Justus Walker on Life in Russia

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Well, today is going to be a little bit different.

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As many of you know, the show is called Conversations That Matter because, well, we have conversations or I give a monologue about topics that matter to me.

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I think they're important. And one of the things I, you know, most of you probably don't know this in my audience, but I started to develop a little bit of an interest and a curiosity in Russia.

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And I certainly am not an expert on Russia at all, but I did listen to the

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Audible version of War and Peace, which I am proud of that as one of my probably top five accomplishments in life, because that's a very, very long book.

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But, but, you know, Russia to me, it just has such a fascinating history, kind of coming out of communism, still, you know, we'll find out today more about kind of where they're at now.

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But I think there's just so many things that I've learned that actually even parallel in some ways, the

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United States, obviously, there's there's a lot of differences. But we're gonna explore Russia a little bit today, if that's okay with you.

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So we have a special guest, Justice, I'm going to let you kind of introduce yourself a little bit.

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And then I'm going to tell everyone kind of how I found out about you. But Justice is a missionary in Russia. He has a large, actually a larger than my following channel on YouTube.

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So Justice, why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, John, thanks so much for inviting me over.

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It was always nice to get a invite from a fellow brother and just be able to talk about, like you said, things that matter.

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So yeah, as you said, my name is Justice Walker, and my folks came over to Russia back in 1994, right after the fall of the

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Soviet Union. And there were missionaries here in Russia and Siberia for six years. I grew up in Russia.

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So when we moved over here, I was 11. And when my folks finally decided to go back to the

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States to end their mission, I just turned 18. I had a real serious plan.

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I'm the kind of guy who always likes to have like, you know, five year plans for everything, seven year plans for everything.

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Even back when I was a kid, I was like, I knew what university I was planning on going to what college I knew how I was going to get in,

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I knew I was going to pay for it. I knew what dorm I was going to live in what floor on what dorm what professors were gonna you know,

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I knew everything like I had the whole thing written up by the time I was 15. And when I was 18, when my folks decided to finish their, their mission, when they felt they needed to come home,

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I did the normal, you know, Christian young person thing was like, well, I better pray about this because this, you know, it's important.

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Any big decision in life need to pray about. So I went out in the woods and started praying about it. And I'm not one of these people who says that, you know,

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God woke me up yesterday and told me to put on black socks or something like that, because I don't think that the almighty God generally speaks like that frivolously.

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But I had a serious encounter with what I believe to be the voice of the

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Lord telling me to come back to Russia. Went back when I was 18 and it was totally like out of blue air.

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I was totally not expecting that. So I changed courses, came back to Russia and I've been serving as a missionary in my own right for the last 20 years in Russia.

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I spent four years in a big city doing orphan ministry and working with street kids and doing a recording studio and a couple of different projects.

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2004, I changed courses in the mission and went up north to serve in small villages as a pastor.

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And that's been more or less the ministry that I've been doing for the last 16 years is starting pastoring, establishing, raising up leaders and leaving those churches behind and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat for about 16 years now.

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2010, we had always been trying to find different tent making opportunities.

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So like I taught English for to get additional income. I sold iPhones. I repaired computers.

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I did all kinds of different things to just make an additional buck. And in 2010,

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I kind of was looking around like I'm trying to do all these different things that I'm in the middle of a village and everyone kind of does subsistence farming.

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Maybe I should just like farm or something. And I'm not too brilliant. Sometimes I make up for my lack of brains with just simple like stick to it in this.

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So 2010, we started a little cow farm. A year later, we started a little goat farm and stuck with that for about five years, six years till 2016.

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Really learned what we were doing, created a model that now we advocate for other people to use.

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In 2016, I moved to a new location, started a little bit larger farm. I call it a four family farm.

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So it's a farm that's big enough that can sustain four families. There's four or four of us that work together on the farm. And that's what we do now.

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We preach the gospel in the surrounding villages. We work the farm.

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I have the YouTube channel in 2015. We had some interesting geopolitical events that kind of conspired to make me famous as a as a strange, weird

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American guy who's farming in Russia. They were there. I saw that.

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That's a story in itself. Yeah, it's a story itself. That's when I started blogging. So I've been doing that for five years.

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And the Lord really used that as an as a tool to like people came to the channel originally because I had a really strange laugh and people thought

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I was kind of like the Mary Milkman, you know, that's like, oh, man, he's so funny. He's like a comic or something. But then they stayed around for the other things that I was trying to talk about.

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It ended up kind of being like a Trojan horse for the Lord. And since then, our model of planting a church with a farm has been duplicated as far as I know that people have actually gotten back to me and said, we have gone and done this using our model 40 different times.

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So aside from the six churches that we've planted ourselves, it's also had that success. So we're really blessed that the

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Lord has kind of expanded what we're doing and trying to live on the land, live with the people, preach the gospel indeed, as well as the word.

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That's what we're all about. Wow. Just as I could probably talk to you for a long time and we don't have forever, but there's so many things you hit on there that just fascinate me.

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I want to hear about this model, but but first, here's kind of how I found out about you.

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The viral video obviously was one of the things I saw, but my brother had sent me an interview that you had done.

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I think it was with another American guy in Russia, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know because I watch so many videos of yours after that. It's getting fuzzy.

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But but you're kind of an agrarian guy. You have these great ideas on farming, and I suspect a lot of my audience, in fact,

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I know because people have gotten back to me. A lot of them live in Middle America. Some of them are farmers. And you're also in Russia, which obviously formerly

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Soviet Union. And just there's so many questions I have about that in doing ministry there.

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And I was watching one of your videos where you had, I think, your daughters and a few friends, you guys were milking cows.

