I was asked recently by one of my supporting churches to write up my suggestions for how a church should evaluate missionaries for support, by what criteria, and what other considerations should be considered. I realized in writing this up that these principles are actually both very important and little understood. 1. The missionary’s budget.…
We held our annual Christmas party this year, and it may have been the best yet. Among other blessings, which were mostly for those in attendance, was this blessing to me, to hear how powerfully our ministry has impacted one person, and to hear how beautifully she was able to articulate it all – and…
Today’s need is for a new project one of our team members is launching as soon as we can get some startup funds.Ilya has been with us for 3.5 years (that’s him above on the couch on the right) and came on to help us reach the younger generation. After an initial couple of early…
An old ministry colleague wrote me out of the blue a few weeks ago, asking if I would join him on the radio for an interview. I was honored, and we enjoyed the process. Here is some background on my relationship with the show’s host. I was in full-time ministry in Richmond, Virginia for 10…
Here are Diana’s collection of thoughts and events that rushed by us on our last 10 days in Russia. It’s Friday morning, March 4th here in Chachak, Serbia. We have been here for 24 hours, and Russia has been waging war on Ukraine for just over a week. Many of you are eager for news…
Every teaching has its own built-in unintended impact. Because our training here in Russia is always in the form of trainings, we get to constantly evaluate what kind of impact and improve the material. And if we have put in hundreds of hours in developing the material, then we have put in thousands of hours…
Are you Fighting Sin, or God? This post is the second of two posts on the subject of how Christian “culture” can be infected with screwball values. In part one I described how Christians accept poor listening as normal, without realizing the seriousness of the spiritual issues involved in allowing poor listening to be the…
Here in Russia we work with churches and church leadership as part of our calling to help strengthen the Body of Christ for influence on society. We not only train pastors and church leaders, we sometimes provide direct counseling and coaching services to leaders. I bring this fact up to say that serving churches helps…
I came across a quote recently that amazed me from one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th Century, Elisabeth Kubler Ros: “There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate,…
Besides all the questions folk back home ask about ministry, I get peppered the most about the basics of living life in Russia. Well, an opportunity presented itself recently that was too good to refuse. An Italian man named Davide living here as well has his own Youtube channel where he shares about life here…
This is the final part (6) in my mini series about my trip this summer to nowhere you ever heard of in Siberia. When I think about the impact this summer’s trip had, I have to evaluate it in terms of my own aspirations for it. I had two goals – an amazing memory with…
This post is part 5 of 6 in my series about my trip this summer to the outback of Siberia. Our departure from Laborovaya was delayed by over a day because our driver Grisha got an offer to take some others back to the city the day before we needed to go. Since it’s a…
Irina accompanied us on all our ventures into the wild to visit her friends in the “chums” (чум, pronounced choom) – which are the traditional teepee-type tents that Nenets live in. First, I need to tell you how we got there. As the crow flies, the two homes we were to visit were only 7km…
This post is part 3 of 5 about my trip this summer (August, 2021) with my oldest son to a part of Russia and a people of Russia that were completely foreign to me until now. One of the blessings of knowing Russian is how many people speak it as a second language – over…
This post is part 2 of my mini series on the 10-day trip I took with my son Kerith in August of 2021. In part 1 I described the road we took to get to our destination, because yes, the road itself deserves its own post. Here I want to go into the land itself…
orphan dreams 