Summer 2012

Ion’s Report from Summer 2012 Mission Trip to Kiev and the Caucasus

This summer God gave me the opportunity, after the trip to California, to have an overseas mission trip to the Ukraine and to Russia.

I arrived in Kiev on June 25 where, for three days, I met with a group of leaders from the former Soviet Union. It was an encouraging time together where we could not only strengthen each other from the Word of God but also plan together the future steps towards advancing the Word in that region. It was great to see people full of zeal and determination to be involved in enlarging God’s Kingdom.

From Kiev I flew to the North Caucasus region, which is also called Caucasus Mineral Waters because of the springs of mineral waters in that region of Narzan.

This is a wonderful mountain region that from ancient times was a battle line for Russia, because there the Eastern Orthodox Russian people boarder the Muslim nations like Checina, Dagestan, Cherkes nation and others. Now that region is in the news because of the frequent terrorist attacks. It remains the battlefield of two religions: Christianity and Islam. It is an especially challenging region for protestant believers since they are persecuted equally by the Orthodox and Muslims.

My closest Russian friend, Alexandr Frolov, organized the seminars in that region and even paid the travel expenses and all local expenses for me. 

The goal of the trip to that region was to present those simple principles of evangelism and discipleship from the Gospel which are buried in the customs and traditions of today’s church.

The seminar we had was in the first evangelical church on Russian territory.  This year that church will celebrate their 210th anniversary. It was good that our team from Moldova as well as some teachers from Moscow had traveled to that place before. Now we had committed disciples who had been encouraged by their teaching and motivated to go into action and become catalysts for the churches in that region.

We had attendees from several different regional churches. The seminar was revolutionary for them, since it was different from what they are usually taught. The impact of the seminar will only be seen after they return to their homes and begin forming new discipleship groups out of non-believers. My hope is that they will search for potential disciples currently attending local Orthodox churches where most likely they can find people of peace such as described in Luke 10:5-9. I was especially encouraged when the core group got together after the seminar to evaluate everything they had been taught. When they then moved to plan a course of action, that was beyond my expectation. Alexandr Frolov has committed to coordinate their efforts in a disciple making movement. 

I realize that the teaching was pretty radical for them in their situation. My hope is that if even a few people will begin actually practicing the principles they learned that they will become a challenge and encouragement for the rest.

From the Caucasus I flew back through Moscow to Kiev, where another team of leaders from eight countries had arrived for training. Ivan Bychcov from Houston, did an amazing job of selecting all those leaders and bringing them to Kiev. I was only there for four days with them. But in those four days God united our hearts in a way that we felt like we had known each other for many years. I again discovered that there is no greater pleasure than to teach motivated and determined people. If I were to guess where Kingdom growth will be the greatest of all the places I have traveled this year, it would be in the countries represented at this training. We had people coming from Chita, and other remote places of Russia as far away as some regions close to Alaska. Some of them traveled five days by train to get to Kiev. 

On this trip, waiting between flight connections in the airports (sometimes for up to 7.5 hours) or on the fights, God gave me great opportunities to share the Gospel. In those ten flights, God gave me 13 people to have deep conversations with. Among them were people from Australia, Portugal, Germany, Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia.

All of them were at different levels of knowledge about Jesus. A 55 year old man from Norway who traveled to the Caucasus to climb Mount Elbrus with his daughter, told me that he had decided long ago, that religion is a social manipulation tool. I told him that I totally agreed with his statement, and that I am a pastor who hates religion. That opened the opportunity to tell him about what it means to have a real relationship with Jesus. After our encounter, I received an E-mail from him where he expressed his impression of everything he heard from the Gospel. I learned again how important is to not just tell people about the Word of God but actually to teach them from the Word.

At another time, I presented the Gospel to a man from Russia who then politely told me that he was not interested in continuing the spiritual conversation. Another man in the seat in front of me then turned to me and said that he would like to discuss the Bible with me. We went ahead with that discussion and three other people around us then heard the Gospel presentation.

God is at work doing amazing thing around the World. Please pray for those who heard the Gospel for the first time as well as for those who learned how to become fishers of men.  I am so excited about what he is about to do here in St Louis. Join us in learning how we can create a disciple making movement in the place we live.