By Stephen W. Barrett — 
On a single day in November 1991, the Moscow-based Athletes in Action (AIA) team tripled in size. My wife Cindi and I, along with our three daughters, flew into Sheremetyevo airport with fifteen boxes.
Another new teammate, Ron Nelson, who had been a missionary in Hungary, was scheduled to arrive (by car) from Budapest the same evening we flew into Moscow. At some point, the road from Budapest intersects with the Ring Road, which encircles Moscow for sixty miles.
Ron randomly took the first exit off the Ring Road and pulled into the first parking lot he could find, which was at a high-rise apartment complex. He saw someone standing in the parking lot and asked in his proper Canadian accent, “Can you please tell me where Carl Dambman lives?”
Incredibly, the man who turned around was Carl!
There were over ten million people living in Moscow, and on a sixty-mile road with 35 different exits, Ron chose the correct one and pulled into a random parking lot where Carl was getting into his car to meet us at out new apartment.
Ron came to Moscow to work with AIA, and in the process, he started a ministry with prisons and orphanages. When Ron was in his late thirties, he came to faith in Christ. At the time he was a highly successful commercial real estate developer in Toronto and was supervising the building of the largest shopping mall in the city.
He read in his Bible the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:36, I was in prison and you came to Me. He felt the Lord telling him he needed to visit men in the local prison and share the Gospel with them.
Somehow, he struck up a deal with the prison warden to rent a cell and live there. By day he worked on the shopping mall project, and in the evenings, he lived in the prison where he held group Bible studies and discipled prisoners.
The investors of the shopping mall heard about Ron’s living arrangements and called him into a meeting to discuss this. They didn’t believe he was taking the shopping mall project seriously since he was sleeping in a prison cell at night. The investors gave Ron an ultimatum: either move out of the prison or be fired. He turned in his resignation and continued to live in the prison.
A week later, the investors called Ron in and said, “We see you are serious about living in the prison, but we need you.” They reinstated Ron’s position and he continued developing the shopping mall by day and teaching prisoners at night.
In his fifties, Ron became a missionary. We met him for the first time in 1983 when he moved to Vienna, and by the time we met Ron again in Moscow in 1991, he was 61-years old and had worked in both Austria and Hungary. Under the influence of Ron’s vision to start a prison ministry, I visited over 75 prisons throughout the former Soviet Union and Mongolia. Because of his example and his heart for orphans, I was also motivated to visit orphanages, sometimes as many as 100 a year.¹
From Budapest’s budding fellowships to Moscow’s clandestine house churches, Ron lived and labored in Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Russia, training indigenous leaders in discipleship and biblical counseling through the Biblical Counseling Foundation (BCF) courses in Helsinki and Lahti. When political winds shifted his base from Moscow to Finland, he served at the International Evangelical Church while spearheading New Life Prison Ministry in Russia. Known for his courage in street evangelism and family-inclusive outreaches, Ron often quipped that his real estate days taught him to “build on the Rock.” (Matthew 7:24-27) Ron entered the presence of his Savior on February 27, 2008, at age 78, leaving a legacy in souls saved and lives transformed.
- Excerpt from The Unlikely Missionary. To order the book go here
