Finding the father in God’s Word

“I loved my mother but I couldn’t stand what was going on at home. I still came around and helped with the housework. I wasn’t an orphan – I just didn’t want to be at home.”

KYZYL, Tuva Republic — Anton Salikov grew up with no father and an alcoholic mother. Things were so bad at their home in the town of Olmsk that he and his young sister used to think it would be better if they lived on the streets.

“I loved my mother but I couldn’t stand what was going on at home,” explains Mr Salikov. “I still came around and helped with the housework. I wasn’t an orphan – I just didn’t want to be at home.”

n As a fatherless boy, Anton Salikov felt overjoyed when he read in the Bible that he was a child of God

During the long hours each day he spent away from home, he felt empty and alone and started wondering about, as he puts it, “an unknown spiritual world around me.”

“I tried learning about many religions but I was not satisfied with what I found,” he says. “With the situation at home I just could not see a future for my life. I knew that I could not go on like that.”

His despair deepened at what he saw around him, too. Many of his friends were going through similar problems with alcoholic parents. Just when things seemed at their darkest, he heard about God’s Word.

“My aunt shared God’s Word with me,” he says. “When she became a Christian, she was suddenly happy. She had hope and she wanted to share it with me.”

Fatherless

When he started reading the Bible, one particular aspect of the message touched the fatherless boy deeply and changed his life.

“What spoke to me the most when I started reading the Bible was the fact that God is our father,” he remembers. “I loved reading that. When I read the words, ‘God loves you’ and ‘You are my child,’ that was so exciting for me. For me, that was the best news in the Bible.”

Although he loved reading the Bible, Mr Salikov did not make any quick decisions about his commitment to God.

Shelter

“God became my shelter where I could come with my troubles and the Bible was important to me. But for three years my aunt and I didn’t go to church. We just studied the Bible for ourselves. Then we started going to the church and five years ago I became a church member.”

“What spoke to me the most when I started reading the Bible was the fact that God is our father,” he remembers. “I loved reading that. When I read the words, ‘God loves you’ and ‘You are my child,’ that was so exciting for me. For me, that was the best news in the Bible.”

Wanting to serve God, Mr Salikov successfully completed Bible school in Irkutsk and moved to Kyzyl, where he is one of the leaders of the Pentecostal Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith, which has a congregation of 150. He leads an outreach among Tuvins.

“I have a group of Tuvins to whom I teach the Bible,” he says with some excitement, “and when God’s Word touches their lives they feel the influence of the living Word, which they apply in their lives. The Tuvin people need this kind of love where they can have a living relationship with God.”

The church, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination, has seven ‘daughter’ mission churches in nearby villages. Overall membership is about 85 per cent Tuvin and 15 per cent Russian. Services in the ‘mother’ church are held in Russian, with translation into Tuvin. Singing is in both languages.

One of the top priorities of the congregation is to see the entire Bible translated into the local language.

Great impact