Our Story — Akop & Svetlana

Armenia · childhood

Chapter One

A Calling at Seven

I was seven years old when my Aunt Rose came to me one night. She had been praying, and the Lord had given her a message for me. She knelt down, took my hands in hers, and said the words that have never left me.

"God has a plan for your life, and He needs you." — Aunt Rose, Armenia

Some of my earliest memories of Christ are of walking hand-in-hand with Aunt Rose through the mountains and forests of Armenia — hours at a stretch — to reach the places where the underground church gathered.

This was Soviet times. Christianity was forbidden. Believers were persecuted — to be known as one could cost you your job, your education, sometimes your freedom. So the church went where the government could not see. That was my first sanctuary: under the trees, on the slopes, with people who would not stop calling on the Name.

A letter I wrote to Aunt Rose — in my own hand

Read translated to English

Meleuz, Russia · 1991

Chapter Two

The First Church

Meleuz, 1991 — a small town in the foothills of the Ural Mountains, in the times when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Doors that had been bolted for seventy years were swinging open. For the first time in living memory, a person could speak the name of Jesus out loud and not be afraid of who might be listening.

I was seventeen. There was no church in Meleuz that we knew of — no fellowship, no gathering, no other believers. So I began doing the only thing I knew how to do: I shared Christ with my classmates, my friends, anyone who would talk with me. One by one, people began to listen. They came to my home to ask questions, to pray, to learn.

Days before our very first meeting, I sat down and wrote to Aunt Rose. I told her I had been praying — that Jesus would gather people for that first Sunday — and asked her, in the name of Jesus Christ, to send us Russian New Testaments, songs, sermons, anything she could find.

"People will be coming to faith and they won't even have a Bible." — Letter to Aunt Rose, Feb 3, 1991

In those first months, our small fellowship shared a single New Testament between us — passing it from hand to hand and reading it page by page. We baptized new believers in rivers, met in our home week after week, and the little gathering that had formed around our kitchen table became our first church. That is how, at seventeen, I became its pastor — not because anyone had given me a title.

Meleuz, 1991 — early baptisms and gatherings

To Aunt Rose, three days before our first meeting — Feb 3, 1991

Read translated to English

1992

Chapter Three

Hand in Hand

Svetlana and I married, and at nineteen we were already ministering side by side. From the very beginning, this calling was always ours — never mine alone. Two lives stitched into one purpose.

Wherever the road has taken us in the decades since — across continents, through unfamiliar languages, into rooms where we were strangers — we have walked it together. Everything that follows in this story is "we," because there has never been anything else.

Two more soon joined our "we" — our daughter Kristina and our son Martin. From their earliest years they were learning, simply by being with us, what it takes to serve the Lord. The road was their childhood, and they made a home wherever the work took us.

"Home is where my suitcase is." — Kristina, age 6

Akop and Svetlana — the early years

1998 onward

Chapter Four

Joining the McNultys

In 1998 we joined Christian Adventures International, the ministry of Drs. Kevin and Leslie McNulty. For more than twenty-five years we served as their International Event Directors, organizing mass tent outreaches across Eurasia and the former Soviet republics.

Country by country, city by city, tent by tent — a quarter-century of evenings under big tents, watching the gospel meet people for the first time. Almost everything we know about evangelism, about ministry, about leading a team across borders, we learned in the McNultys' company.

Nearly everything we know about ministry, we learned walking alongside Kevin and Leslie.

Whatever comes next, we are building on this strong heritage.

Drs. Kevin and Leslie McNulty with Akop and Svetlana

With Drs. Kevin and Leslie McNulty — Christian Adventures International

Across Eurasia

Chapter Five

Under the Tents

The tent was where so much of the work happened. Big yellow-and-white tents pitched in city squares and parks, in towns that had never seen anything like it. Trucks of equipment, days of setup, nights of preaching, mornings of follow-up with the local churches.

We organized outreaches across more than thirty countries. We watched young evangelists take their first preaching opportunities, watched skeptics fall to their knees, watched local believers carry the work forward long after we packed up and moved on.

Akop and Svetlana with the McNultys under a crusade tent

2006 onward

Chapter Six

Alongside Dr. T.L. Osborn

Beginning in 2006, our work with Christian Adventures International expanded. Alongside the McNultys, we began helping coordinate worldwide mass-outreach crusades for the late Dr. T.L. Osborn — already one of the giants of twentieth-century evangelism.

To organize alongside him — and to sit under his preaching — was a gift we never expected. We watched stadiums fill. We watched a message of healing and hope land in cities that had heard nothing like it. From Dr. Osborn we learned not only how to run a crusade, but how to carry one in your spirit.

With Dr. T.L. Osborn

2026

Chapter Seven

What Comes Next

This summer, we step into something new. Not a departure from the road that brought us here — but a continuation of it. We are going back to the soil where God first lit a fire in us. Walking again with the churches and the people who shaped our faith. Standing alongside the evangelists carrying the gospel into places where it still costs something to believe. And listening for what God is unfolding next.

With deep gratitude for everyone who has walked this road with us — and with hearts still open to the partnerships ahead — this is RESET.

The Road That Brought Us Here