Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country — a vast sweep of steppe, desert, and mountain that served for millennia as the highway between East and West. The Silk Road passed through it; Genghis Khan conquered it. The Kazakh people were nomadic herders, and their Islam, absorbed in the 15th to 17th centuries, was always lighter and more syncretic than in the Arab world. Russian imperial expansion absorbed Kazakhstan in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Soviet rule proved catastrophic: forced collectivization in the 1930s triggered a famine that killed nearly 40 percent of all Kazakhs. Soviet atheism suppressed both Islam and Christianity for seventy years. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Kazakhstan emerged as an independent nation with almost no living religious tradition to return to.

20,844,000

People live in Kazakhstan today in a country still finding itself — post-Soviet, oil-rich yet unequal, officially secular but with Islam reasserting itself as a marker of national identity. Many Kazakhs are Muslim in name only, carrying Soviet-era skepticism toward all religion alongside a new hunger for meaning and roots. In this spiritual vacuum, one of the most remarkable stories in Central Asian mission history has unfolded: thousands of ethnic Kazakhs have come to faith in Christ since 1991, forming indigenous house churches and facing increasing government pressure for doing so. Kazakhstan's church is young, growing, and costly — and it needs the prayers of the global body.