In my line of work, as is the case in life generally, you often have to sew seeds for many years before seeing any fruit. I sometime pursue a ministry or personal connection on nothing but a sense of God’s leading and don’t see anything come of it for a long time. Then suddenly, bam.…
Here is another sample from my course. In this case, it is actually little more than a Bible study with discussion questions on the subject of how we are to navigate agenda conflicts in conversation. The text we use is one that often gets Jesus in trouble, as it sounds on the surface like he…
I am thrilled to include a post written by one of our team leaders Sveta Alekseeva, who is now actively taking ownership of the need to raise personal support for the vision of our ministry. For three days we were given the opportunity to immerse ourselves in Scripture and understand God’s view of finance. …
Continuing my series of postsdrawing on material from my training course on building the relationships and the team work that becoming the Body of Christ requires, here are some of my thoughts on obedience. Obedience gets a bad rap. No one likes to obey. And though we have not yet used the word with you…
Continuing my periodic posting of excerpts from my course on building real relationships in the Body, I decided to post this portion from week four, which is dedicated to authenticity. Each week I discuss the topic in the context of the life of Jacob, which turned out to be a wonderfully rich life to study for…
I continue my series of posts based on material from my courses. I do this to give you an idea what we are covering, but it does a poor job of giving you the experience itself, because the theory is actually a small part of the process. Oh well, I hope the theory gives you…
I decided should start sharing excerpts from my course with you, first to better inform you what I am up to, secondly for feedback as I constantly am working to improve it, and third, in order to sew seeds for starting a group somewhere other than Russia one day. the following excerpt is from the…
This article is copied from Christianity Today. It’s an unusually well-done piece because of its good understanding of the situation here in terms of religious freedom. Brian C. Stiller is Global Ambassador of The World Evangelical Alliance. Image: pixabay After brief instructions from the Lutheran Archbishop Dietrich Brauer, we processed up the center aisle of the…
It was one of those “bad Russia days” as we call them. This time it was related to the fact that the ministry God has called me to looks very different from what Russians are used to, and Russians don’t like new things. As a result, opinions across the Christian community are divided over me.…
I have written about RealTalk and its history before, but it needs an update. RealTalk is the seminar that I have made nothing less than the flagship course for my entire ministry. That’s a lot of pressure for one little seminar, but I think it’s that important and pivotal. I come to this position after…
Anna is a relatively new, but wonderful addition to our team. With a background in social work and orphan ministry, she brought the right heart to our ministry. Add to it a hunger for growth in “relevant” but biblical Christianity, we just had to partner up. Here is her story. I came to St. Petersburg…
It was my director, Mark Cathey who first told me about Ilya. In fact, I knew about Ilya years before he even thought about God, because Mark and Melinda have loved Ilya and his parents like family and talked about them to me for as long as I can remember. They were best friends and…
