EYES screwed shut, Teimurazi Edjibia seeks the hand of God. "Help us, help us," he beseeches. "You know what I am looking for, what I am dreaming about."
Today has brought bad tidings for the evangelist preacher and the closely-knit church he leads; the worst news in a procession of bad news days stretching back to early 1999.
Edjibia addresses his flock in Russian, the one language understood by the whole congregation. Once a month all 115 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Visaginas cram into a small, 150-year-old sand-stone chapel.
But in Visaginas, Lithuania's youngest town, there are no churches. This is inner city Liverpool. And today the congregation are wondering how much further they must travel before they can worship in peace with their pastor.
For the pastor has given his weary community of souls the shattering news that they face expulsion from the UK and a return to the land they fled - as victims of religious persecution - more than four years ago.
How they came to be here this late autumn day is a tale that, in places, beggars belief. It tells of an alleged threat to wipe out mankind in a nuclear holocaust, a Biblical-style exodus and a suspected conspiracy going to the heart of government.
Most of all it is a story of astonishing devotion to a preacher that has brought them from eastern Europe to Merseyside after a search for sanctuary spanning nearly four years, five countries and thousands of miles.
Just across town, in Toxteth, solicitor Peter Simm works over-time in his empty office, unaware that he is the focus of such fervent prayer.
For three years, the church has put its faith into the Liverpool human rights lawyer, based at AS Law in Myrtle Parade. His faith in them has extended to representing them in dozens of court appearances, occasionally funding their fight out of his own pocket.
But now the long legal road of asylum and human rights appeals may have run out, their quest for a promised land thwarted again.
A crucial appeal involving one of the congregation has failed. As a test case, it means the other 50 adults and 64 children now face the same fate.
Church member Lydia Polevoj says: "If we are sent back to Lithuania I don't know how we would survive - we have no jobs, no homes, no documents even.
"Just trying to feed the children and putting a roof over them would be a nightmare."
A TV documentary in January 1999 brought chaos to their lives in Visaginas - a town built to house the workforce of a vast nuclear power plant, built on the Chernobyl model.
A film crew arrived seeking material for a programme about the millennium. "They asked us what we thought about the end of the world and we explained what the Bible says, that we believed in a Day of Judgement," recalls Lydia.
In the documentary Pastor Edjibia was seen expressing his belief that Judgement Day would arrive sooner rather than later. It was also reported that a fifth of the congregation were workers at the nuclear plant and a former churchgoer speculated that one of them might - at Edjibia's bidding - hasten the end of the world by triggering a nuclear disaster.
The allegations combined to make an explosive package. The next morning, one story dominated the country's best-read newspaper.
Side by side were pictures of the pastor and the Ignalina nuclear reactor, and over the top of them a banner headline: "Doomsday at a nuclear power plant".
For the Church of Jesus Christ, meltdown was immediate.
"We were just ordinary people. We had no reason to believe something like this would happen to us," Lydia recalls from the modest terraced house in Kensington that she shares with husband Vadim and their four children.
"People abused us in the street, our children were bullied at school. One of our congregation was threatened by the secret service. We became so frightened."
The press fed the fire. The church was said to be a dangerous sect; articles described the congregation as zombies, with Edzhibya said to have employed "hypnotic techniques" and "cursed little children".
Looking back, the congregation believe they were victims of a politically-inspired campaign. To link them with the power station might make it easier to shut it down and, ultimately, facilitate the country's entry to the EU.
Leading their monthly services, Teimurazi (Tei to his congregation) Edjibia dresses for an afternoon in B&Q; pastel pink polo shirt, chinos and open-toed sandals. Nothing in his appearance suggests he is intent on bringing the Earth to a cataclysmic conclusion.
LAWYER Peter Simm believes the pastor to be "a bit of an enigma, but very genuine". He adds: "He is just a nice guy, really".
But by October 1999, Edjibia, a Georgian national, was considered sufficiently dangerous for the Lithuanian government to expel him to neighbouring Latvia.
To church members, the pastor's expulsion felt like a mortal blow. For a time they crossed regularly into Latvia, meeting Edjibia in a forest clearing.
But three weeks before the new millennium, the entire congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ - men, women and children, aged from just a few months up to 67 - took a decision that would astonish their countrymen.
They packed on to two hired buses and left Lithuania in search of a permanent sanctuary, with no idea where it would be found.
Edjibia, tied by visa problems in Latvia, waited for their call.
Lydia says: "We would have stayed. We could have come through this, but when the pastor went we were no longer a church."
Vadim adds: "We had lost our brother, our father, our teacher."
For 10 weeks they sought and failed to find refuge, first in Poland, then in Sweden and Germany. Their misery culminated in a night on the floor of a cell at a German immigration centre, during which they were strip-searched and interrogated, before being dumped at a border station.
"This was the worst. I cried every night for months after that," says Lydia.
They reluctantly resolved to return to Lithuania and raise the air fare to England in hope of a sympathetic reception.
They sold everything, pooling the proceeds and, in March 2000, the first church members landed at Hea-throw applying for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution. The rest, including Edjibia, followed over the next two months.
"Our request to be kept together was refused," Lydia recalls. "They dispersed us to seven cities around the UK.
"Most of us did not speak the language and we had no legal representation. We were in disarray."
Eight families, including Edjibia's, were sent to Liverpool. The city suddenly became a magnet and, three years on, all but three of the scat-tered families have surmounted problems of geography, language, finance and bureaucracy to be here; over 100 people living in Bootle, Anfield and Kensington.
The others travel to Liverpool for regular services so that, for now, they are a fully functioning church once more.
But now judges deciding church member Alexey Rotchenkov's case at the High Court have confirmed earlier decisions that the congregation's treatment in Lithuania did not fall within the definitions of persecution under British law.
Mr Simm says: "We have not completely given up. The congregation can still make one last plea to the Court of Appeal but we are pretty much at the end of the road."
Edjibia, as a Georgian national, is being dealt with separately and his case remains undecided.
Vadim believes deportation would be the end for the church. A final plea to Home Secretary David Blunkett to use discretionary powers to "have mercy" has gone ignored.
A Home Office spokesman says: "We do not comment on individual cases of asylumor immigration."
There is one possibility. If Lithuania's entry to the EU is granted, and the pastor is still in the UK, the congregation - if still intact - could join him by exercising their right of movement around the EU.
Lithuania's EU entry depends strictly on the Ignalina power station shutting, thus offering the prospect that the nuclear plant at the root of the church's problems could yet prove its saviour.
Mr Simm is to plead with immigration minister Beverley Hughes to extend their stay until Lithuania's EU membership in confirmed.
Meanwhile, the Lithuanian media speculates about when, and if, they will return.
Now and again the congregation makes the journey to Freshfields pinewoods. It reminds them of the forests around Visaginas and of their lives there. Except that those lives can never be regained. And where each of them will end up is as uncertain today as it was in 1999.
His hands tied legally, the special adjudicator who passed judgement in their chief case for asylum, was moved to comment: "Their situation can be compared to the Pilgrim Fathers who arrived in Virginia in 1620 in a simpler, less sophisticated, but in some ways more enlightened age.
"The Pilgrim Fathers were not faced by immigration officers on arrival . . . clearly these are honest, decent and God-fearing people."