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And and I was like, I was like telling my wife, I was like, you got to come in here. I was like, watch this. We could move to Russia.

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I was like, we could do it. We could just do what this guy's doing. And she's kind of looking at me skeptically. But, you know, well,

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I hear the light of great opportunity. Right. I've also seen this documentary called Happy People about Siberia, which, by the way, anyone watching needs to see this, which which, you know, these people are like, well, they're way up there and you think it'd be miserable, but they're the happiest people.

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So you confirm that to me. But so so here's where where I guess I want to start.

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You're you're an American guy. You're living in Russia. You kind of got famous because the Russians, the

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Russian news organization tried to use a clip they took from you to promote the idea that I guess what's the word

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I'm looking for? The economic we're trying to stop free trade. Yeah, go for it. What was the word you use?

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I'm sorry. Sanctions. Sanctions. Right. Sanctions were good and they worked and you were kind of like supporting that.

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But you weren't really saying that they kind of use that. But it went everywhere and both sides were kind of like going back and forth, depending on what you said, like he's on our side.

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No, he's on our side. And now you have this platform kind of overnight as a missionary in a country where you're not from there originally.

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What's that like having all these people kind of view you that way as kind of something different?

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Like you said, they thought you maybe were a comedian or something. But your mission is to share the gospel there. Was that kind of a surreal thing for you when that happened?

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It was it was it was absolutely surreal. Like it was it was and there's it's funny because like one of the one of the themes, the common themes that we see in scripture is that God takes our weakness and turns it into strength.

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He takes our ashes and exchanges it for beauty. And 2014 was one of the worst years of my life.

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Like starting from 2013 through 2014, we lost a baby.

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We buried a child on the local cemetery. We you know, some of the locals had killed one of our horses.

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Some of the other locals had killed some of our goats. Things were just not going good.

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Like it was it was darkness inside of darkness. It was like the shadow, the valley, the shadow of death at midnight.

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It was really bad. And and, you know, you're out there, you're like, what are we even doing here?

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Like, we've got this little church and I know that I'm supposed to stay the course. And but I'm stuck in this village.

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No one's ever going to hear about me. Like if we if the local, you know, good old boys get together and torture us tonight, like no one's ever going to know about it for like for a long, long time.

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It's like totally, you know, what am I doing here? And just, you know, feeling the

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Lord again, not saying, but that leading of the spirit of just be like, stay the course, stay the course, stay the course.

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And so the sanctions happen. So, you know, Russia does the the annexation of Crimea and the

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West respond with sanctions and the Russia responds with counter sanctions, kind of shoots themselves in their own foot with their own counter sanctions.

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And this news channel comes up and they're like, you know, you're a farmer, aren't you really in support of these sanctions?

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You're American, you're farming in Russia and support. And I'd be like, I had this 45 minute conversation where I was like, no, absolutely not.

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You know, competition, free markets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and somewhere in there, like at the end,

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I made a joke about, well, there is one good thing, you know, before I couldn't even get my foot in the door because they'd be like mozzarella, mozzarella from taco chat.

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You know, mozzarella should come from Italy. And now it's like, well, now you don't have any of your Italian mozzarella anymore, do you?

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That was like the five second clip that goes boom. But it was surreal because it was like everyone's come to the channel being like, oh, you know, we love your laugh.

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We love your laugh. And it was like. But I've been in darkness, like this has been the saddest time of my life, and yet everyone, the whole

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Russia knows me as this Christian guy who's the merry milkman, like that is the meme on the

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Internet. And like that's that to me is is a beautiful thing. Like that's and how can you be happy?

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How can you be joyful? And it's like, well, the joy of the Lord is that, you know, the joy of the Lord is my strength. And that's and that's what

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I was able to share with people. And again, like I said, it kind of ended up being a Trojan horse of people came for that.

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And then there was home education, there was farming, there was the gospel, there was Christ, all of that that they got in return from coming to the channel.

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So it was strange, but but God has turned it around for his own for his own purposes. Protectionism didn't make you happy.

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It was not something much deeper. And that's what people came for. Tell me a little bit about just in general, living in a place like Russia where I know there's the

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Eastern Orthodox Church and everything I've heard now, which is very limited, is that the

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Eastern Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, I should say, is kind of on the rise. They're building churches all over the place.

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You know, the military has this beautiful cathedral that was just built. And there's almost like a revival going on of, you know,

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Russian ancient Christian tradition. I'm kind of skeptical of that, but I wanted to hear from you, like what?

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Tell us a little bit about Eastern Orthodoxy. I know you can't say everything, but and then and you're obviously you're not that you're a

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Protestant Christian living there. And what is that? What's the mission field like ministering to people that have,

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I suspect, a cultural kind of Christianity? So, yeah,

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Russia is a very interesting mission field in the sense that if you were asking a

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Russian on the street, you know, what religion are they? You know, what faith are they?

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They would definitely say Christian. They would say Orthodox, like just, you know, five out of ten, seven out of ten, eight out of ten people you stop in the street, you know, yeah, we're

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Christian Orthodox, you know. And so the weirdness in that is what does that mean?

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You know, well, it means that I when I see an icon, I cross myself and I have a cross on my neck that I was given when

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I was a child. That's what that means. Really? I mean, that's you think that that's what the sum total of what being a

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Christian really, really means. And it's it's like with any nation that has nominally received

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Christ. There is that that fight of he is not a

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Jew who's Jew outwardly, but one who is one inwardly, you know, and saying, no, no, you got to actually follow

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Christ. And that's in some ways even harder than dealing with just straight up pagans. Like I spent

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I spent a time working up in the far north, almost exactly in the back door of that place where they did the the

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Happy People movie where we started some churches up there. Yeah, like exactly like that same area.

