The faithful gathered to pay tribute to a man some were calling "the greatest thinker in all of history." In fact, the man giving the eulogy said as much. The deceased’s friend and closest associate, Friedrich Engels, said this of Karl Marx:

But, Engels said, "His name and his work will endure through the ages."

There’s no doubt it had an effect on the world; in a Christian world view, there’s no doubt it had an effect on how many will spend eternity.

The Russian Revolution, fed by the writings of Marx and Engels, occurred a mere generation later, in 1917. One writer called the revolution one of the "cruelest political earthquakes in the history of the world." Thus began the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the spread of Communism with its mantra of "There is no God."

Within a few years after the end of World War II, all of Eastern Europe, including the small predominantly Christian country of Estonia, had fallen to Communism under the strong ideological arm of Joseph Stalin.

Estonia is no stranger to conqueror.

The Danes held the north from 1219 until 1346, when they sold it to German landholders, who held the south. Later, it was divided between Sweden and Poland. The Swedes ruled all of Estonia until 1721, when it was lost to Peter the Great of Russian.

Estonia is also no stranger to Christianity.

The Oesel-Wick bishopric castle, located in Kuressaare, is first mentioned in historical records in 1381; St. James Lutheran Church at Puha dates to at least 1449 and may have existed 100 years before that date. The pastor there, Anti Toplaan, said that as recent as 40 years ago, 90 percent of the population was Christian.

In 1918, Estonia declared its independence, but in 1940 the tiny nation was occupied by the Soviets and annexed, becoming the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The next year, the Germans drove out the Soviets until October 1944. With the return of the Red Army in 1944, about 30,000 Estonians escaped to Sweden and 33,000 to Germany. Peasant farms were brought into collectives, and industries were nationalized.

On August 20, 1991, Estonia again proclaimed its independence, becoming the first of the three Baltic States to break away from the Soviet Union.

But the damage to the economic and social system was already done.

More importantly, the Body of Christ had suffered; it had even, to some degree, been dismembered.

Pastor Toplaan says today only 20 percent of the nation considers itself Christian.

Some give an even lower estimate.

A little over a year ago, Broadway United Methodist Church’s minister of music Bob Ergenbright formed an ecumenical mission team. It’s destination: Kuressaare, Saaremaa, an island city off the coast of Estonia.

Ergenbright formed the team – representing Methodist, Lutheran, Wesleyan, Latter-Day Saint and Presbyterian traditions – in response to needs cited by a Volunteers in Mission group that visited Estonia in September 1998. The group returned with a list of needs, including audiology, optometric, substance abuse and building lay support in crisis intervention.

Like other United Methodist Churches in the Maryville District, Broadway UMC is part of the United Methodist Church’s Holston Conference, which helps fund the Baltic Mission Center in the capitol city of Tallinn. A $4 million facility that has been under construction since 1994, the completed center will serve as a seminary as well as the local United Methodist Church. The church replaces one bombed by the Soviets in 1944 and has the distinction of being the first church constructed in Tallinn since the end of World War II.

In addition to housing a church and seminary, the completed center will also include a publishing house to provide much-needed Christian literature and a soup kitchen to feed the hungry. The seminary opened at a United Methodist office building in Tallinn in 1994 and expected only a dozen students, but 52 students arrived for classes. Degrees were awarded to 19 students in June 1998.

United Methodist Church members have responded enthusiastically to the project, and in 1997 a group known as Friends of Estonia was formally organized. Led by the Rev. John Trundle of Gatlinburg, the group's mission is to find the most effective ways to support the ministry and mission of the United Methodist Church in Estonia.

When our team of 12 went to Estonia in September, we thought we knew the reasons God was sending us. But those of us who had been on mission trips before knew that what you plan is not always what happens when you get there. After all, God is in control. And as long as you allow God to control things, you should be ready for His agenda.

We did conduct the audiological screenings.

Scores of young people were tested in schools, but Johnson City audiologist Marianne Searfoss wasn’t comfortable with the idea of merely doing hearing screenings.

While preparing for the mission, Searfoss modified the idea of conducting screenings to one where the protocol for screenings could be taught for future testings.

