RETIRED MINISTER TO DEPART FOR MISSION IN SIBERIA

Adam Mueller was 9 years old in 1940, the year Hitler and Stalin made a deal that repatriated thousands of German families living in Besarbia, a section of what is now Ukraine. As it turned out, "This was our blessing," Mueller says of his family's return to Germany.

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union the following year, Stalin's soldiers packed the region's remaining German families into boxcars to be shipped to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

The word Siberia stood for more than just a place to the people in Mueller's homeland: "It meant the end of time."

"... During World War II, 50 percent of our people just disappeared," he said.

On Monday, Mueller, now a retired Lutheran minister living in Cape Girardeau, will travel to Siberia with 18 other people on a two-week humanitarian and good-will mission.

They have been invited by the German-speaking Christians in the central Siberian city of Omsk, people who suffered for their heritage and for 50 years stuck with their oppressed faith.

For Mueller, it will be a homecoming of sorts, an encounter with people who share his roots and religious beliefs but who in many ways have been living on a different planet.

"They were put to work for the state for almost nothing," he said. "They lost their rights. It's only now that they're starting to come out again."

"... I could have been one of them over there."

Omsk is an industrial city of 1.5 million people and 85 churches established in people's houses. In these small churches, groups of people conducted secret Christian services in defiance of the Soviet Union's proscriptions against religion.

The mission is an attempt to establish contact, "to let them know we are brothers and sisters and we care," Mueller said.

"We want to find a way to establish a good relationship across our boundaries."

Mueller is "speaking about a citizenship that is more than our citizenship here. ... We don't have to look to Moscow or Washington or even Beijing. We can rise above all our differences."

Those traveling with Mueller hail from Southeast Missouri, St. Louis, Kansas, California and Maryland. They include four ministers, four teachers, two farmers and some students.

Each will carry 14 pounds of medicines, a dear commodity in Russia. Mueller also will take soap and seeds. "They are in need of almost everything," he said.

Russian-language Bibles, children's Bibles and children's storybooks are in their care packages.

Mueller, who for 20 years was pastor of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Friedheim, first was asked to participate in the mission by the Rev. Bert Schirmer, pastor of the Salem Lutheran Church in Farrar.

The mission was instigated by the Rev. Wallace Schulz, an associate minister on the international radio broadcast "The Lutheran Hour."

Mueller hesitated to commit, especially when informed it would be an independent mission each member required to pay their own way. Fund-raising has never been part of his ministry.

"Suddenly, people got hold of it, individual people, friends, congregations, the Aid Association for Lutherans, the Lutheran Laymen's League," he said. "These people got involved on their own."

In Cape Girardeau, St. Andrew Lutheran Church and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church organized a fund-raising drive.

Suddenly, Mueller was bound for a visit with these fellow Germans whose faith is so resilient.

"We want to see what God is doing," he said.

"... In spite of their circumstances and hardships and persecution, God still did not permit that his church be destroyed."

Mueller is the only German-speaking minister on the trip. Preaching to people who for half a century have lived in an atmosphere of distrust will require winning their confidence, he says.

"They're still hesitant. Anything could happen over there. ... They don't know what it means to be able to speak out freely."

But Mueller can say he was born in the Black Sea area, and he speaks a southern German dialect common in Omsk.

"I am a part of the people," he said. Two million Germans now live in the former Soviet Union.

Great care has to be taken to respect how the Russian people live and worship, Mueller said. "We have to be very sensitive. We don't want to impose our way of life."

That was a lesson he and his wife Margarete, who had just obtained their U.S. citizenship in 1960, learned on a missionary assignment on the South Pacific island of Yap. "We are not intruding our way of life," he said.

"You cannot minister to them unless you have their confidence."

There is a conviction on his part that the people of Omsk have had a pipeline to God all along.

"God doesn't depend on an ordained minister," he said. "... This is the work of the spirit of God. You cannot organize this."