English Club – 2 weeks that can change a life

How can you manage to gather 30 students who don't know the Lord yet to get together for two weeks in the row, study the Scripture and take part in the spiritual discussions?

How can you both share the Gospel and break the stereotypes letting people get to know you closer?

How can you reach the students that take leading roles in society and lead the active way of life?

English Club outreach helps you find answers to all these questions.

God has blessed us with a wonderful place to have our classes at.

Right in the center of Odessa and very close to many different campuses the beautiful building of Lutheran church is situated. It was restored couple years ago and now it has a bunch of facilities for different kinds of group meetings. It is very modern and well made so it was the best place for us to invite new students.

Oleg became a believer a year ago exactly at English Club 2011. This year he has brought two of his classmates from his university to attend the classes with him.

“Real Americans”

Darlene

The idea of the English Club is to help students practice their conversational English. That's why we want to have English native speakers as teachers. But what is the most important that students are willing to discuss spiritual questions with foreigners (they are not as open with us, Ukrainians).

The lesson consisted of two parts: studying English and reading the passage from the Scripture and discussing it.

Rick

Curt





Max and Elijah

Max and Elijah are the students of the marine college and both of them were asking tons of different questions during the second part of the lesson. Yesterday we studied the “Parable about four soils” and Max said that his doubts and his unanswered questions  stop him from becoming the fourth good soil for God.



Please pray for these students. May they keep coming to our weekly meetings in Russian and may the light of the truth shine out for them. May they personally meet with true mighty and loving God.

The voice of the crying in the….dorm!!!

This was one of the memorizing phrases from the speaker at the Winter Bible Student Conference. The topic of the conference was – Finish Up – how to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus Christ in this generation. We passed our students the idea that they were the “crying voices” in their own dorms. They can be the source spreading the Good News in every single room that Christ came to save every sinner.
At this 5 days long WBC were about 180 students presenting the biggest cities and campuses of Ukraine.

Sharing the gospel in the sanatorium

Despite of the cold weather (-13°F and down all the time) we decided to put the theory into practice. We divided into pairs and went to share the Gospel with people from the sanatorium we were staying at and to the nearby little town.






At the end we figured out that about 180 people head the Gospel that day.

The beginning of the Spiritual Movements…

I thank God that He blesses us to see the beginning of the spiritual movements in Odessa. The Lord is bringing the new students to our ministry through the witness of our volunteers in their environment.  

Sergey and Yura

Sergey was sharing his faith with his classmate Yura. Last semester Yura became a Christian. Sergey is helping Yura to grow in his faith – they read the Scripture together and discuss spiritual things in a life of a Christian. At the conference Yura was sharing his faith for the first time.

Rita and Olya

Rita was telling her classmate Olya about Christ. Olya decided to go the WBC with us. She heard more about Christianity and she even tried to tell other non believers at the conference about God and faith. The ways of God are unpredictable!
When we went to the 5th dorm of the Academy of Connections last week – 4 students decided to become Christians after hearing Four Spiritual Laws. Praise God for His faithfulness!

Please pray with us:

- For the new “crying voices” joining the “voices” of our students in the dorms; may our students are not afraid of sharing their faith constantly in their environment.

- May new students who became Christians recently continue coming to our meetings and grow on faith.

-  For the new Bible study groups in the dorms.


 -  For the student leaders Summit in Budapest. 7 students from Odessa are going to attend it from the 1st to the 7th of March. May God inspire their hearts to dо His work full time.

Serving with you, Alina Rudik

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

A wonderful time of holidays has finally started. It’s the time when we can have some rest from our daily troubles and dive into X-mas preparations. The end of the year is a great chance to evaluate what God was teaching us and how He was leading us this past year.

I wanted to share with you what God was teaching few of my girls this semester.

«This semester God was working in my heart and my character through the Bible study groups that were organized for the leaders on our Campus. We studied different methods of the Evangelism and during the semester I used them in my personal ministry in the dorms.

Basing on the Scripture we studied the character of a spiritual leader. I’m not a natural leader that is why I faced a lot of obstacles on my way. But I noticed in the Bible that leadership is God’s idea. God is a supreme Leader and He is calling all of us to take this role. That’s why He gave us different gifts and talents. We also have a good example in leadership of Christ. This semester I learned how to build relationship with the girls and managed to be more openhearted.»

Janna Cheban, 20 years old

 

«One evening I didn’t get a chance to go to share the Gospel in my dorm. I got very upset. But God helped me to share 4 spiritual laws with the girl in my room. She has never heard the Gospel before. She didn’t know much about Jesus and His sacrifice.  And the best thing is that next day she told me that she shared the same brochure with one of her classmates and they talked about Jesus. It’s absolutely wonderful to see how God is using us to share Good News about Him.

The same situation happened to me when I was on the train going home. I was reading a book about the evangelism. There was a girl sitting next to me. I didn’t know how to start a conversation with her but God helped me and she started talking to me first and we had a great conversation about Christianity.”