While planning for the mission, she recalls thinking, "It doesn’t make sense to go see how many people I can test; that just doesn’t make sense. You don’t test people and then not have anything to offer them after you test them."

Searfoss worked quite a bit with a grammar school nurse, but left feeling as if she needed more time. "I wasn’t completely able to accomplish what I had hoped to accomplish," she said. "I would like to have spent three days with her."

Searfoss, who teaches at East Tennessee State University, recalls one of her "God moments."

"What I do is I teach students – that’s really all I do – and I’ve been doing that for years. And what I ended up doing the whole time I was there was teaching," she says. "What she (the school nurse) wanted me to do was teach her how to ‘mask,’ and that’s what I did all the time."

"Masking," Searfoss explains, is a testing process that allows for the sound carried through a bad ear to progress to a good ear, a process that she says is very difficult to teach even when there are no language barriers.

"And so, she had a hearing exam from a patient and then we did it together with masking and she looked at me and said, ‘Your results are different.’ I said, ‘Yeah, they are. That’s why you have to mask.’

We did conduct an optometric clinic. Like the hearing clinic, that work has also continued after the team departed.

Scores of people in need of glasses were fitted during a clinic at Kuressaare Methodist Church. There are even special prescriptions that Maryville optometrist Michael Kolarik has been following up on now that we have returned to the states.

Kolarik brought to Estonia 450 usable pairs of glasses donated by the Lions Club. However, the first day in Kuressaare, it almost looked like there would be no clinic.

"It was kind of like my greatest fear for the trip was coming true," Kolarik recalls. "I was afraid that I would get there and would not be able to do anything."

As it happened, though, by mid-week a clinic had been scheduled and Kolarik was able to provide screenings and glasses for those in need – including one person in particular.

"I do remember an elderly lady who had a pretty strong prescription. And if I remember right, she had somebody else’s glasses that she had been getting by with and I gave her glasses," he says.

Kolarik explains that he tested their eyes and then measured their prescription to see how close he could match a pair of glasses brought for the mission. He would then find the prescription and put the glasses on a patient and there would be a "pregnant pause for 10 seconds or so while they looked at the charts and looked at the newspaper. Then they’d look up at me and I would say, ‘Yes …? Good …? No …?’

"And this lady, a smile came across her face, and she stood up, and I stood up to tell her good-bye, and she almost crushed my ribs with a bear hug," he recalled laughing. "So, that’s rewarding."

The bad news, Kolarik says, is "it looks like they lack a safety net for people who need eye care or glasses. People who are employed or retired are on their national insurance program. Everybody buys their glasses, so the people who are unemployed, who don’t have state insurance, are left without any medical eye care and there did not seem to be in place any sort of agency or any sort of method that people who could not afford them could get glasses."

We did work with doctors and explored problems with the emerging medical system.

Time was not only spent at the Luukas Clinic, but Dr. Bob Funke of Kingsport and Dr. Nancy Bartley of Maryville took part in a roundtable discussion at Central Clinic, a private, for-profit clinic that has been open about a year. The doctors there shared with the team their frustration with some aspects of the new system.

"The system here is better than in countryside, where the family may not have a car," says Dr. Meelio Tiik, the young entrepreneur who started the practice. "Still, there are problems. Everyone is guaranteed health care."

Each worker pays a 20 percent payroll tax for social insurance (welfare or pension funds) and a 13 percent tax for health insurance. The money is collected by the state and redistributed out of a "capitation fund" to each municipality according to the working population. The downside to that is those municipalities suffering from unemployment have a smaller pool of funds from which to draw medical payments.

The government contracts annually with doctors on a per-patient basis and pays 18 kroons a month (about $1.20) for each elderly patient; 15 kroons (about $1) for each adult; and 20 kroons (about $1.40) for each child. "For this money, I do my work, my analysis," Tiik explains.

Under this contract, the family doctor can analyze blood, urine, echocardiograms, ultrasounds and do a spirograph (lung function). The patient can come to the doctor as many times as they want and has a right to a yearly checkup.

"We have one problem of what determines the 13 percent?" Tiik says. "… Who will help our practice after 6 o’clock?" After 6 p.m., he explains, a patient normally goes to the hospital, payment for which is not covered out of the capitation fund, but "the hospital sends the bill (to us)."

