The United Methodist Church officially opened a mission here this week, marking the event with a worship service on Sunday.
Bishop Ruediger Minor of Dresden, Germany, has been appointed to head the mission. He was consecrated during the service, which was held in an auditorium where a Russian-Korean congregation meets.
In a related development, Rev. Dwight Ramsey, a minister from Shreveport, La., has left his U.S. pastorate to head a cooperative effort to start new congregations in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Ramsey has been pastor of Broadmoor United Methodist Church in Shreveport since 1989 and is one of the founders of the first United Methodist congregation in Ekaterinburg, Russia. That congregation now has 980 members, a school, a medical clinic and a prison ministry. It has started other congregations in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Minor said integrating those congregations with the broader church would be a priority of the mission.
The plans to build new congregations revive a 100-year-old evangelization effort. A Methodist congregation was established in St. Petersburg in 1889. Methodists disappeared or went underground in Russia after political changes in the 1920s.
