Sunday, October 7, 2007
Our faculty translator, Serge, tried to get Luis and me into the college computer lab so we could do business for our respective ministries. However, he couldn’t find a key. He did find a secretary who was willing to let us use her computer while she worked elsewhere. I had just enough time to send the last three reports, plus five separate e-mails with pictures to accompany the reports. The Internet connection is so slow here that if one were to send more than one megabyte in a message, it would just evaporate into the ether. So the photos must be resized to web resolution and grouped into several small e-mails. That takes some time! I worked on the images last night and transferred them to my flash drive so I could plug them into a campus computer this morning. It worked. Luis was downloading his many messages when I left for Kiev on an excursion.

Pastor Yuri from the union office again drove the van. Several ladies from the college here hopped in for a free ride into the city for some shopping. I have no clue what they discussed in Russian during the 40-minute ride.

By pre-arrangement, we met with Alan Bogsrud, an American business entrepreneur who lives in Kiev. Alan showed us some of the major sites in Kiev that were on my must-see list: three cathedrals, some statues and monuments, and a sweeping view of the Dnieper River. At St. Sophia Cathedral, built by Yaroslav the Wise, Prince of Kiev, in 1037, we saw 1000-year-old frescoes, mosaics with gold tiles, and climbed a tower to a high gallery to see some gi-normous paintings made in the 18th century, including one apocalyptic painting of people casting crowns before Jesus, who was pointing angrily at a beast that surely represented the devil.

At another cathedral, we watched part of an Orthodox wedding (view video clip). The priests chanted and the wedding party and guests genuflected numerous times, so perhaps the priests were calling upon the saints to bless the marriage.

We also visited the 19th-century statue of St. Vladimir the Baptizer, Grand Prince of Kiev. Vladimir, who lived from 950 to 1015, was a pagan and like his forbears, quite the bloody warrior. He had 800 concubines. In 987, he sent envoys to study the religions of neighboring nations, including Judaism, Islam, and Byzantine Orthodox Christianity. The envoys were entranced by the beauty and wealth of the Orthodox church at Byzantium’s Hagia Sophia, and Vladimir followed their advice and chose Orthodoxy. When he negotiated for a Greek princess’s hand in marriage, she refused to marry a pagan barbarian, so Vladimir was baptized a Christian and was allowed to marry Anna and ally with her father, Emperor Basil II. Vladimir returned to Kiev and destroyed pagan monuments, established Christian churches and monasteries, and ordered that the population of Kievan Rus (a very large territory) be marched into the Dnieper River for baptism. Thus the sainthood!

There is a contemporary point to this ancient history. The Quiet Hour and ShareHim are planning a baptism next weekend for the converts of this series of evangelistic meetings! Guess where they’re going to baptize by immersion? Vladimir the Baptizer’s Kiev. But these people will be entering the water by their own choice to follow Jesus, not by command of a temporal ruler.

Monday, October 8, 2007
Kiev, Ukraine—The three traveling evangelism coordinators met today in the capital city at the union conference headquarters, to report their findings and strategize for the final week of the evangelism series being conducted at 50 sites across the large country.

On the way to the union office, we stopped at the Babi Yar Massacre memorial. About 180,000 Jews, Gypsies, and Ukrainian civilians were killed by the Nazis over three days in September 1941. At least 100,000 were Jews. There’s a huge sculpture evoking the agony of those who were shot en masse and dumped into a large pit. A polished granite marker with three sides is engraved in Ukrainian, Hebrew, and English with a sentence from Ezekiel 37:14: “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.” NIV

Pastor Mike Porter, CEO of The Quiet Hour, who was joined by his wife Karen last Thursday, traveled to the eastern third of the country with Vladimir Krupsky, the union president. They also visited many of the evangelism sites around Kiev. Pastors Porter and Krupsky didn’t take a translator, as both have working knowledge of one another’s language.

