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[Above: Gottfried F. Alf—public domain, wiki.wolhynien.net.] 

GOD RAISES UP WORKERS for his kingdom in unexpected ways. In 1850, Mentnowo, a German colony northwest of Warsaw, Poland, had no resident Lutheran minister. Lutheran pastors were scarce and had to cover large areas. The denomination was weakened from within by liberal theology and formal worship. Few clergy or laypersons showed the spark of genuine faith.

As schoolmaster of Mentnowo, nineteen-year-old Gottfried F. Alf was expected to lead his town’s church service and read a sermon. Determined to understand what he was speaking about, he burrowed into the Bible and learned he was a sinner. It took him two years of study to realize salvation came only by Christ’s work. In 1853, he committed himself to Christ.

Having discovered the key to Christian life, he began to share it with his students. Several became Christians and so did a few parents. Other parents were frightened by the life-altering teaching. They complained to the region’s over-extended pastor. He forbade Alf to hold any more Bible discussions and prayer meetings. When Alf refused to quit, the pastor brought charges against him to the Lutheran Consistory (council). The Consistory stripped him of his educational duties. Alf lost his home. Married, he did not know how to provide for his wife and baby, so he turned to his father for help. His father loaned him some land to farm.

Alf began to make mission trips throughout the region. People were transformed by the gospel. Arrested and beaten at the instigation of Lutheran authorities, he realized he no longer had a place in the church of his childhood. Heinrich Assmann, a neighbor, shared Baptist ideas with Alf, who became convinced they matched the Bible more closely than any other doctrines he had heard. When Alf became a Baptist and repudiated his infant baptism, his father threw him off the land as a despised Anabaptist. Alf moved his family to Adamow, another village near Warsaw. 

Meanwhile Wilhelm Weist, pastor of the German Baptist Church in Stolzenberg, East Prussia, had begun mission work in East Europe. Assmann put Alf in touch with Weist. On this day, 28 November 1858, Weist baptized Alf and eight other converts at Adamow. The next day, Weist baptized seventeen more. Before he left, he baptized eighteen more. With one of Weist’s assistants, Alf formed the first Baptist church in Russian-controlled Poland. However, the Lutheran Consistory and a Lutheran magistrate forbade Alf to preach.

But Alf preferred to obey God’s call. After six months studying under Johann Oncken, the founder of German Baptists, he returned to preach to large crowds in an ever-widening region. The Baptists suffered continual persecution not only from Lutherans but from the Russian Orthodox Church. When Russian troops observed outdoor baptismal services, they more than once marched entire congregations straight to prison. Alf himself was beaten and jailed more than thirty times by 1866 when overt persecution ceased.

But his persistence and suffering paid off. Not only would he establish more churches in Poland, but he also founded the first Baptist churches in Ukraine. By his death in 1898, thousands of Poles and Russians had embraced Baptist life and teachings. Many of those converts migrated to the United States, taking their faith there.

—Dan Graves

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For more on Baptists in Eastern Europe, watch A Light in the Darkness at RedeemTV

A Light in the Darkness can be purchased at Vision Video.

Alf was in the wide stream of Baptist Christianity, a story told in Christian History #6, The Baptists

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