"Economically, the island is not so good," which affects health care, Tiik says. Young people are leaving the island and unemployment is a problem. As for his practice, 2,000 out of 14,000 are uninsured.

"We have more than that," says Dr. Bob Funke of this nation’s ratio of insured to uninsured. Still, he notes, "Your danger then is not being able to keep your clinic open financially." He suggests that protocols can be set up to become more efficient.

The doctors earn an average of about 1,500 kroons (about $214) per month, with a high of 3,000 to 4,000 kroons (about $429 to $571) per month.

Hundreds of young people in several schools heard testimonies of how God can change a life consumed by drug and alcohol abuse.

They also heard the message that there is no need to go down that path – that it’s a matter of making the right choices.

In presenting substance abuse programs in several schools on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, Lori Gates-Addison , a clinical social worker from Lebanon, Va., discovered the other side of the world is not so far away when it comes to dealing with young people.

"The one thing that hit me really hard was the same thing that hits me in my country: There’s not one easy solution to helping kids with problems, to getting kids to stop blowing each other away in our country, or to stop the alcoholism in Estonia," she says. "There’s no one easy answer."

The same holds true for adults who want to see things change, she says. "Everyone has to take an individual responsibility and be a role model, to mentor, to be a Christian in life."

Gates-Addison says she would have preferred to spend more time with a singular group of students, and team member Teresa White agrees.

"The things that Lori did, I think it was just a little bit of sugar on what could have been a big cake," says White, assistant camp director at Wesley Woods in Walland.

"If we could have worked with one set of kids for more of a time – I mean for like a three-hour period instead of just a little bit here and a little bit there – I feel like we could have done a lot more," she says. "But given the amount of time that we had, I think a lot was accomplished."

Nonetheless, Gates-Addison says the youth are ripe for intervention.

As a team member, those were the things I was prepared to observe.

I should have paid more attention to the words of Dr. Kalep Koppel, written to me in January.

Kalep leads the Luukas Clinic, a small, Christian-based clinic located in Kuressaare. In Estonia’s changing medical system where once state-sponsored doctors are now largely faced with opening private practices and dealing with socialized medicine at the same time, the clinic is struggling to survive.

But despite such issues, these are the words from Kalep I should have considered more closely:

I am very grateful to you for being ready to come here to help us. But in the first place I would wish our contacts to be spiritual ties, it means that we have prayer meetings to witness about our Saviour Jesus Christ. In the first place, our country needs spiritual aid. Estonia considers herself to be a Christian country, but only 15 percent of the people call themselves Christians. We are looking forward to meeting and working with you.

Spiritual aid.

There are six churches in Kuressaare. We worshipped in song, Scripture and testimony in four of them: The Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and Pentecostal churches. Elsewhere on the island, we worshipped at a small country Methodist church and a non-denominational church that was somewhat Pentecostal in nature. For the most part, the congregations were small – 30 to 60 people – and largely elderly. Kuressaare has a population of a little over 16,000 people, 15 percent of whom are over 60 years old. It would seem the older are well represented in the congregation.

While not in great numbers, we found some younger people in churches, too. Those in their teens and 20s were found, but largely in the Pentecostal churches.

As we looked around at the apparent demographics in those churches, we discovered there was a lost generation: In America, we call them Baby Boomers.

My generation.

Why?

The answer may be found in stories such as that told by Tiit Henno, a slight man of 46 years with dark hair and a compassionate face – a face that often reveals the struggles of one who pastors an aging congregation once hindered by decades of Soviet oppression.

Henno knows the price his predecessors paid for living out their faith at this simple clapboard building known as Kuressaare Methodist Church.

On an autumn night following a worship service, Henno rises from a dinner table in a narrow room just off from the sanctuary. Sometimes in broken English, sometimes with the help of an interpreter, but often with teary eyes, Henno humbly tells the story of Martin Prikask, a former businessman who founded this church – the first Methodist church in Estonia – and served as the first superintendent of the Estonian Methodist conference.

"There is no God!" the Soviets shouted through such imprisonments.

