Whatever planning of the ministry we are we doing, we should be ready for the surprises the Lord provides. The greatest surprise of the month is a wide open ‘new old’ ministry opportunity – spreading of the Gospel message to people with the sight disorders.
We did plan a ministry like this about a decade ago, developed a lot of good audio materials, and got good audio cassettes duplicator. However we did not managed to reach our main goal – unbelievers with the eyes problems back then – they mostly all were involved with strictly closed totalitarian organization ‘The Blind Society’ (what a considerate name!). The Society was established by Stalin in 1925 for using people with the sight disorders as a slave manual labor.
In exchange for the cheap manual labor the society was providing its members a sort of fellowship as well as provided everyone with a cheapest one frequency radio receiver in the beginning and with the cassette player later on supplying them with the particular propaganda cassettes for the brainwashing.
The Society exists by now as a mean of fellowship and has the same strictly atheistic secular leaders who are strongly against any ‘religious propaganda.’ They refused any of our materials, while still supplying the members with the ‘bestsellers’ audio versions when got a grant for it. For instance the only book they got last year is DaVinci Code 🙁
Having no access for our materials spread at the society, we were providing the audio materials to churches for people they have connections with as well as for track drivers. However the cassettes ministry has declined eventually with CD and MP3 players replacing the cassettes players, and we did not even use our duplicator for a good couple years already.
Nevertheless the Lord has provided us with a new start of the old project! A brother in Christ Dmitry Polynnikov, the society member informally connected with the leadership, has moved to our city and became our church member last year. We have ordained as a on of the elders recently. He has a passion to spread the message and he volunteers for this ministry. We have found out the common vision and understanding of the ministry with Dmitry, and he is going to be our coordinator at the Society. We will do it on the project by project basis. Dmitry is going to distribute 26 copies of every audio book for the former Soviet Union regional centers of the Society and 15 for the local groups. The ministry will be more effective in the new materials production when we have our own studio after the remodeling done, but we will see the opportunity to make some new records made at rented studios even this year.
On June 15 we have made the presentation of ‘The Lesson’ movie at our headquarter upper room. We have invited 35 persons including youth leaders of several churches of the region, and everyone told how much they are touched by the movie. Many had tears in their eyes. They told them sorry they did not have a video like this before. During the presentation we have shot interviews with the leading actors; Zhenya told about the purity commitment; I have preached about Biblical concept of the marriage covenant (http://www.scienceandapologetics.org/engl/g11.html). Everyone got a book ‘Taking Truth Next Door – offering honest answers to 21st-century seekers’ as a gift as well as a copy of the movie DVD. People are keen about using it in churches and schools immediately.
However the greatest adventure of the month with no doubts was the ‘Creator’ children creation evangelism camp (see the pictures attached)! The camp was extremely blessed time of fun, recreation, studies, worship, training, fellowship, etc., etc., etc. We had children of age 8 – 12 with very mixed and diverse background. Two thirds of them were from various churches, the rest – from unbelieving families; some children were from regular families, some – from foster families, some – from incomplete and/or indigent families. Some of the kids do not have proper regular meal and decent living conditions usually. Just imagine: in the beginning of the camp some of them were taking their shoes off entering public restrooms – never in their life they see such a clean place and hesitated to enter it other way!
The main goal of the camp was field testing of the ‘Beginnings’ curricula that builds a worldview foundation in young minds. We were afraid that with so much scientific terms it could be too hard for the understanding in the target age group, but everything was very successful!
Please join our prayers for the seeds planted during the camp as well as for the testimony the children could be to their parents. Now we will spread the curricula for various churches ministries.
The venue for the camp was a rented motel at a small village at the sea shore. The price was reasonable and the owner gave us a lot of freedom to use the venue in any way we want, but since it was initially built for different purposes many ideas were left aside and many more ideas we got how to build our own retreat/conferences/training/camps center if this is the will of the Lord to provide us such an opportunity. We keep praying and dreaming about that vision.
Please pray for our ministry, for our team, for my family, for all the activities and projects, for God’s guidance in everything we do.
