A little about Nikolai Solomonov’s ministry and my part in this story.
For the past few months I have been helping now and then with the digital side of the ministry of Nikolai Solomonov, a pastor and Christian preacher from Kazan.
Mostly this means YouTube and Telegram: episode topics, titles, packaging particular ideas, working with the content, and trying to work out how to speak about faith on the internet so that someone on the outside genuinely understands what is being said.
And it becomes clear fairly quickly that the problem here is certainly not a lack of substance.
Nikolai came to God back in the early nineties, and for many years he has spoken consistently about roughly one core idea: the Word of God should be the foundation of real life, and faith should bear fruit.
Not only inside the church. In health, work, finances, relationships with people, freedom, ministry, and a person’s ordinary decisions.
In one of the episodes Nikolai says plainly that God and His Word must always remain the foundation, while outward circumstances and emotions change constantly.
For him it matters a great deal that Christianity should not turn into a separate religious compartment of life. He says that a person’s whole life can be ministry, not only the moment when they preach or pray for people.
Faith ought to change something
One of Nikolai’s central themes is prospering. That word is easy to read too narrowly, as talk about money alone.
But in his episodes it is constantly tied to a wider picture: life in abundance, health, freedom, the ability to fulfil your calling and to see the result of your own faith.
Nikolai himself says that for a long time he thought he believed, when in fact he was simply agreeing with certain biblical ideas. And then he saw the difference between mental assent and the kind of faith that genuinely begins to change a person’s thinking and actions.
Hence one of his most characteristic formulations:
If God has said it, it ought to work.
In one episode he connects the Gospel not only with the forgiveness of sins, but with a person’s release from the consequences of the destruction that sin brings into life.
You can agree with that reading, argue with it, or put questions to it. But for Nikolai this is not a chance topic for a single video. It is a worldview he has lived through consistently.
And then YouTube appears
And here begins the part where I am occasionally useful.
The internet demands something fairly cruel: a complex thought has to be placed into a few words first.
The person does not know you yet.
They see the title of the episode.
Sometimes a thumbnail.
And within a few seconds they decide whether it is worth listening at all.
So one of the tasks was very simple to state and fairly hard in practice: how do you keep Nikolai’s thought intact while phrasing it in the language of someone who is not yet inside a church context?
That is how titles like these came about:
- “Why poverty is not humility but broken faith”
- “Millions heard it — a few received it. Why?”
- “Business in the Father’s hands: how God brought me out of debt”
What I like here is the principle itself.
Not inventing a new thought for someone.
Not turning a pastor into a blogger.
Not making the Gospel into a marketing product.
Just shortening the distance between what a person wants to say and what a viewer is able to hear the first time round.
Not changing the source
This, probably, turned out to matter most to me.
Nikolai already has his own voice. He speaks sharply, sometimes provocatively, leans heavily on Scripture, argues with religious habits, and makes no attempt at all to render his views comfortable for everyone.
That does not need correcting. The internet produces quite enough identical people without our help.
I find it far more interesting to help keep a person as they are, and at the same time make their thought clearer to someone meeting them for the first time.
Somewhere pick a title.
Somewhere look at an episode through the eyes of a new viewer.
Somewhere suggest a phrasing.
Somewhere help with Telegram or other technical things.
A small amount of work around an already existing ministry. But I am genuinely glad that my skills turned out to be useful here.
And a little personally
I am glad I was able to help Nikolai’s ministry and to be a small part of this work.
I want to wish him God’s blessing, health, strength and continued guidance. That the Word he carries would find the people who genuinely need it.
And may the technology, the algorithms, the platforms and all the rest of the digital machinery remain exactly what they ought to be: instruments.
The main thing still happens between a person, God, and a person.
Nikolai Solomonov — YouTube: @nikolaisolomonov · Telegram: @n_solomonov