I’m amazed at how the Lord uses my Kiev Theological Seminary students for His kingdom as the result of a simple assignment. This fall term I taught 16 students about “Missions and the Church,” and I asked each student to present the material they learned in class to their local church, as either a lesson or a sermon. My desire, as always, is to motivate Ukrainian church leaders to understand and help fulfill the Great Commission.

As I read their reports detailing results, my eyes welled with tears of joy. The Lord was not only working in these students – He was changing hearts through them, all over Ukraine! Here are a few of their stories:

Aleksandr Kalinichev taught about missions to his church’s youth group. His theme was “God’s heart in relation to the nations.” He explained what the Bible says about missions, showed a video about a Muslim coming to Christ; and led a discussion on the question, “How can I participate in the Lord’s mission?” The youth were enthusiastic, and made plans to create a “common purse” for collecting missionary offerings.

Sergei Chudyuk taught young people from 17 to 29 years of age. “Their reaction surprised me,” he said. “It became obvious from the prayer time, that all of them desired to participate in God’s worldwide mission! I am personally very happy to learn about missions and I thank God for the opportunity to study this topic. If not for your course, it would have been unlikely that I would ever learn about it. Thank you so much.”

Pavel Protopopov said, “I was very inspired by your course, and especially that God spoke to me through it, and gave me a lot of answers. When I got home, I put together a youth team and shared the material received from you. I shared the importance to reach other nations, especially Muslims. We have a lot of them here from Turkmenistan. After my talk we agreed to pray for Muslims in our city, and ask God how we could reach them with the Gospel. And very quickly God answered our prayers! We began to invite these Turk men to our youth meetings, and they kindly agreed. Now they join us in almost every meeting. We are building relationships with them and continue to pray for their salvation.

I want to thank you for praying with us that the Lord would raise up a multitude of missionaries in Eastern Europe to take the gospel to the ends of the earth.
Rich