Featured author – Dr Vitali Petrenko

I was born in 1965 in the city of Gomel, Belarus, U.S.S.R. My early childhood was spent under the ‘shadow’ of the persecution of Christians, which directly affected both me and my family. My father paid the price by refusing to co-operate with the KGB, with the result that in 1970 he was imprisoned together with other church leaders. These early years left an indelible imprint upon my conscience and faith. Indeed, to a certain extent they ‘pre-ordained’ the future direction of my life and ministry.   In 1972, after my father’s release from prison, our family moved from Belarus to Latvia. The sudden and tragic death of my father in 1976 created a desire within me to follow in his footsteps and to study the Word and to go into ministry. This was, however, impossible to achieve in the Soviet Union. Due to the ‘unwritten’ restrictions for higher education for Christians it wasn’t even possible to embark on a study of foreign languages. Instead, I graduated with distinction from a textile college and worked in the textile industry as a mechanic of textile machinery and subsequently as a lorry driver.   The monumental changes in the Soviet Union brought about through Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost opened up unprecedented possibilities for the followers of Christ. In 1988 I became a youth leader in the ‘Church of the Cross’, Riga, Latvia. Opportunities for the preaching of the Gospel, which had never existed, had arrived; we preached in the open air, in concert halls and in prisons, including in the prison where Aleksey Navalniy, the Russian critic of Putin’s regime, recently died.

The years that followed were filled with different evangelistic outreaches throughout the Soviet Union: trips as far as the Far East, Kamchatka Peninsula and the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circle (‘Yamal’ meaning the ’end of the earth’ in the language of the Nenets people, the indigenous population). In 1991 this culminated in the historical mission ‘Christ to the people of Siberia’, when we planted a number of churches in the region beyond the Ural Mountains.   In 1990 participation in the Lausanne Congress in Moscow changed my life’s direction. My dream of following in the footsteps of my father and studying the Word of God became a reality when the Lord opened an amazing opportunity for me to spend a number of years studying theology at London Bible College obtaining a BA and then an MTh and ultimately a PhD at Durham University, where I graduated in 2006.   The list of publications includes:

• 2000: MTh dissertation published as a book in Russian, Богословие икон, Протестантская точка зрения, Санкт-Петербург, «Библия для всех». This book was later translated into Romanian (2002).
• 2006: Publication of the article ‘West versus East and the Consequences for Russian Christianity’, in the Eurasian Theological Journal, Bogoslovskije razmishleniia, 6 (2006), 69-97.
• 2011: Publication of the PhD dissertation, The Development of the Authority within the Russian Orthodox Church. Peter Lang, Oxford (English); Colloquium, Ukraine (Russian).
• 2014: Reflections on Church Planting in Latvia, VTR Publications; Verlag für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft   The following years were a time of great joy in fruitful ministry. In 2008, I returned to Riga, Latvia, to run the Latvian Biblical Center (LBC, www.bible.lv) together with my wife, Ester Petrenko, who subsequently became the Academic Dean. It was also a joy for me to be the associate pastor at Salvation Temple, Riga, Latvia, and an associate professor at the Norwegian School of Leadership and Theology (HLT) in Oslo, Norway. I taught various courses such as Church History, Dogmatics, Christian Initiation, Apologetics, and Global History. Following the completion of this ministry in Latvia, in 2022 our family moved to Portugal. We continue to teach at HLT in Oslo, Norway, and I am also a pastor in the local Slavic church in Lisbon.