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And the thing about that is that the event people, the non -Russian peoples that are up there, they're pagan, they're shamanistic.

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And that was wonderful. It was like, oh, you have your God, we have our God, and we don't even care about your

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God knows like, but he cares about you. And let's go back to acts. Let's go back to Mars Hill.

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Like, this is really awesome. This is a way to start a new conversation. And this is an amazing thing.

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But when you talk to an Orthodox person is like Jesus, they're like, oh, yeah, we know Jesus. And they're like, you know,

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God. Oh, yeah, we know God. No, no. But you really don't. It's really hard kind of thing.

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As far as the revival, quote unquote, that's happening, Russian Protestantism is about one percent of the population.

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If you were to ask the official statistics on Russian Orthodoxy, they'd say about 30 percent of the population.

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But if you actually go in and do a clicker meter on the on the weekly attendance, not people who claim

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Orthodox affiliation, but actually do the work which has been done by Orthodox priests inside this inside the system, they say it's about one percent.

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And so you see these buildings being built. You see all this stuff going up. It's Caesar papism.

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It's it's basically the government financing, pushing money in through the church and trying to buy votes by by pumping up nationalism through a national church.

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You know, it's it's that's what's that's what we're saying. So so these churches are essentially empty or half empty than it sounds like.

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They're not functioning. We have this. Yeah, we have this wonderful, beautiful, you know, new temple in the county seat, our county seat here in Soloneshina.

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And it it has it's been there for 10 years. They have a regular attendance of 10 people.

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That's the county seat. That's four thousand people in that in that in that town. The town that I'm next to is called

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Tarnostipnoye. It has one hundred and fifty people as population. I've been here for four years and we have twenty five people coming regularly to our meetings.

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You know, so that's just tells us a certain story. Yeah, no, that's definitely eye opening.

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And there was someone who had kind of told me that, you know, it's kind of making headlines, but it's it's all fluff.

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There's really not much behind it. And you're kind of confirming that. It sounds a little bit to me like a little bit like I was going to try to draw a comparison with the

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United States, that Siberia would be maybe like going up to New York City or something.

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I don't know, like a very godless area, the Northeast, Pacific Northwest. And then the south would be like a lot of the other parts of Russia where there's going to kind of a cultural understanding, but no reality.

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Would that be a fair comparison, you think? I think Siberia is

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I think the rural urban divide holds true across a lot of times cross cultures.

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So Siberia is a lot like your Midwest, a lot like your south. You know, the smaller urban centers, you don't have a lot of people.

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People are more conservative, even even atheists. These are people who are completely godless, you know, like they're still like, you know, you should get married and stay married and have kids.

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It's like, well, why? And they're like, oh, because. Right. Well, yeah, that's right. But, you know, so anyway, so so you have that urban, urban, agrarian, rural divide.

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It really is very meaningful. And even even cross cross culturally. So Siberia is definitely culturally, politically, economically is very, very conservative, whereas the western part of Russia across the

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Urals back that way towards Moscow, the closer you get to Moscow, the more rot there is, the more perversion, the more you know, all that kind of stuff.

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So it's a lot like the United States where, you know, you get you get you get out of arm's length away from the big cities and, you know, the stench kind of filters away a little bit.

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And so I hear you. And I agree. I got to ask you this because, you know, you read some of like or or you probably see them live, some of these like Putin speeches where he talks about how the

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West is committing suicide with same sex marriage and all kinds of immoral, especially sexual things that they're doing.

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And then he'll say, but in Russia, you know, that's not who we are. And it sounds really good to the ears of a lot of social conservatives in the

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United States and in the West more broadly. And they look there are people I know some of them who and I don't know that this is warranted, but there's many who look to Putin as kind of like he's going to be the one to preserve some semblance of what used to be

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Western civilization or some kind of a Christian influenced civilization. So despite the fact that these churches are empty, is there any sense of that where you feel as a

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Protestant Christian living there, you the culture may be better for your children or that you feel more safe, kind of that the threats that are facing the

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West aren't going to face you there? Or is that all a mirage as well? I've been living in Russia for almost 30 years, so so twenty twenty six years now for twenty seven years.

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Part of that was as a child growing up, but still, you know, 11 years old and older, kind of aware of what was going on and everything

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I've seen in Russia culturally has has happened like clockwork with a 10 year lag.

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So it Russia looks to the West. The West is the capital of the world like that's that's, you know, the

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West in general, American, particular New York, Washington, D .C., specifically

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London. You know, that is Babylon, right? That's the great, you know, the great symbol of of worldly power and worldly people, no matter where they're at, they look to that and they are amazed.

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You know, they're they're infatuated with that. And so we can talk about, oh, you know, those wicked people in America, those sodomites, those this, those that, you know, whatever.

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But in the end, that's what you're trying to do. You're you're you're heading that direction because the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, these are the things that the world are made up of.

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And if you're worldly in Russia, you're still made up of those things worldly, no matter where you're at.

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So what I see is, you know, the whole gay movement, big things, you know, really just exploded with, you know, gay rights and marriage in the

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United States. What is that? Ten years ago, 12 years ago, I was a real serious move for that.

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Yeah, yeah, you're right. It was about 10 or 12 years ago. And then it and it ramped up and then, you know, you got married and we see that starting to happen in Russia.

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Like we start seeing your first gay rights parades. It just takes 10 years. Give it 10 years and everything. Everything happens.

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So, you know, give it another 10 years. And we'll be talking, you know, I don't know, social justice for those

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Becks or something. Who knows? But so I don't see

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Putin as the great white hope or something. You know, I don't see Russia as the as the the the last bastion of Western civilization.

