REVIVAL IN THE ARTIC - RUSSIAN INUIT

The last week of August Bill, an evangelist from Ottawa, held a series of meetings in Gouverneur, New York. Gouverneur was a difficult or hard place when Charles Finney held meetings 160+ years ago. It is even a harder place today. He is known for a healing ministry but the meetings in August were definitely more like renewal meetings.
The reason I'm sharing this is that he spoke of the revival in Arctic Canada among the Eskimo (Inuit). Then last week we received the latest issue of Spread the Fire from TACF. In that issue was an article about the Eskimo revival. I thought I would share some other exciting news that Prankard shared concerning Arctic Russia.
He found out that there were Inuit in Arctic Russia as well and that these Russian Inuit were an "unreached people." It seems that in all the years of Russian control, not even the Russian Orthodox Church had had any contact with these people.
In 1994 he arranged an outreach to the Russian Arctic and took a team of nine Inuits with him. They found the Inuit people open to the Gospel and many, many were saved. The team had to take a helicopter to a village, share the Gospel and then leave to the next village. The Russian Inuit got saved, a prayer was said over them that the Holy Spirit would keep them, and they were given a Bible in their language. That was it.
Nine months later the team of Canadian Inuit returned with Bill. They were apprehensive about what they would find. The Russian Inuit hadn't really received any teaching. When the team arrived in Arctic Russia they found on-fire Christians. In one village 1100 of 1200 Inuit were saved (all adult men in the village were saved).
It seems that since the Russian Inuit had no teaching they were forced to rely on the Bible and the Holy Spirit for guidiance--they just didn't know any better. :-) They did't know anything about church but they did discover that the Book of Acts wrote about church. In Acts, the believers met daily. So the Inuit met daily. In Acts, believers asked the Father for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and received. The Inuit asked the Father and received. Deliverance, healings, gifts of the Spirit were all freely available to the Inuit. They just didn't know any better-- they thought the Book of Acts and the New Testament letters described NORMAL church life!
All on their own, the Russian Inuit decided to send missionaries to villages which had not heard the Gospel. Yes, they are facing opposition and persecution as well. (I believe they weren't surprised, having read the New Testament. Probably thought that was normal too.)
Bill said that these people were so isolated that they had never heard of Canada or the United States. Of course they had also never heard of Toronto, Vineyard. But in their services they acted like they had. The Canadian team saw Inuit do crunches, laugh, shake, the whole Toronto blessing repertoire of manifestations. The Russian Inuit had the peculiar notion that this was all part of a normal, everyday church service. I guess they just didn't know any better.
We have a prayer meeting every other Friday night in our home. At our last meeting we decided that our standard operating procedure would be to ask ourselves, "What would a Russian Eskimo do in this situation?" I guess we just don't want to know any better.