Abstract
During the winter of 1996 I had the rare privilege of flying on a Transaero flight from Moscow to Almaty, the capital of the sprawling former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, with a group of American missionaries from Texas. The evangelists from Houston were on their way to this landlocked Central Asian Muslim republic to spread the gospel of Christ and had a sense of enthusiasm that was nothing if not contagious. As their Texas twangs mingled in the airplane's cabin with the Turkic language of the Kazakhs, a people who in many ways still resemble their nomadic ancestors who conquered the world under Genghis Khan, I was intrigued by the notion of American missionaries converting these hard drinking, ex-Soviet Muslims of Inner Asia to Christianity.