The major achievement of the month was completing of a great technical adventure of transferring all our videos from VHS to DVDs. The discs are much easier to duplicate, to mail and to store. Now the videos are available to the evangelists, pastors and preachers much easier and in a descent form. It is hard to imagine, but total of what we have made is 50 videos on 16 DVD-ROMs! Isn’t it amazing how great is a work of our God?!
As for strategic development, I have a very good and productive meeting with Igor Kurlyanov, a missionary at North China and Russian Far East. He was my student at Donetsk Christian University eight years ago, and back then he was dreaming already about the missionary work in China. Now his dream came true. He lives with his family at Blagoveschensk (Russia) right at the China border and doing the ministry in both countries. But the things he have studied on the Creation Evangelism at my classes a while ago as well as his current ministry experience make him concern about the desperate need of apologetics for effective Christian persuasion. That is why he desires to serve as our coordinator at Russian Far East and North China. Praise the Lord for sending the workers for His harvest and the opportunities He makes thru His faithful servants!
Another development of the month is making the textual resources we produced earlier more available! We have issued a new CD-ROM ‘Apologetics Electronic Library’ that includes many books on Apologetics and Creation Evangelism, PowerPoint presentations, video files and a complete copy of our web site. We have sent a copy of the CD to every Christian college, university and seminary of former Soviet Union for making all these materials available to the students at those schools local servers.
Also we got very interesting contact with the organization that arranges the conferences for 1000 Ukrainian pastors in Kiev and 600 in Kharkov. We have decided immediately to publish 2000 copies of the revised and updated version of ‘Biblical Strategy of Evangelism’ with the information about our ministry and upcoming Summit on apologetics at the back to give a copy to everyone who will attend those conferences. Please pray for more ministers will see the need for the apologetics in general and for Creation Evangelism in particular thru these materials we are going to give them.
We have a sad news and prayer concern as well. A manager of our video production department Mikhail Bankovsky found out that his father is seriously sick, and Mikhail had to move back to his parent’s home. It is at Mikhail’s apartment all our video production equipment was set up. Now it had to be reassembled, transported and installed again at new place. That has delayed our video production projects considerably. Please pray for the physical, emotional and spiritual strength of Mikhail’s family (all of them are reconciled with the Lord, and this is a great comfort!) as well as for the Lord’s guidance in catching up with the delayed projects.
The last (chronologically) event of the month was my departure to teach at Kursk (Russia) for two weeks. I love to teach! It is so great to see ‘Aha!’ in students eyes when they start to realize how important to go and challenge the worldview of secular people instead of just recruiting and indoctrinating them without proper change of the mindset called ‘conversion’. Please join my prayers for the seeds planted will bring a proper harvest in God’s time.
The students were young people mostly, but there are some middle age ones as well. Two of them were former criminals who served more then one sentence, but now they came to the Lord and ministry to the prisoners themselves. Another was a Gipsy missionary to his own people. Beyond the classes I also was preaching ate the churches, met with Christian youth groups and secular schools students. Also I had more time for doing the assignments on my doctorate studies than I have at home usually where much more things are at the plate.
The school administration is extremely excited to find out about the distant learning courses we develop now and they will be glad to coordinate their usage in Russia. It increased our outreach opportunities considerably.
Please pray for all the projects mentioned above. Pray also for my family and for our team. You are in our prayers as well.