Pastor Mauri Bascom, assistant field director of evangelism for The Quiet Hour, had been traveling with the union secretary (vice president), and their translator Yuri, a former military officer who found the Lord through an English-language Bible he read to supplement the vocabulary and sentence structure he’d learned in English-language classes. This team traveled in the western third of the country.

Pastor Luis Leonor, evangelism field director for ShareHim, an international evangelism ministry which is closely linked with The Quiet Hour, traveled with Yuri Kuzmenko, union evangelism coordinator (and our driver), Pastor Roman, our translator, and me. Our team (as you know from this series of reports) traveled through the central section and the south, along the Black Sea.

The pastors reported on attendance, the estimated numbers of people interested in baptism as a result of the pre-campaign Bible studies and current meetings, and the technique of the volunteer evangelists they observed in action. One of our evangelists is ill and hospitalized, so logistics of transportation and caring for his needs, were discussed and actions taken.

The committee also discussed improvements for this and future evangelism projects. Suggestions floated, but not necessarily to be implemented, were:

• to shorten the length of the sermons,
• to reduce the number of graphic images in the presentations,
• to begin a supplementary Bible-study/baptismal class by the second night,
• to have a seamless carry-through from the health talks into the sermons,
• to write the sermons in a more elementary way, assuming visitors had no knowledge of Jesus,
• to have a more-detailed orientation for volunteers, including practice sessions,
• to include local pastors and organizers in the orientation meetings,
• to distribute the Bibles on the first night of the series, and
• to have both the evangelists and translators read from their Bibles, not the projections onscreen.

The Ukrainian pastors and union officers were extremely grateful to know that the resource DVDs of the evangelism series and the Jesus video would be distributed to them in their choice of Ukrainian or Russian language, free of charge, by ShareHim, the creator of the series.

The committee which met today also discussed what we’d be doing and where, between now and the weekend conclusion of the series. Mike and Luis will re-visit some of the many sites in and around Kiev, while Mauri and his translator will travel by train (about 12 hours) to two sites in eastern Ukraine. On Saturday, when the baptisms will take place, Luis will be in the hub city of Cherkassy, Mike and I will be in Kiev, and Mauri will stay in the east. Vladimir Krupsky will be in Washington, DC, for the General Conference Fall Council: he says he feels torn that he’ll miss the Ukrainian Harvest Festival (similar to America’s Thanksgiving) and baptismal service on Saturday the 13th, but he must represent his union at the annual meeting.

The cooks at the union office presented two lovely meals to our committee: lunch consisted of a vegetable plate; vegetable soup of barley, potato, and dill; mashed potatoes; hard-boiled egg halves; eggplant; and bread; and supper was laid out as potato patties with minced mushrooms inside (I’d add green onions when I copy it at home!) and sour cream to top it; a vegetable plate of tomato, pepper, and cucumber; cole slaw, bread, avocado slices, cranapple or pineapple juice, and raisin bread for dessert.

It was a full day! We left the union office after 7 p.m., and entered the thick of evening rush hour. I’ll have to take a video of it for you to believe it. At one “Y” intersection without traffic lights, thousands of cars were backed up in three directions. When a car could force its way from one street across three oncoming lanes (only two of them official, but there’s always the sidewalk!), it would squeeze between cars from two other directions. Once outside of the city, we were still in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the narrow road through the forest to our village of Bucha (spelled with a B, Y, upside-down lower-case h, and A). The single lane of slow traffic in either direction seemed to pose no delay for a large delivery truck, because he just drove up and over the curb, and used the asphalt sidewalk on our right as his personal express lane. (My Ukraine guidebook advises that it’s “foolhardy” for non-Ukrainians to consider renting and driving their own car.)

Luis Leonor and I arrived at the college where we’re staying after 8 p.m. The daytime temperature is probably in the high 50s (Fahrenheit) with a bit of wind chill, and the nights—well, I’m in a light sweater next to a radiator, so it’s hard to say!

Read October 9-10 reports