northern europe

In Scandinavia and Northern Europe, much like FPGM's efforts in South Asia, our objective was to assist, supplement, and partner with national believers and the existing work of long-term church planters. We did this by way of bold Gospel proclamation, Scripture distribution, and evangelism training. In addition to training and discipleship work in Jyvaskyla and Tampere, Finland, we were able to carry out street evangelism and tract distribution in places such as Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, Sotkamo, and Rovaniemi in Finland; Petrozavodsk and Kostomuksa in Russia; and Tallin, the capital of Estonia. FPGM also had two unique opportunities to take the Gospel into the far north just before the coming of the winter snows. One such jaunt involved bringing Bibles into Karelia, a region north of St. Petersburg in Russia. Until just recently, the Karelian peoples have not had any Scripture in their native language, so we drove many miles around this isolated region and targeted at least five Karelian villages with the Word. Back in Finland, we embarked upon long road trip up into Lapland (the northernmost region of the country) for the purpose of Gospel proclamation and initial assessment of the Northern Saami, an indigenous unreached people group. This involved Bible distribution and some unique encounters from village to village in an remote corner of the region where Finland, Norway, and Sweden come together above the Arctic Circle. In places like Karelia and Lapland, there are countless small towns and villages where exposure to the biblical Gospel is extremely limited or altogether absent. As is our custom, this missionary journey again involved seizing opportunities to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to where it has not been named (Romans 15:20).