, “We got to know the ladies and talk about their lives.” For Lisa, talking about life meant talking about faith.

Through all the good and all the hard of ministry, James and Lisa felt the pressure on Christians in Moigorod, and all over the country, continue to increase. New laws were passed to limit the freedom of local believers, not just foreigners. A church was prohibited from meeting in the building they owned. They were eventually able to overturn the ban in court, but the government clearly opposed the growing Christian presence in Moigorod.

Questions and Answers

Despite—or perhaps partly because of—increasing opposition, the Walkers felt momentum building in their ministry. They had invested five years in deepening their relationships with local churches. They spoke Russian well enough to develop heart-level friendships. Their vision of reaching the Turkic Muslims in their region was just on the cusp of bearing fruit. And James and Lisa had lived in Moigorod long enough to be eligible for a five-year visa. That would save the cost and stress of frequent renewals.

Their optimism dimmed somewhat the afternoon that Anya, the office manager for the training institute, got a phone call instructing James to appear at a drab, concrete government office downtown. The appointment turned into somewhere between four and six hours of interrogation. James was provided with an official translator who seemed to relish his job when the questioning started. By the end, he just looked confused. Two uniformed officials grilled James about his activities at the institute, which he was happy to describe in detail. They also wanted to know what he did in his free time.

“You teach a pastor’s class,” they accused him.

“Yes, I do,” James answered.

“That proves you’re a missionary!”

“I am the director of the institute,” James explained, “and I oversee all the programs. I use my time outside of work to teach the pastor’s class.”

The translator asked for clarification, “You mean it’s like your hobby?”

“Sure,” James told him, “You can describe it that way.”

The authorities eventually let him go, but they stepped up their surveillance. Not long after the interrogation, a friend told him, “I got called in to talk about you. They told me that if I don’t sign a document, they’ll take away my job and my apartment.” When Lisa next went for a haircut, her long-time hairdresser was called away by her boss. When she returned, the woman’s chatty demeanor had vanished, and her hands trembled. In a flat, dull voice, she asked Lisa, “Who really pays you? How do you get your money?” Lisa responded that she got her money from the corner ATM like everyone else and left as soon as possible. “We felt sorry for our friends,” Lisa remembers. “They felt the stress of knowing us.”

A Danger

James was summoned to the city immigration office a few weeks later. This time the Walkers both went, along with Anya and a lawyer. A woman they recognized met them in the lobby and escorted them to her office. She had befriended Lisa at a business luncheon the week before. They had made plans to get together and cook some American recipes. Now James and Lisa realized the woman was an immigration officer who had been surveilling them. She looked uncomfortable as she informed James that he was being deported as a “Danger to the Republic.”

James asked what laws he had broken. She said the relevant laws were classified and instructed him to sign a document acknowledging the charge. For a moment, James considered not cooperating. “What if I don’t?” he asked.

The officer looked even more unhappy. “In a few days, the police will come to your house and put you in prison.”

“Honey, that is not an option,” Lisa told him firmly.

Anya agreed. “You’ll disappear, and we’ll never hear from you again.”

With the lawyer’s help, James wrote on the document, in Russian, that he didn’t agree with the statement and was signing it under duress. He added his signature on top of that text so it would be difficult to alter.

The immigration official told James he had 10 days to leave the country, but she emphasized to Lisa, “You’re not being deported, so you don’t have to leave.”

“Do you think I’d stay here without my husband?” Lisa asked in shock. “I’m just sorry we won’t get to cook together after all.”

James and Lisa rode home from the immigration office in a daze. When they shared the news with their friends and family in the U.S., one of the responses they heard was, “It’s fine. You can come home now. You did your thing.” Lisa bristled at that. She had just lost her house. Her friends. Her job. She didn’t think she could handle returning to the U.S., where people would tell her, “It’s good that you’re home. Now you’re safe.” So, standing in their little Soviet kitchen next to the roaming washing machine, Lisa asked James, “What if we don’t go back to America?”

They decided to ask their area leader, based in Western Europe, if they could come to his city temporarily to figure out what to do next instead of returning to the U.S. He agreed with their plan immediately over the phone. Western Europe would be their “strategic waiting place” long before anyone used that term.

A Guarded Goodbye

Lisa describes their last 10 days in Moigorod as “unbearable.” They had to hurriedly hand over the leadership of their ministries to teammates and local believers. Over the next few years, all 10 foreign families on their team would gradually be pushed out of Moigorod, all for different reasons and often with little warning.

The Walkers packed two suitcases per person to take with them to Europe—mainly clothes, photos and keepsakes. They also stored some boxes for a friend to ship to them once they’d resettled. Brittany was only one, too little to feel much attachment to anything except her family. But Daniel was three, and he sobbed as he watched his toys disappear into boxes. James and Lisa made sure to pack his favorite Thomas the Tank Engine train and one circle of track in their luggage, but the rest had to go into storage.

Partway through the Walkers’ 10-day departure period, a uniformed guard appeared at the entrance to their apartment block with the tip of a machine gun sticking out of his black duffel bag. Lisa called a teammate and told her, “The kids and I are coming to stay at your house. My babies can’t handle all this pressure of watching us give away their things.” James finished emptying the apartment and met the rest of the family at the train station.

Even then, the wonderful and menacing aspects of life in Moigorod continued to coexist side-by-side. All the Walkers’ local friends gathered on the train platform to say goodbye. While they wept, sang hymns and pressed notes into James and Lisa’s hands, the armed guard hovered in the background. A teammate accompanied the Walkers to the capital to help manage the kids and luggage, but the train supervisor had clearly been warned about them. Every time they opened the door of their cabin, she rushed up to ask, “What are you doing?” and block the exit.

When they finally reached the airport, the Walkers stuffed as many heavy things as they could into their stroller and the pockets of their winter coats to keep their suitcases under the weight limit. Then they walked through passport control one last time. James and Lisa wouldn’t get to be “lifers” in Moigorod after all, but they hoped to find a new chapter of missionary service somewhere else, maybe with less orange-and-purple wallpaper.