| Thanksgiving in Suffering
This month started out on a sad note for us. I got the news that Pastor Peter had died just as we were starting our Missions roundtable. We had to leave the roundtable a little early to make it back to Odessa in time for the funeral. Around 700 people gathered in our church yard for the funeral service. Thankfully, God gave us beautiful sunny Fall weather. The testimony of Peter’s life rang loud and clear, he was a man who loved God and his family, as a result God used him to impact many people and churches throughout Ukraine and beyond. Just over a week before Peter died he preached a short sermon on thanksgiving in our church. Would you please take 5 mins to watch his sermon? It is such a great reminder that no matter our circumstances we are called to have and attitude of thanksgiving.
Missions Roundtable Around 50 participants from over 14 countries: Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia, Poland, Albania, Israel, Croatia, Bosnia, —–stan, Hungary, USA, Canada, Moldova and Romania gathered for our missions roundtable. It was amazing to hear how God is now sending out missionaries from countries like Moldova and even —–stan! Together we shared ideas and strategized about how our churches can do a better job in missions. The next step will be putting some of this to practice and for this we need your prayers. Pray especially for Oleg, Sasha, Anatoly and Vera; the 4 church leaders that we brought from Odessa.
More Good Soil On December 17th I will be helping conduct another Good Soil evangelism and discipleship seminar in the city of Cherkassy. I also have two other churches that are currently waiting for us to do a seminar. Please pray that God would bless as we plan these for these seminars. One problem that we are running into is that we just don’t have enough trained facilitators to meet the demand. We are hoping in the Spring of 2012 we can do another special training for facilitators. In the mean time we are doing what we can.
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