Recognize the music but not the words
This was a short video from the opening night at the Youth Conference in Odessa, Ukraine. Sorry for the poor quality but I had my small camera with me and no video camera. What is hard to see is that there’s almost 3,000 people in the crowd. It was awesome!
End of our time in Odessa
As we come to the end of our time here, we took some time to run around Odessa. We had a good time but spent a lot of time crammed into Marshukas (small buses). We had to run to the train station to make some arrangements for some of our team and got to see that area of town. Then we made our way over to the beach area and enjoyed watching a jet ski pull people on an inner tube. Then we made our way back to camp.
When we got back we did hear some good news about the conference – last night we had a famous Russian evangelist speak and many were invited from the community. We found out that over 150 people made a decision to follow Christ and over 50 people made a decision to become missionaries. Isn’t it awesome!!!
Well, we are still looking at the different ways for why God has had us here and look forward to see how the contacts we have made develop in the future. Take care and thanks for the prayers.
Our Seminar
We are in the middle of our seminar RIGHT NOW! And I’m blogging about it during it using my cell phone. Technology is advancing at a rapid speed. Think about the possibilities for evangelism and discipleship. Isn’t God awesome in how He can use all things for His glory?!?
God bless.
Our Mascot & more about the conference
For the past two days we have awoken to an extra companion in our room. He sneaks in after we go to sleep. He’s very friendly and brings many gifts with him (fleas). Honey, if you are reading this than please know that I’m going to need some itch cream when I get home.
I thought I would take a moment and tell you more about the youth conference we are at. Over 3000 youth and youth workers showed up for the conference (they were expecting 2500 – oops). They come from many different countries that were all at one time a part of the Soviet Union (obviously not now). The common language here is Russian but when people pray they usually pray in their mother tongue. This is the first time that they have been able to get together EVER. The conference (actually called a congress or Kongress) is put on by the Baptist Union. We are at a camp here in Odessa, Ukraine that in communist days was a camp for training and bringing up the Communist Youth.
Now the American in me wants to say that that is so ironic as my American value system says that Comunism is wrong however there are many here who would disagree with me (and they have legitimate reasons to support it). But the grand thing is that we are brothers and sisters in Christ first and we believe in a God who is bigger than democracy or communism so we can stand together and worship Him.
Praise God or Slava Boga (although I’m unsure of the correct spelling).
Preparing to present
Here’s our translator Roman (and a system administrator for a Bible school here in Ukraine) working on getting our powerpoint into Russian. Luckily I don’t have a big part in actually presenting. I’m more there for the question time.
OK, let me tell you some about our time here. We left Germany by train early the other morning. We made our connections just fine and made our flights from Zurich to Budapest to Odessa just right too. Now once we arrived in Odessa, it was a situation of “I thought this other person was handling that.” So we waited a total of three hours (which in the grand scheme of things is a short period of time) in the airport. During that time Gordon got some great reading done and I was able to get our Ukrainian phone card working and call our contacts to see what was going on. We were then picked up and told that they really didn’t know where we were staying that evening as every one else was staying in tents out on the beach. We ended up staying with this nice old couple who knew only one word in English – husband. We got to sleep on these futon things in the hallway and dining room. The next morning we were awoken to them leaving food for us for breakfast as they went off to work. We ate an d then waited and waited. No one knew when we were to be picked or by whom we were to be picked up by. Shortly before 1 PM our contact called and told us we should be picked up shortly. I think it was shortly after 2 PM that we got picked up. Now in Ukraine, we don’t normally wear seatbelts mainly because you can’t find them. But in this case they were there but useless as the seats weren’t even bolted to the floor. This was a fun ride especially as I got to ride sideways in the back. We arrived at the camp just in time to meet up with eDOT’er Andrew and our translator, Roman. We then promptly left the camp to pick up fellow GEM’ers Kelly & Nathan who work with the GEM youth team. Finally after some dinner, we made it to the camp and got to go to the opening night ceremony.
Now if it seems like all I’ve talked about is the bad things (did I mention our toilet leaks?), then let me fill in the blanks: on our trip from the airport to the old couples’ home, our driver also picked up a man and his young son. After talking with him, we find out he is one of the organizers of the event and heads up a lot of the stuff happening in Russia. Gordon has been working on a course to help disciple people after they decide to become a Christian and it’s just been translated into Russian. Who better to do a review of the course than this man so we left a copy with him. God ordained? We think so.
Last night at the opening ceremonies, the rows of chairs where we sat only had three chairs per row. Since there were five of us (Nathan stayed back to watch our stuff – well, he actually just slept) there was an open seat. A young woman sat in it and she speaks multiple languages including English, German & Slovak (Kelly lives in Slovakia). As we talked, her church in Kiev is starting an International outreach and invited many of the Baptist churches in Slovakia to a conference in September but were afraid no one was going to come. Kelly, who is a part of a Baptist church, had not heard of the conference and is going to see that the conference gets known in Slovakia. God ordained? We think so.
We’re looking forward to more of the contacts and interactions that we will have over this week. Pray with us as we look for more of these God ordained moments. Pray that we will be bold as most of the people here do not speak the same languages as we do but you never know who might, so we must be bold.
Don’t know what it is but I’ll take 2
So I’m in Ukraine and let’s just say something didn’t settle well with what I ate our first day here. The nice thing is that there are drug stores everywhere around here. All you do is go into one, tell them your symptoms and they recommend something for you. So out I walked with the bottle shown above. I have no clue as to what it is but it worked. I feel much better. This is extremely different than Germany where you almost have to have a doctor’s prescription for aspirin so it kinda weirded me out.
On another note, please continue to pray. We have had a interesting time here in Ukraine between some sickness (me and another team mate), some interesting roads (I’ll show more of that later), housing situations have been in flux and we have not had as much time as we would have liked to configure our new Mobile Outreach Center than we would have liked. As a matter of fact, the only reason I have Internet right now is because while our team is doing some street ministry in a town north of Kiev on this Ukrainian Holiday, Sasha and I are working diligently to get the computers just ready for our classes that begin tomorrow. Praise God with us that our major hurtles have been overcome and we are now just putting the final touches on the systems.
I will probably not be able to get back online until I return to Germany in just over a week so take care and I’ll update you later.
- Courtney
PS – I did get converse with a young man who is going to be attending our classes this next week. While he is a computer programmer, as he puts it – he has this deep need to hear more about God and he knows that while we are teaching computers, we will also be talking about God. He just came to know about Christ in this last year and I am hoping to talk with him more and more this week.
Back, Recovered, Moving on to the next task
Thank you to all of you that prayed for us while we were in Ukraine. It was an amazing trip. It was awesome to see and hear how God is working in Ukraine – using technology to train leaders and for outreach purposes.
The first part of our time in Ukraine was an eLearning Center (eLC) Directors meeting. We have over 18 (actually more now but that in a moment) eLCs in Ukraine and most of these eLCs are in churches scattered across the country. eDOT invited those church leaders who are involved in using the eLCs to come to Kiev (Ukraine’s capital) for a time of encouragement, more training on how to use the eLCs more effectively and for them to meet each other. Our goal is that they will be each other’s greatest resources and to hear how each of the centers are being used is just amazing. Some are a part of ministries that are focused on outreaches to orphanages, some are focused on adult education, while others are focused on reaching local ethnic communities. How they use the computers is just slightly different in each context but they were able to share these differences with one another sparking new ideas and excitement. It was just great getting to know these church leaders and to share in their passion to reach Ukraine for Christ.