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Russia has always put itself in contradiction to Western civilization. Russia has always positioned itself, even in the tsarist time, as we're not

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East, we're not West. We're the double headed eagle. We look both ways. We're something different. And this is something that the that the the

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West needs to people who observe Russia from the West need to understand. Russia's has always been a kind of third way, and it's not representative of the

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West. It's not representative of the East. Russia is a continent in and of itself. Look at the map, see the size, you know, get that understanding.

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And Putin is not some great hope for not the West, not for Christian cultural values, not

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Putin, not Trump. What is the hope is the church is the church being the church.

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That's, you know, the city on the hill, the salt, the light, the people of God like that is the hope of the world.

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Well, as long as as long as I'm on a rampage, you got just as long as we put our hope into something other than where our hope should lay, which is

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Christ and his body, then we're going to be deceived, and that's the thing that we have to be careful about.

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I think the reason the question arises, and why I even want to ask it, is because as we see civil liberties being cracked down on in the

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United States, specifically to propagate the gospel and to worship in some municipalities and in some states, that there have been problems.

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We look to Canada and we see even bigger ones. You start asking the question, well, is there a place that we can go and we can kind of do what you're doing, raise our family in impurity and be able to homeschool them, be able to make the decisions parents should be able to make, where we'll at least have the freedom to do that and have the freedom to go to church and worship the way that we want to.

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Because that's the fear, is that there will be a lot of barriers to it, to even do that.

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Where you are, I know you're in more of a rural area and you're living this agrarian lifestyle, so it might be different than in Moscow, but do you feel somewhat safe, or – that's not the word – do you feel at least that that will be preserved for at least the foreseeable future where you are, that you'll be able to raise your family and have a church, or do you think those threats are coming your way as well?

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Well, first of all, when you talk about the erosion of civil liberties in the United States, that's from the perspective of a culture and a society that's used to having rights and civil liberties that are like up here, like at a nine, on a scale of one to ten, you're kind of like, you've always been up around a nine, you know, somewhere around there.

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And then you look at Russia and you're like, they've never been up above much more of a four or a five, you know, and you're like, oh man, we're losing our civil liberties, man, maybe we should jump over there, because they don't seem to be decreasing over there, but they're already lower than you are, even in your decreased level.

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Like 2016, there was what's called the Yerevoy Packet, which was a whole body of laws that went into effect.

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They are colloquially, vernacularly termed the anti -missionary laws, and they basically put a kobosh on anyone who is not orthodox, doing anything with any kind of proselytizing or trying to advance their mission.

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124 missionaries have been deported since the beginning of the anti -missionary laws.

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How did I not get deported? Frankly, I don't quite know, other than the fact that A, I've tried to be careful,

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B, I'm kind of popular on YouTube, and deporting that Mary Milkman would look kind of bad.

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So I really, it's kind of one of those situations. But like, I'm probably speaking out of turn here, but I regularly do things that should have already gotten me deported, like, and I know people who have been deported doing those same things.

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So like, it's not like you come over to Russia and you're like, the land of the free or something.

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I don't think America is that either. I think that's part of our mythos. And that's part of our problem, is that we've decided that this is something that it's not.

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But Russia, again, you have to understand that as a foreigner in Russia, as a

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Russian in Russia, you'll have far less civil liberties than you would even in the decreased civil liberty environment in the

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United States. As a foreigner in Russia, like, you're a stranger in a strange land.

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And that comes with its own fears and its own set of dangers and that kind of thing.

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Home education is one of those things where Russia is still very free, but only compared to the most free country as home education goes in the entire world, which is the

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United States. So there are certain states in the U .S. where the restrictions are worse than in Russia.

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There are a lot of states in the U .S. where the regulations are way easier than Russia. It really depends on what state you're in.

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So that's just another thing. And I guess the final thing I'd like to say on that issue is

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America has a language and a culture of rights, civil liberties, democracy, whatever, all that kind of good stuff.

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Russia never has. And so any rights, liberties, democracy that Russia has at the moment is kind of a byproduct of whatever else they're trying to do.

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It's not an intentional thing. So the American society intentionally gives you civil liberties and intentionally takes them away.

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Russian never intentionally gives you them. And if they happen to get taken away, that's also going to be just kind of an accident of how the society develops.

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So that's kind of the way that I see that. OK, so don't come to Russia to escape the secularization of the

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West. You'll be disappointed. That's the the vibe I'm getting on that. But there are I'm sure there's other reasons because you're there and you're it seems like you're living a life that you're enjoying for the most part.

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And you you're very passionate about your farm and your family and live in the life that you have there.

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Could you tell us a little bit about that? Because most people in the United States, even if they live in, you know, out in Oklahoma or something where there's farmland, they don't during the middle of their life decide, well,

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I'm just going to be a farmer, you know. So what kind of I mean, did you just start getting get into it because you said, well, that's what most of the people in my area do.

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But then you loved it. Or how did that happen? It's kind of a couple of things. Like I said, we'd always been trying to do some tent ministry things and tent making tent making ministry, no tent making things where we were, you know, working, trying to make little businesses that could help support the ministry, help, you know, even if you have some kind of a mission's income, even if you have something going on, then anything that you can do on the side augments that it gives you the ability to do more, that kind of thing.

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So also trying to make sure that our ministry was self -supported from inside the country so that if I had to leave, if financing, you know, completely dried up for some reason, that the work that I do isn't isn't dependent on that.

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So that's kind of what we're always trying to do. And I'd gotten myself into a to a big project, which ended up being a nightmare project.

