"Jump in Heaven" Youth Conference

"Jump in Heaven" Youth Conference October 31- November 2

From October 31st through November 2nd of this year, we had our second youth conference at a partner church in Zhashkiv, a city close to Bila Tserkva. We went with our team partners who took responsibility for arranging the event.

Our first conference was in April of 2008. We had about 50 teenagers from 3 churches in 3 different cities. At this second conference we also had about 50 young people from the same 3 churches. The name of the conference was "Jump in Heaven". The theme of the conference was "Self Worth in God".

As we prayed about whom we can invite to speak at the conference God put on our hearts to ask our friends, a couple from Eastern Ukraine, to speak at the conference. They minister as pastors at a local church there.

The conference was amazing, the presence of God was all over it. Many people testified how God set them free from many complexes and inner scars.

We took four of the girls from our English club who were non Christians. One of the girls, named Anya, enjoyed the conference so much that she didn't want to leave. She cried a lot at the conference.

If it's the Lord's will, we will have another conference in Spring.

A Father's Heart is Turned

My brother Roman, my father Sergey, and me.

I would like to share something to encourage all those who have experienced pain and hurt due to broken families and divorce.

When my twin brother and I were 6 months old, our father divorced our mother and left us. Only once in ten years did he come to see us and that was only when he was drunk. So we grew up in a fatherless home.

When I was thirteen, I got saved and began to follow the Lord. Growing up, I realized that I had a deep sense of loss because I did not know my father. Even though I knew God was now my father, I still suffered because of the loss of my earthly father. He still lived in the same town, but I had only seen him once after many years. I had no feelings for him and I think this was because I always felt like he was just a stranger like any other man on the street.

When he found out that my brother and I had become Christians, he didn't care. When we asked him to turn to the Lord and repent, he said that he had nothing to repent of. So at that point I can say that I actually gave up on my father.

But God had His own plans and He prepared a special surprise for me and my brother. It was on May 3rd of 2008, the day of our birthday, that my father came to church in our home town of Slavyansk. My mother was there working that day and she said when she looked out and her eyes fixed on him walking up to the church door, he was looking so desperate and broken that she hardly recognized him. He came to say that he wanted to see his two sons (me and my brother).

When my brother came to the church to see him, my father began to cry and ask for forgiveness for leaving us and letting us go through life without his help. He said that the past several months had been a nightmare for him because he had had a terrible bout of depression that kept him awake almost every night and made him nearly lose his mind. No doctors could help him and no medicine had been good enough to cure his depression.

Right there at the church, in private conversation, my brother led our father to repentance. Our father went home a totally different person than when he came. He has had no restlessness since that time. He began to come to church after that and went through a discipleship course along with his current wife. I can testify that since this time my father has been baptized and is walking with the Lord as a new person.

It had been twenty-nine years since our father had left us. God gave us the best gift possible. He brought our father to the Lord Jesus Christ on the very day of our birthday. He really does turn the hearts of fathers to their sons and turns the hearts of sons to their fathers.

Our Journey Begins

In February of 2008, Anya and I left our home in Slavyansk in Eastern Ukraine and moved to Bila Tserkva over 500 miles away where God has called us as native missionaries. We are creating this blog so that we can open up our lives to you and share about how God is using us in Bila Tserkva. God has given us a heart for reaching school aged and university students. Our dream is to one day see a thriving and active student church.

Before being led to become native missionaries in Bila Tserkva, I worked as a full time assistant in our home church in Slavyansk, Church of God Ukraine for six years. While working in that position I began to feel strongly that God was calling me to full time missions, but didn't know where exactly. About a year before we moved, I had the opportunity to work with an American team in Bila Tserkva as a translator. That is when God confirmed that He wanted us to work in missions and showed me exactly where He wanted us.

It has been nine months since we packed up our home and our little boy Nikita (who had just turned one year old at the time) and said good bye to all of our family and friends. God has been faithful in providing for our needs in good times and in bad. We have been witness to God's miraculous leading in ministry and confirmations of our calling here. We are currently involved in two English Clubs reaching out to school age and university students, youth discipleship through private English lessons, sharing God's Word in local churches, youth conferences, street evangelism, and we are praying about future English Camps with other missionaries.