Village ministry- Krasnoznaminka

Sunday was a super busy day for the worship team. After church, we headed out an hour and a half to the village of Krasnoznaminka. As a team and church, we've been looking to get involved in serving a nearby village. This one is a little further than we would like, but a small church there was interested in partnering with us to reach their people. Their were nine of us in all and we started our time there with an English club. It was basically identical to the two weekly English clubs that we lead here and was a lot of fun. We invited all of them to return for the evening service, which we were also leading. In between English club and the evening service, they wanted to show us a little of their "town culture," so we walked down the dirt streets to their pond. There was an odd metal structure out in the water and we asked what it was. It turns out that they had begun to build a bar that was to look out over the water and then started to think about all of the drunk people that would probably fall over the rails and drown. So they stopped building and as is completely normal in Ukraine, left the unfinished skeleton of a structure sitting there.

The evening service was an interesting experience for us. The little church we were visiting is a Baptist church. Baptist churches here are rather legalistic, to put it lightly. Our church is not Baptist, so I was very interested to see how all of it would work and how we would be received. It was fun to see all of our girls wearing skirts, since that doesn't happen much. =-) The service went really well, also, with two of our team sharing their testimonies and the worship team sharing six songs. It became more of a performance than a time of worship, but it was a good outreach, as many of the students from the English club had either stayed or returned. They had set up outside and put up mikes and loudspeakers so that the village could hear everything. It was kind of amusing to me to be "performing" outside with dogs barking, cats fighting, roosters crowing, laundry flapping in the wind and guys driving by on their noisy little motorbikes.

It was a very long and tiring day, but one that I greatly enjoyed and hope that our students learned a lot from. Service opportunities are numerous and though I often go into them with a wrong attitude, I almost always come out being greatly blessed by what God is doing here. It's good for me to get out, have a change of scenery, and see more of the ways in which God works. Hearing how grateful those people were to have us there and seeing children who had never seen or heard a real "violin" before, really made me think about how blessed I am. I have been given so much in so many forms and now it's my responsibility to pass on those blessings to others.