29:22

It was a sawmill. So we started making lumber and we were exporting to Germany. And it was this big business.

29:28

And we had like 25 employees and it was like this big deal. And and it was it was it it kind of got into where I was.

29:36

I was more of a sawmill operator than I was a missionary. And it was really driving me crazy, pulling my hair out.

29:42

And I had this little garden and a couple of pigs in my backyard at my house. And I'd come home from the sawmill, like literally like just shaking from from nerves and be like, oh, and then

29:53

I'd go and I'd be like, feed my chickens and feed my pig and work in my garden and calm down.

29:58

And then one day I was just looking around like, man, I like this. I don't like that. Maybe I should just be doing this.

30:06

One of those brilliant moments. So that's kind of how that's kind of how I got like, I saw that I wanted something simpler.

30:13

I saw that I wanted what I call a home centered life. I wanted

30:18

I wanted something that when I did at that point, I didn't have a wife or kids. But when I did get a wife and kids, I wanted to be able to do something that I could involve my children with in my work and my life.

30:28

So I also wanted to do this tent making thing. And I started reexamining the scripture.

30:35

And Paul in Acts, when he's giving his farewell address to the Ephesian elders, he says, you know what manner of life

30:41

I lived among you that I coveted no man's silver or gold or their clothing, but that I always worked with my own hands to provide for those who were with me and for my own needs, showing you that what the what the words of our

30:55

Lord Jesus Christ that he said that it's better to give than to receive. And I just like it jumped out at me like I'd never with my own hands.

31:03

And that was a this is a sort of a size of business. I think it's at least a hint at if you are in ministry.

31:10

Yeah. By vocationalism, sure, it works. It's great. But if you're in a situation where your secondary vocation, you know, you're the business that you're trying to run to support you has gotten to where you're, you know, managing managers and it's this big giant thing and you're no longer working with your own hands, you're probably in a space in a head space that you're not able to actually do the ministry.

31:32

And I took that away from me personally. It's not something I project on anyone else, but it's something that I take away that that that's that's the size we want to we want to stay at.

31:40

So right now I've got the biggest farm that I think we'll ever have. It's the four family farm. And that's me and three other guys.

31:48

And I do the milking in the morning. I also keep the books. I do, you know, PR, advertising, sales.

31:55

And but I actually do the milking every single morning, every single evening, help process the milk. And then there's three other guys who do the other other parts of the work and trying to keep that that that size that it feeds us.

32:08

It's never going to be a big giant agrarian concern, but it's going to be something that that will keep us going for the future.

32:14

Well, it sounds like it's a good human scale kind of situation where you're not completely overwhelmed, but you can do what the main things the

32:22

Lord calls you to. So, I mean, is this kind of I know you said you wouldn't push this on people, but sounds like it might be something you recommend people consider the home education and agrarian type of living is

32:34

I mean, if someone wanted to get into this, what would you what advice would you give them? Well, the part that I'm not pushing on people is some sort of doctrinal position on what size of business need to be to be considered tent making.

32:47

I think it's a real good sort of a test and a real good general recommendation.

32:53

But of course, I'm not trying to say that doctrinally. What I am pushing on people like full on education and jam it down our throats.

33:01

Let's hear it. Yeah. So, yeah, we are totally, you know, we totally promote, you know, home education.

33:10

And I personally believe that to raise a family, one of the best context, one of the best environments is either like part time farming, where you're just doing it to have an addition to your own, you know, budget, like as a help, or, you know, small scale farming, where that's actually your main source of income.

33:29

I think that's one of the best environments to raise to raise a family to raise children. I think if you can do it in other environments, of course, obviously, but it's in an agrarian setting and a farming setting, all the things that you want to have to raise children is natural to that lifestyle.

33:47

Whereas when you're in an urban setting or a non agrarian setting, you have to you have to intentionally do everything.

33:55

You have to set up those kind of systems intentionally. And that really, that takes a lot of willpower and a lot of a lot of concentration and attention.

34:04

And it's really actually rather hard to do. Home education. I've got a couple of basic arguments for that.

34:10

First of all, I believe that any institution is defined by its functionality.

34:16

So the institution of the family is defined by the function that it serves in society, like in a societal context.

34:23

And one of those functions is the raising and education of children. It's always been that way for thousands of years, only recently in modern civilization have we decided that we should export that particular function to society at large.

34:37

And I think that it is a tragedy on the scale of socialism, fascism, or the potentiality of nuclear holocaust.

34:45

I think that we as the church, especially, but in general society, if we want to not go absolutely completely, you know, expletive, expletive insane, we need to start raising our children again.

34:58

And this is something that is absolutely 100 % necessary from simply a sociological standpoint.

35:05

Studies have shown that home educated children do better in every single measurable metric across the board, head and shoulders above their peers.

35:15

As a cohort, home educated children do better in everything. On 20, 30 year studies of large cohorts.

35:23

So that's just a societal, it costs less, it's more effective. That's just a societal argument. The Christian argument, the scripture admonishes us 36 times throughout the scripture that parents raise your children, parents educate your children, parents do this.

35:40

Never does the scripture admonish parents to send their children to the Philistines to get their tools, you know, sharpened.

35:48

So this is something that I'm totally 100 % like.

35:53

You're passionate about it. Crusader. No, I love it. I mean,

35:59

I was homeschooled through high school and it was a blessing. And, you know,

36:04

I remember what the main argument against it from other Christians was, you know, how are your kids going to get social socialization?

36:11

And, but that's, that's in a society where people are having like one or two kids. So if you have more than that, they'll get plenty of socialization.

