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news from the Radstock network

This is Big City Church!

Posted by Max Tikhonoff on

Yes, Kiev is big! It is home to more than 4,000,000 people, with 72 Universities and over 500,000 University students. One may think it is a church-planting paradise, and it fairly was about 15 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed and the winds of freedom of religion blew hard over Ukraine. But now things have changed. Along with the good things that came to us with that freedom, we got some problems as well. Materialism, self-making and self-centeredness are the current modern problems that a church-planter faces here. Also, the Eastern Orthodoxy (“this-is-faith-of-your-grandma” and “don’t-betray-your-family”) problem immediately follows any young person showing any slight interest in a Protestant faith.

So planting a church in Kiev of 60 people has taken 10 years. But those 60 are the “diamonds,” because there is hardly a single person in Big City Church that is not involved in some kind of a ministry and because Big City, with its average age of 24, is crazy about church-planting and missions. So crazy, that it is now planting new “Liberty Presbyterian” near-by, and is getting ready to “attack” the Left bank of the Kiev area to plant another church there in 2017.

Add to that:

  • partnering with a church in the UK to reach the Russian-speaking community there,
  • creating a church-planting “Antioch” hub and school in Kiev,
  • sending short-term teams and missionaries to the USA and other places of the world,
  • trying to be helpful to the Ukrainian army and refugees from the Eastern Ukrainian conflict,
  • running anywhere from 1-2 up to 100 student summer camps every year for non-Christians,
  • keeping our own vocational mission school going all year round…

Yep, we are busy! All 60 of us, and our kids, too! Just as busy as the city. But we like it! Do we ever fail? Yes, we do! Just enough to realize why, to lick up the wounds, pray and stand up to walk further…and to ask ourselves several important questions once again: How are we going to live as a church, now? What is the true reason for us to be? Does God really want us to do all this? What are we going to do, if we don’t do what Jesus has said: “GO!”

So, we are going…wherever we can go, wherever we have enough resources to go, with whomever He gives us to go. Just like in a normal big city!

Tags: kiev, mission, planting churches

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