The month was full of blessings and excitement!
The first part of the month I spent teaching two weeks intensive training course for the pastors of Donetsk (Eastern Ukraine) area churches. I had about forty of them in my class.
Teaching ministers is much better joy then regular students. It is always pleasure to see the people who immediately understand where and how they can apply the material they study.
A weekend between the classes I spend visiting churches of the region on the invitation of my students. It involved preaching, talking to the leaders of the churches, doing Q&A seminars on various issues of Creation evangelism, apologetics, church life and personal life in Christ. I have returned to the campus tired by rejoicing of great serving opportunities the Lord provided.
On the return I had a brief week with our team with the last preparations for TVORETS (‘Creator’ in Russian) Creation Evangelism children’s camp. We went for on June 20. For 10 days we were living in the tents in juniper grove at the Black Sea coast with 25 kids of age eight to twelve from various churches and family background (5 of them were from family-type orphanages). Together with the kids we studied how to stand more firm in our faith and how to be better faith defenders.
During the lessons we were going thru key points of biblical history – Creation, Fall, Flood, Babel confusion, Christmas, Redemption and New creation. During the games and activities we practiced how to apply our knowledge effectively in our daily life and Christian witnessing.
We have had lot of fun playing, swimming, trying to imagine a life at the Noah’s ark, searching for the young earth and Noah’s flood evidences recorded in the rocks. The camp was a great blessing for us and for the kids. And I believe it will be a great blessing for their families and their churches, where the truth of the Bible could be defended from the very youth.
Here is a feedback from the camp counselors’ leader: ‘The program of the camp made me see the Bible in some way differently. Now I am convinced that the Bible not just a book to tell us about Savior and the salvation, but also a true history of the creation. The program can be used both for believers and nonbelievers. Teaching it lesson after a lesson I observed how the worldview of the kids who did not know God was formed toward Biblical understanding of the world. On the other hand, believers were excited to discover various evidences and arguments on Biblical truth relevance for the real world. Both kids and counselors experienced great satisfaction in stage by stage study thru the Bible of the story of the universe- its past, present and the future’ (Irina Tsaritson, camp senior counselor).
In couple days after the our return from children’s camp, the biggest part of our office team left to Central Russia for doing medical universities students camp – the outreach project we are doing together with our former manager and now Central Russia coordinator Andrey Goorsky. Please pray for the Lord’s guidance and protection in it.
Please pray for all the projects mentioned above. Pray for the fruits from the seeds that had being planted. Pray also for my family and for our team. You are in our prayers as well.