36:19

And of course, if you have a farm, you know, there's plenty of animals to play with and you probably learn a lot of things that I mean,

36:26

I mean, not to be crass, but you don't need sex education. Like, you know, all the controversy about, you know, what should the school teach?

36:32

I mean, you're, you're watching the animals do what the animals do when you're on the farm. So it just seems like a great context that you have for educating your kids.

36:41

And I just, I was just intrigued by it. And I appreciate you sharing it with the world. A lot of people don't do that, but you film some of it.

36:48

You have, are you a bit of a scientist or a tinkerer or an inventor as well?

36:54

Because I know you have some videos that I don't even understand because I'm not in that world, but you have different methods that you use for growing food or composting and that kind of thing.

37:04

I'm, I'm just a very curious person by nature. I'd like to think of myself as a tinkerer, but I'm really not much of that.

37:11

I'm more of a broad scale researcher, research, research, research, find the things that seem to work for other people and then just implement those things and collect different odds and ends scraps of things that work elsewhere and implement those.

37:26

I have had a few things that I've done myself. Like for instance, I built an underground greenhouse barn that where the barn was the heating element for the greenhouse and all the convection and that kind of thing.

37:37

I, you know, worked on that myself. That was my own idea. But aside from things like that, most of the stuff that I do is just researching, finding things that work, implementing it, figuring out if it's going to work in our particular cultural economic context, and then, you know, trying to implement those, those solutions.

37:57

I do love learning. I love science. I love the whole, whole process, the whole scientific method. But I, you know,

38:03

I'm trying to just use it to serve our stuff. So we use different methods here.

38:09

Like, first of all, we're 100 % off grid. So we're, you know, solar power, hydroelectric station,

38:14

I put that all in myself. And then we also do like the garden. So we use like a non -till method for a garden, which is kind of known in its hyped form as like the back to Eden method, which is otherwise known as just like massive sheet mulching.

38:32

I'm really heavy into composting. For a few years, I tinkered with John Payne piles, which is using compost to heat buildings, and just different things like that, trying to find things that will work.

38:43

And, you know, bring those solutions down to a scale that's doable in our particular context.

38:50

Wow, that is fascinating. I didn't realize you were 100 % off the grid. So right now, as you're recording this in your studio, you're off the grid doing this.

38:58

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. We don't, there's no lines going to the farm. We don't have backup power of any kind other than just the, you know, the solar panels and the.

39:07

Right. And the hydroelectric station. Oh, my goodness. I'm definitely very much on the grid right now.

39:14

So I want to ask you about the ministry, because I know we're kind of the time's running short here.

39:21

But you said you threw out the number 40, I think, before. How many churches have you planted? We, I personally was involved in planting or restarting six different churches.

39:33

We've got another two, hopefully come online this spring, right after Easter. So that'll be eight. But right now we're at six that I've personally been, you know, like, hands on involved in.

39:43

And then there's another 40 that have looked at the courses that we do online, come to my conferences, come to my seminars, taken the material, gone and done, and then come back and said, you know, a year later, whatever, you were the inspiration for what we did.

39:59

We used your method. It's working, you know, that kind of report. So we don't have any kind of formal training center yet or anything like that, that, you know,

40:09

I can actually go down the list of what these people were discipled by me. And, you know, but people who write me later and say, we took what you taught.

40:17

We went and we did it in the context of our own denomination, in the context of our own church. But we were inspired by you and we used your methods.

40:24

That that number is at 40. What's that? What's the method? Tell us what the method is that you're utilizing or you came up with or.

40:33

So basically, I mean, the main thing is, is, and this is none of what I'm going to say is going to be like birth shattering, crazy, like, you just follow the

40:42

Bible. Basically, I mean, you know, you don't want to be glib about that, but, but yeah,

40:49

I mean, the first idea is like Russia is has a huge mission field, which is the villages.

40:56

The rural areas are the least evangelized, the most underrepresented as far as Christian testimony.

41:05

So if there are Christians in the city, their responsibility is to go to the rurals like this is this is just a normal like thing.

41:16

And what that means is it doesn't mean going on the weekends out to some village and preaching like that might be a good place to start.

41:23

But that's not what that means. What it means is you sell your apartment, you sell your goods and you move to the village, you buy a house.

41:31

And then, of course, everyone says, well, then how do we support ourselves? Because the villages, the rural areas are very economically depressed.

41:37

And so the answer is you start a farm and they say, well, how do you start a farm? And I say, OK, well, here you go.

41:43

Here's a basically a packing list of things you need to buy. Here's what you need to be looking at. There's a couple of different three or four different options that we've really worked through that we know work.

41:53

You can start a goat farm. You can start a cow farm. You could start a mixed poultry farm. You could start a small greenhouse project.

42:01

And here's what you need to do to think about marketing. Here's what you need to do to think about raising your stuff. At the same time, here's what you need to do to start your church and kind of working through that method of moving, living, investing yourself into a community, preaching with your deeds first, then preaching with your words, proclaiming the kingdom to that area, and God gives results.

42:25

So that's kind of, in a nutshell, the idea of an intentional bivocational ministry that goes into the rural areas to start churches and preach the gospel.

42:36

The rural Christian church is a very long -growing plant in Russia.

42:44

It's something that you plant the seed for, and you water it, and you weed around it for about four years before you see growth.

42:54

But again, that's part of the model. I tell everyone, you know, you got to do these things, and if you do these things regularly for four years, then on the fourth year, you're going to see a result.

43:04

If you stop on the third year, you're not going to get any results. If you don't do those things for three years, four years, you're not going to get results.

43:11

So it's kind of that's the method. I gotcha. What advice would you give?

43:18

And by the way, I don't want to just brush that off because that was very good and informative, and I want to get your contact or your website.

