This Week's Story
click here to play audioLocked doors swing open in Soviet Russia when Dwayne King and a team bring Bibles.
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Dwayne King - An Urgent Life Adventure, part six
September 1991 the Piper Navajo was inside Soviet airspace and starting to descend toward the military airstrip in Far East Russia. At age forty-nine Dwayne King was stepping into an urgent and startling life adventure!
He was part of an American led mission launched two years earlier to help revive the tiny network of Evangelical and Baptist churches that had survived seventy years of Soviet government’s attempts to eradicate Christianity in the U.S.S.R.
Dwayne had been in God’s school many years. Now he and a team member went into a customs’ room.
A Russian agent asked “Vut is purpose of your coming?”
“Religious business,” Dwayne answered, as earlier told to say.
“Vut in baggage?”
“Clothes, personal belongings, gifts, printed materials.”
“Take out”
Dwayne began unpacking 200 Russian-language New testaments.
“Zese is not allowed!”
“But we’re not selling them. We’re going to give them to people.”
“You give me one!”
“I’ll give you two!”
He took two, slightly smiled, and said, “Go!”
More guards and customs’ agents asked for and received Bibles.
Soon the Americans were surrounded by people wanting Bibles.
“In the region Dwayne was in, there were no Evangelical or Baptist churches. There was no underground church. There was no above-ground church. There was one Russian Orthodox church.”
Soon Dwayne and the team with him were invited to a home. For the next few days, the team shared their faith in schools and on the streets with an interpreter.
The Russian government had forbidden their citizens to have Bibles and teach children the Christian faith. It had brutally forced a policy of atheism. In 1989 the Soviet Union began crumbling.
Dwayne’s life school was drastically different. It had begun with a lively loving family in upstate New York. By age seventeen he knew he wanted to marry Carolyn Pfaff. He did so in 1963 after attending Practical Bible Training School.
After graduating from LeTourneau College, he and Carolyn went to Kenai Peninsula in Alaska where his first love, aviation, became a means to serve God. In 1970 they joined the mission organization SEND International.
His next destination was Tok, Alaska. He was to build a body of Christian believers who would work together. He would get to know Indian people in the surrounding villages.
The next home for Dwayne, Carolyn, and their four children was above the Arctic Circle in Bettles, Alaska. He and Carolyn learned that God was at work in the people’s hearts to whom they were teaching the Bible.
The last assignment in Alaska was ministry in Glennallen. Dwayne was busy as chief pilot for SEND, recruiter for Alaska Bible College, and often in a pulpit preaching or on air at KCAM.
Now he realized he was being called to a new commitment. Over the next ten years Dwayne and Carolyn served and lived in Russia. Other Americans helped. Many churches reopened; others began. Russians in Far Eastern Russia and eastern Siberia had open doors for witness. Many doors have now closed with governmental changes in Russia.
Information in this account was taken from interviews and the book entitled Open the Sky by Mark Winheld.
Today’s recording team is Nathan Thomas and Todd Warren for Barbara Steiner. Pursue weekly reading of thisweeksstory.com.
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