In the tiny town of Kief, North Dakota stands the first Russian Baptist church built in the US.
Founded in 1901 and originally named Liberty Baptist, it was established by Ukranian Stundist immigrants, chiefly farmers, fleeing religious persecution. The church was moved in the 1930s to its current spot, about two miles from its original location in Dogden Township, to make it easier for older parishioners to attend services in winter. It’s architectural features include the familiar hipped-roof brought by Ukranian immigrants.
In June of 1922, 1,200 Baptists from around the world attended the American Baptist Home Mission Society’s annual meeting in Max, North Dakota. With them was Richard J. Inke, invited by the Mission as general missionary for Russians. The visits the delegation made as part of the meeting included the nearby “Dogden Russian Church”.
Inke gave a thoughtful report of the meeting, and of the Russian immigrants in North Dakota. Inke wrote that at the time, there were some ten thousand Russians in North Dakota, including 219 Russian Baptists. After six years of crop failures, many of the local Russian-American farmers (like so many others) were heavily in debt.
The state had a single Russian Baptist missionary; Inke encouraged the Society to send another to support their parishioners and churches. This probably was not what they were hoping for; it appears the Home Mission Society had invited Inke to represent as a “general missionary for Russians” at the meeting in hopes he’d stay on. But Richard was completing a graduate fellowship at Newton in MA (and also taking Russian at Harvard). His brother Janis was pastor at the Riga, Latvia Baptist church, and his other brother and sister were doing mission work in Brazil. The call of academic and mission work in Brazil eventually won out, and he took the post of Professor of Church History at the Rio Baptist College in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The tiny Ukranian Baptist church in the tiny town of Kief stands today, a hundred years after the 1922 Home Mission Society annual meeting brought 1,200 Baptists from around the world to worship and discuss the work of the Home Missions.