43:26

I'll actually ask that now. Do you have a website that people can go to if they want to find out more about this method and everything, or is it just your

43:33

YouTube channel? I've got two YouTube channels. There's the Russian YouTube channel, which is, you know, you just go onto YouTube and write in Dzerzhasta Suolkyr in Russian, and then it'll come up the first, you know, the most one, the most viewed ones will come up.

43:50

In English, it's www .thewalkerwitness .com. That will take you to the

43:57

English YouTube channel. I also have rawhomeeducation .com, which is my podcast, which doesn't have anything up yet because I'm lazy and I haven't got anything done yet on that one.

44:09

Keep wanting to start an English podcast dedicated to home education and been a little busy with my other stuff, so maybe

44:16

I'll get to doing that. But mainly, it's thewalkerwitness .com. That takes you to the

44:22

English YouTube channel. A lot of people will say, well, you don't seem to have a lot of stuff about missionary stuff in here, and that's because the anti -missionary laws, people.

44:34

So it's more about composting. It's about, you know, so you're taking a risk. Well, it's talking about this, you know, because this will go on YouTube.

44:41

I mean, that's kind of a risk in a way, I guess. Yeah. Okay. And it's everything is everything. It's like with COVID, like everything's a risk.

44:47

You know, it's you take your like, I'm not going to be crazy about like, oh, no, I'm never going to say anything. Like if somebody asks me, are you preaching the gospel in Russian?

44:55

I'm not gonna be like, no, I mean, right. So, you know, there's but there's a difference between talking to John, you know, once in a lifetime, occasionally with somebody like that on YouTube and like every week coming out and be like, you know, here's what we're doing.

45:10

Here's what we're doing. You know, you know, come arrest me, deport me. That wouldn't be different.

45:17

Oh, man. Well, what kind of advice would you have for someone then who is wants to go to Russia, maybe do kind of what you're doing, but they're in the

45:27

United States right now? I'm glad you brought that up because we kind of we brushed over that real quick, that idea back a few questions ago, and it's good to circle back around to it.

45:38

You know, I am passionate for Russia. I am passionate for the Russian people. I love the country. I love the place.

45:43

And there are a couple different reasons that people might want to think about coming over. Like, I know that in the general population of, you know, white

45:51

Anglo -Saxon American Protestants, you look at like the Mennonites who in their own time went to like Bolivia or whatever,

45:58

Mexico to find land, start communities, farm, whatever. People are like, oh, that's so crazy.

46:04

And now it's like, oh, you know what? Now maybe not so crazy, you know? And the idea of leaving the country that you're in for a number of reasons to start a community somewhere or to continue a community that you're already in where you think you can do it easier, better, to raise your family, to proclaim the kingdom, that's totally legit.

46:26

Like, don't think that you're going to run away from crazy collapsing West because it's coming. The whole world is going to, you know, once Babylon falls, all the merchants of the world will weep, right?

46:37

No one's going to be left out of that bag of weeping. So don't think that you're going to escape the great collapse of the

46:44

West that way. But it is a way to say, maybe it's a less expensive, easier, less nerve -wracking way of raising my family and something else.

46:54

So maybe that's definitely a totally legit thing. The other thing is like missions. The state of the

47:00

American church is not the greatest at the moment, but it's still, even in its, you know, belaguered state, a lot better than most places.

47:08

And the idea of going to a rural village or a place in Russia where there are no gospels being preached at all, might be something that motivates people and like go to preach the gospel, you know?

47:21

So yeah, come to Russia. We have land is super dirt cheap and you can start farming.

47:28

And for what you can sell your house for in the States, you can buy a village in Russia. So yeah, you know, come and see.

47:37

Yeah, the Harris kingdom. I could start a little fiefdom.

47:44

No, that is, you know, it's just, I have to, I mean, my, you know, my wife, you know, if I really say the

47:49

Lord's leading us here, she'll follow me. But it's going to take some convincing to get her on board with the idea of going to Siberia and living with the happy people, which is, you know,

47:58

I'm like, Danielle, it's my wife's name. I'm like, look, look at these people. They're so, they seem so happy.

48:03

And I'm like, and look at the happy milkman. He's happy too. They're all just happy, which is probably not true. I mean, but this is the thing you said.

48:11

The key word there is you said that you, you know, if you sold your life, the Lord is leading us to go to Siberia. She'd follow the main thing there is to make sure the

48:18

Lord is leading you to Siberia. Absolutely. It's not some romanticism of like, oh, you know, this looks so, you know, rural, romantic, cool, whatever, you know, that it's actually the

48:28

Lord's leading. And that is the most important thing. Like, um, cause you know,

48:34

God can, the Lord can show you, lead you as the head of your household to say, no, stand on the wall and, you know, speak unto

48:41

Babylon, let the, let the, uh, let the air, let the archers shoot Babylon. She is sick.

48:48

She is ill into death and there's no healing her, you know, who knows? Maybe that's your, your calling. I don't know. Um, so, well, well,

48:54

I just, I'm fascinated by it and I love to come visit, uh, Russia sometime. And, um, and, and I'd love to see kind of the,

49:01

I'm sure by that time, you know, you'll have a lot more churches and see the fruit of those labors. That's, uh, I respect that a lot.

49:07

Um, now I know you're a, you're a tent maker guy right now with, with, is there, and you, and you gave us your website.

49:13

Um, is there a place people can go to support you? I don't know if you're doing financially or if it's just prayer, you know, do you have like a, an email list or anything like that?

49:22

There is a, an email that we can put in the descriptions sent to Siberia, um, sent and then the number two

49:33

Siberia at gmail .com. Um, that's my mission sort of connect contact point.

