11 He also served, until 1922, the churches in the Soviet Far East, which was then a part of the so-called Far Eastern Republic, controlled by the Bolsheviks. Babienco “led these workers into northern Mongolia, about one hundred miles below Lake Baikal, then down into Chahar, Inner Mongolia and Jehol.” 10ĭuring his ministry in Harbin, Babienco worked among Russian refugees in Manchuria. More than thirty pastors graduated from the seminary. Having mastered those languages, the graduates were sent to key stations in the regions around. The school was to “prepare evangelists to work among the Russian population in Manchuria (the northeast region of China, which was controlled by Japan at that time) and China, as well as among the Mongols and Chinese.” 9 Chinese and Mongolian languages were the compulsory subjects in the seminary. Moreover, a church was built where an Adventist secondary school was also accommodated.Īfter two years a publishing house and a Bible seminary were opened. 8 As a result, an Adventist community of more than 700 people was established within a matter of months. Kositzin, became a pastor of the Adventist Church. Opanasenko, who later became an Adventist and whose son-in-law, P. He got permission from the police department director, E. 7 Babienco began evangelistic series in Harbin’s theater. When Babienco arrived in Harbin, there were only about thirty members, who attended worship in their private homes. By 1920 Harbin was flooded with Russian railway workers and Russian immigrants who had lost everything, including their hope for the future.” 6 “Harbin was one of the central stations on the great Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), which connected the Russian and Chinese empires. It was one of the centers of Russian emigration. 5 Babienco moved with his family from New Jersey to Harbin, a Russian-speaking city in China. 4At the beginning of 1920 Babienco was sent by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists to Harbin, China, in the Far Eastern Division, with a view of entering Siberia. Mission Work in Harbinīetween 19 Babienco worked as a pastor with the Saskatchewan Conference in Canada 3 before working with the Atlantic Union Conference in the United States. After arriving in England and meeting Anna, he asked her to marry him after three weeks, and a week later they were married. 2 “She will be my wife,” Theofil told his friends. He caught sight of the photo of Anna Wilson, who incidentally was the sister of Yan Yanovich Wilson, a pastor and the author of several hymns from the Psalms of Zion collection. Prior to his trip, Theofil flipped over a yearbook of the graduates from an Adventist college in Newbold, Great Britain. There, in 1912, Theofil Theofilovich graduated from Clinton German Seminary (Missouri, USA), and in 1913 he was sent by the Adventist Church to Russia to improve his knowledge of the Russian language so that he could serve in the regions there. MarriageĪt the beginning of the twentieth century, in an attempt to avoid harassment by the state church, the family secretly moved to Europe, and then to Canada. In a short while, the whole family was baptized into the Adventist Church. The Babienko family confessed the same truth, which they found while studying the Holy Scriptures. Babienko, began to share his new “Adventist” faith (see Babienko, Theofil A.) with others, he was soon exiled to the North Caucasus in the city of Stavropol), where his son Theofil spent his early years. 1 Theofil Theofilovich was a descendant of the Polish noble family Gordowski. Theofil Theofilovich Babienco was born on September 7, 1885, in the town of Tarashcha (Тараща), near Kiev, into the Russian Orthodox family of Theofil Arsentievich and Ekaterina Stupka Babienko. Theofil Theofilovich Babienco served the Seventh-day Adventist Church from 1913 to about 1970 as pastor, missionary, administrator, educator, and translator in Canada, the United States, China, Mongolia, and Poland.
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