Ruslana Baibekova, 20 years old


This year we celebrated the 20th anniversary of CCC in Ukraine. You can watch the video about this event if you visit this link  

The spiritual influence among our students

I want to share with you about unending spiritual influence that our student leaders have on the world around them. 

One year ago one student named Jenya went to the football championship with us and he heard the Gospel. That same year Jenya became a believer and got baptized in June.
After graduating he is both working and taking part in the ministry as a volunteer.

Jenya loves football and he was trained as a footballer since childhood. He once even played for the “Chernomorets” team (Odessa football team). That is why he decided he could reach the students using the “football language” with them.

This month Jenya organized a one day mini football tournament for the local youth. 7 teams took part in that tournament. All the students came from the Universities that we are trying to reach.

There were a lot of opportunities to evangelize at the tournament. Our students shared the Gospel in the personal conversations while guys were waiting for their turn to play.
During the break 40 participants were able to hear the testimony of one young American guy who was visiting Odessa with a mission.


We gave away the daily planners form Cru and received a lot of contacts. The daily planner itself contains some testimonies of the famous sportsmen and Christian footballers because it’s made for the Euro 2012 that will be held in Ukraine.
After the tournament we organized a treat dinner for the winners. We shared Four Spiritual laws with them that night.

                               An interesting fact:

Kolya is a graduate of Odessa State University and he works at school as a teacher of history. Two years ago he became a believer through this strategy with football.
This year he not only joined us for the tournament but he also brought two of the students from the school where he teaches. 

This is the great example of the spiritual influence that our students have on the world around them after the graduation.

Kolya and two of his studemts
(second row on the right)  

Prayer requests:

For the spiritual fruit after the evangelizing strategies we had.

For the spiritual multiplication. May each student leader have a student to disciple.

For our team. This fall two families are in the support raising period and there are only 3 of us in the active ministry.

My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." (2Cor.12:9)

At the beginning of this semester we realized the truth of these words of the Scripture as never before. We really felt our weakness. Instead of 8 active members of our team only 3 can participate in the ministry.  Each one of us has experienced emotional difficulties and fatigue.

But God has poured out His grace, supported and strengthened... Praise Him for the answer to the prayers of the laborers. We now have about 12 dedicated students who are potential leaders helping us in every way in building spiritual movements.

Earlier this year, we held a training conference on "Movements everywhere." We would like to add an emphasis to our ministry which is to motivate and help local churches to initiate a movement of evangelism and discipleship in their communities. God has blessed us with a "symbolic number" of students participating in this conference. There were 12! We pray and hope that God makes ​​a breakthrough in the spiritual revival of the youth of Odessa through these students. We want every non-believer to know at least one true follower of Christ.

Pray that the youth in the churches accepts the challenge to go to non-believers and work with them on permanent basis.

Giving out the planners

As usual, we began active ministry with the distribution of gifts for freshmen - diaries, which we ourselves develop and paste it there are many interesting and useful information, including the testimony of God. These diaries help us get to know new students and then invite them to our events. In two weeks we have distributed about 2,000 diaries in 4 major high schools in Odessa. 

Stella

We have a student, Stella, who graduated from the Odessa State Economic University this year and began working at the Odessa automobile industry college as an accountant. But despite that she wants to continue to be active and participate in the Campus ministry. God has put the desire into her heart to start a spiritual movement in this college. She went and negotiated with the director of the college so that we could distribute diaries to students. As a result, Dima was able to advertise our future events at their line up and we distributed diaries to all the freshmen. Stella will try to continue to build relationships with students and start a discussion club there. We thank God for the students who are the examples of spiritual leadership.

Dima speaks at the line up.
In the foreground - the director of college.

Please pray for:
  - the students who received diaries to come to our events (quest, paintball, discussion clubs, personal communication);
  - an evangelistic trip to Crimea at the end of October so that we could take 40 non-believers with us;
  - God’s blessings on Stella and wisdom for her in the ministry with her students from college.

LIVE IT OUT

Thank you for your prayers about our student project in Carpathians.  God blessed us to take 18 students from Odessa with us. The title of the project was - Live it out and the idea was to help our students learn to live according the principles of the Scripture. We had about 80 students from all over Ukraine. Together we tried to understand what it means to be an obedient, faithful and forgiving Christian.   


We also organized an out-reach for the local youth – football championship where we shared the Good News with the lost. We had three students who were not Christians yet – Roksolana, Luda and Oleg. It was a good testimony for them to see how we worshipped God together and studied His Word. Please pray for them to come to the Lord wholeheartedly!

PRAYER REQUESTS:

- for the beginning of the semester— may God bless us with a group of faithful student leaders who would like to win the world for Christ

- for the hand out of the planners for freshmen so we could set up some new relationships and find new contacts for the future Evangelism.

- for the partnership with the local churches – may God inspire the church youth leaders to start the movement of Evangelism and discipleship in the church
- may God bless our team to have close relationship with Him and each other so we would be a good example of unity for the students.

   
The team of Missionaties in Ukraine

Our happy team

The baptism of our students