49:39

I think it's the address he used to get ahold of me. Um, and, uh, yeah, the, um, and people can write there if they want to get our newsletter, then

49:48

I'll put them on that list. Um, and yeah, prayer, prayer is so many, so often in missions, um, circles, it's like, please pray for us.

49:57

And it's like code for like, give us money. It's like, we could like, there's no amount of money that you can't spend, but like we are legitimately at this point, not in some need for, for money.

50:09

Like there's a, there's a big project that I'm not at liberty at talking about right now. Um, but that's directly connected to the missions, um, that we will need more financing for that.

50:18

And that's, you know, but the Lord provides, but the main thing, the main thing is people who commit to praying regularly daily for the harvest for the work.

50:31

There is the Russian government. If you're a Russian citizen, you can get subsidies for tractors.

50:37

You can get grants for buying land. The Russian government will finance people to go out into the villages, into the rural areas and start their farms, especially if you're a

50:47

Russian citizen citizen. And it's like, I had this naive idea back in 2010 of like, oh, the reason why

50:52

Russian Christians aren't going to the mission field in the rural Russian context is because, oh, you know, they can't make money.

50:58

It's like, of course they don't know how to support themselves. So I'll just learn how to do that and show them and that'll solve that problem. And it was like, uh, no, actually it doesn't solve that problem because pray he, the

51:08

Lord of the harvest, that he would send laborers into the harvest field. That is the main thing.

51:13

And we have a model that works. The Russian government's willing to finance, um, projects like we can just infinitely duplicate this project, but you need people who actually go.

51:26

And so pray he, the Lord of the harvest, that he would send his workers into the harvest. That is the number one thing.

51:32

But be very careful about that because, you know, what's the exact next verse that Jesus does when he tells the disciples to pray, they start praying and he sends them out.

51:40

So, you know, um, here I am Lord send them often turns into here. I am Lord. Oh, you mean me, but pray, absolutely pray.

51:50

That is the number one thing. And if, you know, being on our newsletter helps remind you to do that, definitely send to Siberia, gmail .com.

51:57

I'll get you on the newsletter and, um, pray, pray. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it.

52:04

Uh, justice, uh, Walker and, um, I'm going to put those links in the info section. If people are listening and want to go check that out.

52:11

And, uh, hopefully this was interesting. It was interesting to me. I think it was interesting to a lot of people listening, uh, cause it's such a different world.

52:17

We hear about Russia, but we, uh, don't get to often talk to someone who's from the United States and, uh, speaks our language that can relay some of this to us.

52:26

So, um, I do have one just to satisfy my curiosity, just one really quick last question. Do people in Russia, when they hear you talk, do they say you have an

52:33

American accent? Um, before I was like quote unquote famous in Russia, if I didn't get out my name, like I sometimes have been known to use a pseudonym or Russian pseudonym.

52:46

Like if I got on the train and went from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, it's a three day or four day train train ride, three, four day train ride.

52:52

I could sit in the train compartment with people for three days and no one needed to know that I was that I was an American if I didn't want them to.

52:58

Um, so yeah, no accent, but that's that again, I cheated. Like I grew up in Russia, my parents brought me over.

53:05

So it's like no real big, like, uh, kudos to me. It's just that I grew up here. So that's like, that's, that's well,

53:12

I heard, I think in one of your videos, you were saying that like you never actually like took Russian, you didn't have to do anything. It was just literal immersion and you, you have it, which is just amazing to me.

53:21

Oh yeah. And just a real quick anecdote on that, on that side of things, uh, to get my Russian citizenship, which

53:27

I'm really working on right now. Um, I just recently, I had to go into this committee for like knowledge of Russian language.

53:34

And so there's this like six people per panel and I go in there and, and they're asking me all kinds of questions and the secretary is writing things down.

53:41

The clerk is writing things down and they're asking me this question and that question, what about Russian art? What about Russian music?

53:46

And what do you like to listen to? And I'm just like, just talking, talking, talking. And, and they're like, you can see, they're just like, they just keep asking more questions, more questions.

53:54

And I'm just, you know, you know, machine and gunning it all down. Fine. Great. You know, all right, we'll come back in a week.

54:01

We'll have the results of the committee. Um, in that committee I'd said, you know, please don't try to make me write anything because I'm terrible written language.

54:09

I never studied Russian formally. It's, it's just totally immersion. Like, and, and so that kind of went by, um, a week later

54:17

I go back and there was a lady, the clerk from the committee, she comes out and she's like, here's your paper. And I need you to come to my office and sign it and write a few things down.

54:25

And so I, I go into the office and she's like, you need to write here on this line. You know, I, I, you know, basically

54:30

I, Justice Walker hereby, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, a few words. So I write it down and she kind of looks at it and she looks at me and she says, man, you really don't know how to write.

54:42

Oh man. Well, it is a hard language. So, you know, you have a little sympathy there because I remember looking at, uh, you know, like I said,

54:50

I had, uh, I listened to war on peace on audible and then I was looking at like an online, like here's it's, it's, it's like three times as big in Russian because the words are so long.

55:00

And, uh, I was like, yeah, it's a big book. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, man, that would be so hard to, to trudge through all of that in Russian.

55:07

But, uh, Hey, um, you know, it sounds like you're on your way and you'll be a citizen soon. So, uh, premature congratulations on that.

55:15

And, uh, well, you know, God willing. Yeah. Well, pray for that. Um, and, uh, if anyone's, uh, like I said, curious about hearing more about justice

55:23

Walker, check out the info section. There's some links there. Hey, God bless you, uh, justice. I appreciate you giving us your time,