Nobel prizewinning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled from Russia in 1974, remembers: "… Orthodox churches were stripped of their valuables … Tens of thousands of churches were torn down or desecrated, leaving behind a disfigured wasteland that bore no resemblance to Russia as such. … People were condemned to live in this dark and mute wilderness for decades, groping their way to God. … 15 million peasants were brought to death for the purpose of destroying our national way of life and of extirpating religion from the countryside. … Hatred of religion is rooted in Communism. … Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied … obsession with destroying religion. … The ruinous revolution has swallowed up some 60 million of our people. … Men have forgotten God."

But there were those who found strength in their faith and persevered, and the Holy Spirit sustained them.

I was reminded of that oppression as I sought to photograph people in the church where we held the optometric clinic. As I looked at their faces, I was reminded of what a camera in the church meant as recently as the 1980s.

At St. Jacob's Lutheran Church in Puha we were told that during Soviet times the KGB would come to services and take notes on who was there and later invite them to a meeting. Even teachers were employed to do the same at Christmas and Easter, but in a more sinister manner: They would record the names of young people who entered the church.

But those who found strength in their faith persevered, and the Holy Spirit sustained them.

But most did not, and succumbed to the oppressive Communist state.

Who in the American church would have persevered under such oppression?

Would I have persevered?

If my family had lived in 1947 Estonia, my grandparents would have had to go underground for their faith, and their children (my parents) may or may not have gone along. If not, then there would have been no faith to pass along to me.

I had heard the statement before, but in Estonia it echoed in my mind and carried with it has the solid ring of truth: "Christianity is only one generation away from extinction."

One generation away from extinction.

In Estonia, and in other former Soviet states, there is a lost generation.

Buildings constructed during Soviet times all look the same, but in eight years they are slowly changing – a little paint here, maybe some scroll-work and a garden sprouting there. The people have suffered and responded likewise: Communism has tried to make them the same on the inside, but God has made them different. Each unique, but some of them just don’t know it yet.

There is a seed of faith, and we saw it in a children’s choir at the Baltic Mission Center in Tallinn; in young adults such as our translators, Ingrid Vahter and Veljo Puuljalg; and in 15-year-old Tanniel Rooso, who twice a week broadcasts Contemporary Christian Music from the basement of a Baptist church.

Just as the Estonians are returning touches of their culture to the crumbling infrastructure left by the Soviets, so is the Body of Christ pushing through the atheism left in the Soviet wake.

In November 1989 the Berlin Wall was opened, and less than a year later East and West Germany were reunited. The Cold War was pronounced over, and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991.

When Estonia declared independence from the Soviet Union on Sept. 6, 1991, there was rejoicing. As 21-year-old Ingrid Vahter recalls, "Everybody was glued to the TV, getting ice cream and wearing our national colors."

Something else happened: People flocked to the churches.

Taimi Krull, an interpreter from Zion Baptist church (Siions Kirkh), remembers that the Kuressaare Methodist Church played a part … at least, for a while.

"Ten years ago when our new times began, youths gathered in this church from Kuressaare. This church was full of young people, every Monday evening, very full. And this was fantastic revival here, and from this began also a Pentecostal church at Kuressaare. … Most of the young people go to the Pentecostal church."

"Ten or 11 years ago, this began when a new movement for liberty began in Estonia, and also began revival times in churches," Krull says.

We heard as much from Riina Tammasula, a tour guide who was married to a Lutheran pastor when independence came. Hundreds of people flocked to his church in Kuressaare to be baptized, confirmed and married – sometimes all in the same day. Then, most never returned.

Just as in America, such shallow religion does nothing to bring people to Christ.

Author and theologian Brennan Manning says, "The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

If we suffered the same oppression, would you have been among the chosen few whose faith sustained them?

Would I?

What will we do here and elsewhere to ensure the faith of future generations?

Veljo Puujalg has apparently made his choice, and shares it with me during our last meal in Kuressaare.

Puujalg says that on Friday nights young people from his church go into the streets to tell others about Jesus Christ.

"My mother and father tell me not to," he said, explaining that many of the other young people’s parents plead the same.

"They are afraid."