What’s your least favorite thing about moving to a new place? There is a saying in Russian: “Three moves equal a house fire.” I do not know about comparing a move to a house fire but statistically a church can lose up to 20% of its people when it moves. Of course, it all depends on a church and how far it moves. It is all individual but given that Moscow Bible Church recently had to move to a new location for the first time in over 12 years I had a lot of apprehensions about dynamics of our church’s life. Specifically, I was concerned about 3 things:
- Growth stagnation. Moscow Bible was growing over the last 2 years, and I was afraid that a move would hinder this growth.
- Reversal of evangelistic culture. Back in September I shared that we as a church saw the need to become much more evangelistic in everything that we were doing. The move could have hindered the development of that evangelistic culture.
- Losing people. I did fear that we may lose a considerable number of people with this move.
But praise be to God none of those things became a reality so far! Now, it is still too early to tell, given that we have been at our new place for less than a month, but I just came back from our church retreat, and it was the largest church retreat we have had yet. Moreover, there were several non-believers who came to it for the very first time, heard the Gospel message and left the retreat lamenting that they do not make it to church more often. One of those couples were our former neighbors, who visited the church a couple of times but got to spend the whole day with it for the very first time. I will share about them a little bit more in my next newsletter.
All this to say is thank you very much for your prayers! It is a miracle that so far we are an outlier to that statistic of churches losing people or momentum when they move to a new place. We are still working out some small details but overall I can really say “so far, so good”. Once again thank you for your prayers!
Yours in praying and hastening the day of revival in Moscow and Russia,
Constantin and Alexandra
PS Did I mention that our annual retreat is held at a place that is run by the office of the president of Russia? I am not kidding! Right as we were moving in this hotel was wrapping up a conference of "human resources department of the secret service."
THREE PRAYER REQUESTS:
The next two weeks will be jam packed for us as a family. We are leaving for the annual "Athletes in Action" conference where I will have the honor to be the keynote speaker along with serving as a "conference chaplain". Next week Sasha and I will fly out to Tel-Aviv, Israel for a couple of days. I will be co-teaching in the "Preaching Lab" put together by "City to City Europe." Please join us in praying for God:
- To empower us as we minister at the "Athlets in Action" conference and as I co-teach in a "Preaching Lab" in Israel. At the "Athlets in Action" conference I will also get a chance to interview Olympic Champion Ivan Yudeshko. He was the basketball player that passed the ball in the final seconds when USSR beat USA in Munich in 1972. Please pray that I would get to share the Gospel with him in the course of that interview.
- To bless our youth's mission trip to Kazan at the end of May. Every year our youth ministry travels to Kazan, mostly muslim city, to share the Gospel and to put together various activities for kids and youth in the are.
- To bring peace to Ukraine and Russia. Moreover, ask God to use this conflict by bringing reconciliation and revival to both countries.
