Russians Attracted to American Faiths : Missionaries: With restrictions on worship lifted, a wide variety of preachers find eager audiences in Moscow.

The October Theatre, which in glasnost days drew thousands of Russians seeking to slake their thirst for U.S. culture by viewing films such as “Gone With the Wind” and “Romancing the Stone,” is packed every Sunday with Muscovites hooked on a newer American import: religion.

The faithful hurried down New Arbat Avenue one recent Sunday morning so as not to miss opening hymns at the city’s largest movie house, which for a few hours every week is the home of the Moscow Christian Center. Once inside, they exchanged hugs and enthusiastic greetings before raising their voices to sing, “Jesus is lord and I sing his praises.”

“You better believe in Jesus Christ, because one day it’s going to be bad news for you if you don’t!” an American preacher warned in his translated sermon.

Just about three years ago, the opposite would have been more true in this officially atheist state, where some churches have been turned into vodka distilleries and communism was supposed to eliminate the need for other systems of belief.

But since the government of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev passed a 1990 law guaranteeing freedom of conscience, Russia has become a Klondike for foreign missionaries hunting souls to save. Moscow’s streets are dotted with modern crusaders from all manner of religious groups, from baggy-panted Krishnas to tie-clad Mormons with smart black plastic name tags.

Kit Major, the Moscow Christian Center’s youth pastor, was at Bible school in Louisiana, when, he said, the Lord summoned him to Russia. “You’re one person in the ocean, fishing with a rod and reel,” he said God told him. “If you listen and obey, I’ll give you nets so you can reap the harvest.”

Since his church opened last June, 2,500 Russians have been baptized in a swimming pool that the center rents for the purpose, Major said. “I’m beginning to see the nets get full.”

Enjoying a cigarette on the street after the sermon, Volodya Gromov, 16, told how a small incident had made him a believer: “I came to church one day with a splitting headache. Some people stood around me and prayed, while Kit touched my head. The pain went away.”

Others offered other explanations for their faith. For many Russians, the last few years have been tempestuous, at best, thrusting them into a maelstrom of competing ideas. Many find comfort in the beliefs and ideas of American missionaries.

“They explain everything very clearly here,” Masha, 10, said at the Moscow Christian Center. The Russian Orthodox Church, she said, “is harder to understand. You light a candle, but you don’t know who you’re lighting it for.”

Although the Russian Orthodox Church has experienced a revival in recent years, some Russians, offered a wider choice, are drawn to other faiths. Why? “You get the feeling (in that church that) there’s a wall blocking the clergy from the people,” said Andy Fleming, 34, the Canadian-born pastor at the Moscow Church of Christ.

His church is associated, spiritually and financially, with the Los Angeles Church of Christ. For $250 a day, he and 10 other missionaries rent the Palace of Youth, a hulking concrete mass near the Moscow River built for the Komsomol, the Communist Party youth organization.

Fleming stood on the Palace stage recently, in front of its vast curtain decorated with red stars, a hammer and sickle. To an audience of 1,000 young Russians, he extolled the joys and sacrifices of life with Jesus Christ. His sermon--full of humor, as well as fire and brimstone--was greeted with cries of Ah-min! (amen, as the Russians say it.)

Fleming’s sermon was translated by a Russian colleague, who will become pastor at the church’s Kiev branch when it opens soon. As for Fleming, he plans to stay in Russia for a decade, opening new churches and allowing native Russians to take over as their pastors.

The Moscow Church of Christ has grown to 500 members since Fleming’s arrival last June.

It is true that for some teen-agers, the Western churches may be little more than places to make friends and to meet Americans--a popular pastime among Russian youths. “I want to have many beautiful friends,” first-time church visitor Anna Silayeva, 18, said in accented English.

But for other young people, the attraction runs deeper. Like many churches in America, the Moscow Church of Christ is a haven, a place where people say they can meet others in an atmosphere where they feel surrounded by friendship and goodwill.

The church’s embrace includes not only the young, but also older Russians, who say they like its lively pastors and accessible message.

“The fog is lifting,” Vyacheslav Siloyenko, 42, said as he gestured toward his furrowed brow. He said he has found much insight into life since joining Grace Christian Church, a former construction workers’ club on the dingy outskirts of Moscow. He first received a Bible--a scarce, costly and dangerous book here--when missionaries from the Los Angeles-based Grace Korean Church came two years ago to Khabarovsk, his hometown in the Russian Far East.

“When I first saw it, I was horrified at how much I had sinned,” Siloyenko said. Within a year, he had quit a lucrative job at a cable factory to study the Bible at the seminary run by the Grace Christian Church.