In 1991, LST sent a large group of students from Lipscomb University to Kiev, Ukraine. One of those students was Chris Lovinggood, who later returned as a full-time worker. One of his accomplishments was to create what is called the Ukrainian Education Center (UEC), a center for reading, for study, for small groups to gather, in short, a place for Christians to build relationships with the community. This building is where the Let’s Start Talking teams meet their Readers as well.
Today, Sherrylee and I had the privilege of meeting Vitaly Samodin, the director of the UEC. He is also one of the leaders in the Nevky church, with whom LST has a fairly long history of serving. We spent the morning talking about our partnership and how we might serve the church here better.
About 11am, we were joined by Kostya K–, the minister for the church of Christ in Bila Tserkva, just outside of Kiev. Kostya’s story is classic!
Kostya was an LST reader about 1994 in Kiev. David Skidmore was the American Christian who read with him. David says that they sat under a statue of Lenin as they read. But Kostya was not that interested. So David went home. Fifteen years later, David is walking by the missions bulletin board in a Memphis church and sees a picture of Kostya and couldn’t believe his eyes. He read the caption under the picture and was convinced it was the same Kostya that he had read with under the statue of Lenin, but now Kostya was the preacher for the church in Bila Tserkva! David had not even known that he was a Christian. Heaven is going to be full of people discovering each other and never dreaming that one had influenced the other towards eternity.
We visited with Kostya for a while, then he took us to the UEC since we had never been there. As a true serendipity, Tim Archer, a man we had worked with in Kiev in the early 90s was also visiting the UEC, so we got to have lunch with Tim and Kostya. See what I mean about our being so blessed to constantly meet people of great faith.
Churches of Christ in Kiev seem to be doing well. There is sustained work, there are many young leaders, there is vision beyond just conducting church services, and there is a strong sense of serving the community. It has been an encouraging day.
The weather in eastern Europe is unseasonably warm. Sherrylee and I can’t decide whether it is a blessing or a curse. Very cold weather as we expected would have been bone-chilling, no doubt, but the extra warm weather has made it very, very warm in all the buildings because they had already turned on the heat. It is apparently unreasonable to cool anything in November. Oh well. Stretch those rubber bands.
Tomorrow we have a morning meeting with Yuriy Aniper and then we fly to Budapest. Thanks for going along with us.
Look for pictures of the people we meet on my Facebook page.
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