At the beginning of the month, Lena and I had a weekend trip to Poland to extend my visa. Due to recent changes in the law, I can only stay in Ukraine 90 days and then have to cross the border to re-register my passport. We have pursued other ways of handling this bureaucratic inconvenience (even spent $300 on a lawyer trying to find an alternative) but even a border guard advised us this time that the easiest thing to do is just cross the border. So I guess I will be crossing the border every 90 days. During the 10 years of ministry in Kyiv, I have jumped through so many governmental paperwork hoops that I could probably perform in a circus. This may be the first hoop-jumping I have actually gotten to enjoy! The Sunday night after we got back from Krakow, we invited several over after church to celebrate Lena’s birthday. 

The beginning of May is also the time of national holidays; the whole country shuts down for little longer than a week. It’s also when we lose hot water for about 2 weeks. Even though showering became more complicate, we continued our regular slate of now pared down ministry events—the summer is often a sluggish time for ministry.  I had two English outreaches, our Monday Psalms study, and the Friday night large group. I have been preaching quite a bit on Sundays as well. We continue to meet with several people to help them along as they find their place in life. In addition to these meetings, we have had several church planning meetings and finally managed to re-organize the small group ministry. In addition to those advances, the church made several other very healthy decisions.  Each month the church leadership continues to demonstrate an increasing maturity and for that, we praise God. 

One person we have recently gotten to know a bit better is Sergiy Kekukh. He is a Christian and will graduate from ICU-Kyiv this summer. While Sergiy works for a local real estate agency, he spends much of his time in church events and especially in reaching out to his parents. In the past several months, they have had numerous animated conversations about faith, God, the Bible, and what it means to be a Christian. His parents are basically agnostics. It’s been a very difficult time for him but his faith has grown and he has been relentless in his pursuit of answers for the testing questions asked by his parents. I’ve enjoyed several long conversations with Sergiy as we discussed intricacies of the reliability of the Bible and reason for the hope we have. Pray for Sergiy, his parents, and his relationships. 

In May we also began preparing for the departure of Sergiy Lyakh, the UEC’s manager. He is starting an MBA program at Pepperdine in the fall. Since he was the one person most responsible for the day-to-day life of the UEC, we had to make sure that all his knowledge and experience were passed on. I helped oversee this process by initiating a massive update of our operations manual and Sergiy also began to train Lera, our other full-time staff member, in more computer skills. Lena also spent some time learning more about the UEC’s financial administration. 

The highlight of ministry in May was the wedding of Vitaly and Lera on May 27. I have known both of them since they were first-year university students and have been blessed to see them become Christians and grow in their faith. Lera works for the UEC and following their honeymoon, Vitaly has joined the UEC’s staff as a part-time manager. While ministers play a role in weddings in America, it’s usually limited to the ceremony itself. In Ukraine, everyone gets to play a much bigger role. Lena and I were helping with marriage preparation counseling, walking them through how to survive preparing to get married, and then we got involved in coordinating food for the wedding and in being a part of the entertainment. I spent time in local markets and at some superstores trying to find the best deals. We had to buy all the food for the wedding and have it taken to the wedding site where the staff there cooked everything.  It wasn’t the first wedding ceremony I have done but it was the first in Russian. I guess I did OK. It was pretty short. But Ukrainians aren’t too much on formalities.

The wedding party was all joy with lots of fun and many people from church. Church members sang songs they had written for the couple, performed skits about love and marriage, and even a special slideshow/Powerpoint presentation was done about their life. We had a combined assembly the following Sunday and Vitaly and Lera left for Crimea that night.  Vitaly began working for the UEC part-time after their return to Kyiv. He will replace Sergiy who is leaving for Pepperdine. In addition to his work for the UEC, he serves as a minister in the church.  It’s great to see Vitaly’s growth, maturity, and passion for Jesus Christ.

The last day of the month also brought unbelievable joy to my life, to Sergiy our UEC manager, and to the UEC staff. Ever since the remodeling of the UEC, we have lacked one legal document to make the renovation projection fully legal. Actually, we had it but we learned just after the renovation was complete that someone had made a mistake on this document and we would have to apply to correct it. Correcting this other person’s mistake took four years and countless hours of work, numerous visits to a maze of offices scattered throughout the city, and almost intolerable frustration at the lack of transparency and snail-like nature of most bureaucrats.  But finally, on May 31, God blessed us with this document. To him alone be all glory!! It’s especially great that Sergiy got to see this process finished since he had worked on it for so long. 

You can keep up with us through our blog www.kyivmission.blogpsot.com .  I write about life in Kyiv, Ukrainian politics, and the ministry. 

One simple way you can help the UEC now is to set your homepage on your Internet browser to www.ueckyiv.org/kyivinfo.php .  Each click on this page or the use of the Google search engine located at the bottom of this website gives the UEC a small credit. The more visits to this page, searches, or clicks on the small ads, the UEC receives credit that we use to pay for our website hosting. 

God bless you and thank you for your continued support!