How do you measure success? That is an important question for us at Moscow Bible. For example, one simple criterion that we employ for our special events is “one person that comes to church service and gets plugged into our regular fellowship.” Meaning that if it least one person started attending our church on the regular basis after a special event that event would be deemed successful.
It was about a month ago that we had our regular class for new church members. One of the girls that came to this class was Sasha, a young tall and a little bit shy girl who apparently speaks 5 languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) besides Russian. I have seen Sasha before in church and just assumed that she came from another protestant community in Moscow, joined our youth group and now wanted to learn more about Moscow Bible. That is the kind of answer that I was prepared to hear when I asked her how she learnt about Moscow Bible.
Sasha mentioned that she came to our Candlelight Service for the first time this past December. She loved it so much that she came back to church the following Sunday, got plugged into our youth ministry, started attending a small group and is now getting ready to be baptized. The moment she mentioned it I remembered meeting her at the Candlelight Service. It was after the service actually. I was getting ready to leave when I met her in the door of the church. But given that I have met so many new people that day that memory kind of escaped me until she shared her story.
It was that story that completely changed how I viewed our Candlelight Service this year. All of a sudden, all the minutiae that I was fretting over did not seem so important after all. What mattered is that God used this service to touch the heart of countless people including a young, tall and a little bit shy girl named Sasha. Recently Sasha brought her dad to church and a friend. It is amazing to see how the impact of that one Candlelight Service multiplies through just one person.
Yours in praying and hastening the day of revival in Moscow and Russia,
Constantin and Alexandra
P.S. You may remember that Evangelical Free Church of Russia was essentially born out of the ministry of Moscow Bible Church. It took us a while to own up to that fact but now that we have fully embraced it the church is pouring its resources into strengthening this young denomination. A large group from our church has participated in an annual conference of Evangelical Free Church of Russia. I will share more about it in the upcoming newsletter.
THREE PRAYER REQUESTS:
Please take a moment right now, after you fnished reading this e-mail, to join us in praying for God:
- To bless our work on strengtheining the Evangelical Free Churches in Russia. I will share more about the work that was done this past year in my next newsletter but in the meantime please pray for our development of theological distintives, theological vision and theological stance of our denomination.
- To raise necessery funds for us to purchase our own building. I shared in my previous newsletter about our capital campaign that we just launched. Check it out if you have not yet and if you can please share about it with as many people as possible especially with the missions board of your church.
- To bring peace to Russia and Ukraine. Moreover, ask God to use this conflict by bringing reconciliation and revival to these countries. In my previous letter I shared that one of the highlights for me personally of our "Train the Trainer" program is that one of the lead trainers in it currently lives in Ukraine. It is projects like this that give me hope for the future.
