KREMENSKAYA, Russia (Reuters) - Father Gennadi's mission is to save souls and shepherd strays back to God's flock.
But unlike most men in holy orders, to ply his trade the Orthodox church priest needs diesel fuel, a reliable navigator, a decent hole repair kit and a river worthiness certificate.
Reaching out to people in some of Russia's most spiritually and economically devastated regions, requires Father Gennadi to bring faith, hope, charity and a full-size floating church.
His movable place of worship is no match for the vast, glittering cathedrals that adorn Moscow's streets, only runs in the summer months and has to be pulled by a small tow-boat.
Looks betray its humble origins -- a converted landing-stage on which workers mounted a simple metal structure, topped off by a gilded onion-shaped dome and traditional Orthodox cross.
But no one in the forlorn villages dotting the arid southern steppes along the Don River is complaining.
"These places are so poor that they have no chance of having their own church for generations to come," Father Gennadi said ruefully. "What we do is an act of desperation."
Each June, this ungainly house of God heads south to cover some 100 miles down the Don, returning four months later to its winter abode in a small town upstream.
As the floating church glides down the shimmering expanses of this laziest of rivers, it is easy to believe that Father Gennadi has the best job in the world.
But if the good Lord moves in mysterious ways, then so does the Don, which often grows treacherously shallow in the summer, which means even an experienced navigator can run aground.
"It is a lot of responsibility. Earlier this summer we sprang a leak and thank God we were not in deep waters. We could have lost the boat and people might have drowned," said Father Gennadi.
A submerged log almost sank Father Gennadi's entire summer of preaching, when it tore off one of the tow-boat's rudders.
It took the cleric all his priestly powers of persuasion -- and his little remaining cash -- to convince a local factory to quickly weld together a replacement.
DROWNED IN CESSPIT
The church's ports of call are a dozen villages, or khutory as the locals prefer to call them in the old Cossack tradition, which are otherwise accessible only through long tortuous lanes.
Cossack heritage is a matter of pride for most residents, who revel in stories about the freedom-loving horsemen who originally defended the fringes of Christendom from raids by Mongols and Tatars and later became the Czar's personal guards.
For centuries, the Cossacks were the only legal small landholders in Russia, surrounded by serfs working noblemen's estates. Their defense of Slav boundaries earned them other privileges, including the right to brew their own alcohol.
The Bolsheviks, who came to power in Russia after the 1917 revolution, eventually did away with the freedoms enjoyed by the Cossacks and brutally suppressed any dissent.
"The Red Army got the upper hand here only in 1921," said Sergei Ivanov, the local Orthodox Church spokesman. "The priests sometimes even allowed the White Guards to mount machineguns on tall bell towers to give them a good vantage point."
Soon it was the turn of the commissars to take their revenge. Churches were blown up or turned into anything from chemicals depots to lunatic asylums.
According to many accounts, priests were forced to renounce their faith at gunpoint. Those who refused faced the death squad or were drowned in cesspits.
Twenty years later, the region squeezed between the Don and the Volga was awash in the blood of another epic confrontation, between the Red Army and the Germans at Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles in history.
UPHILL BATTLE
The Soviet Union may have rebuilt the country, but 70 years of communism transformed the people beyond recognition.
Father Gennadi says today's Cossacks are not even a shadow of their valiant forbears.
"They all say they are Cossacks, but when I ask them, why don't you go to church, then they start mumbling something," he said. "And the motto of the real Cossacks was fighting for 'the Faith, the Czar and the Fatherland'."
Father Gennadi sighs. For he knows that he is fighting an uphill, if not a losing, battle. The five years he has spent bringing his floating ministry to the region's faithful have hardly swollen his flock.
Only women, mostly elderly, turn up at the services -- while their men lie in a drunken stupor.
"Women do their work, the work of their men and they still find time to come to the church and pray to God," he said.
"In my view, women are the guardians of the Orthodox faith. They kept their faith even in the most difficult years. Men took fright the moment belief was banned and have never turned up in church since."
The decline of local industries after the demise of communism in 1991 only accentuated the effect of decades of atheist brainwashing. Thousands of modern-age Cossacks found themselves out of work and usually dead drunk by about midday.
"The Cossack heartland has turned into a den of alcoholism. Where can you expect to find true believers here?" asked Father Gennadi.
Have no doubt, his floating church is popular at every stop. But probably because its arrival is a welcome distraction for villagers subjected to the tedium of country life.
"It only stays here, say, five days a year," said Lidiya Karpenko, one the few floating church-goers in Kremenskaya. "What impact can it have? Those, like me -- and I am 88 -- who learned our faith long ago, we prayed at home for years.
"It is nice to be able to go to church, but it is not essential. And as for the young ones, they just don't care."
Father Gennadi refuses to lose faith in his mission and vows to be back here next year.
"If, of course, we get our river worthiness certificate extended."