I greet you, my friends, with Jesus’ love!
Last month, a man in our church named Sergey, has been ordained to the pastoral ministry and become an elder of the church with me. We rented a café building for this special event. We sang songs and then I preached on 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 about the qualities of a true servant of Christ. God blessed the meeting.
We had guests from Omsk and Petropavlovsk. The pastors of those churches participated in the ordination. Then we had lunch after the service. We have been praying for a long time that our church would be under the leadership of a plurality of elders, since we believe that is the most consistent with the Bible. We are thankful to God for providing another elder for our church.
We prayed and studied the Scriptures, and have studied several books dedicated to pastoral ministry. Those were books written by such authors as Alexander Strauch, John MacArthur, Mark Dever, and others. Over the last few years, Sergey has grown in knowledge, godliness, and the ability to teach. Recently we started to study a new book for us, The Peacemaker by Kenneth Sande, about the biblical principles for solving conflicts.
Springtime is finally here, and warm days give more opportunities for outdoor evangelism. We also visit those people who have previously heard our preaching. We plan to do evangelism in summer also. We pray about things and ask the Lord to bless.
The church is doing well, praise God! We started to practice biblical counseling with the spiritually weak members of our church. There is a very good testimony from a family that became members of our church two years ago. The husband has changed his attitude toward his wife and his child, and now he dedicates his time for studying the Scriptures. We noticed tremendous changes in the family, too. The man stopped napping at the meetings during a sermon, he became a listener more than a critic, he has started asking for advise from the brothers.
I think it is worth noting that the relationship between our church and the church we had to leave (some years ago) because of disagreement on the basic theological doctrines has taken a positive turn. The pastor from that church came to visit me, and we had a very friendly meeting. The members of our church also agree that between our churches there is no hostility anymore.
Thank you for your prayers and support. Please pray for our church and our evangelism efforts.