Dear friends and family in Christ Jesus:

Time is flying fast and the hot month of June is behind us already. We are grateful for this opportunity to share what the Lord has done in our lives and in the lives of the people that we ministered to this past month.

Retrospective:

Overall the month of June has been a good month. On the 7^th of June we went to Armyansk to explore the possibility of serving together with the local Church that Artem Kurdov comes from. On the way there we stopped and visited the family of one of the guys whom our team serves. His family lives in the nature reserve and it was just nice to be there. From there we rushed to Armyansk to get to a meeting with the pastors of the local church. What a surprise it was to us to know that the pastor of this church went to the Bible School in South Africa! Few other pastors have been to South Africa as well, serving together with the Churches there. Also it turned out to be that we have a lot of common friends with them as well. What a pleasant surprise! We discussed the possibility of their church members attending the Missionary Training Center and a possibility of the students to go through their internship at the rehab center that the Church (in Armyansk) has; helping and discipling former alcoholics and drug addicts.

1st:Our team in front of the famous park at the nature reserve
2nd:Our team in Armyansk (with the pastors of the church)
3rd:Arkadiy and Anneke :)

In the month of June we went to the school where we had the basketball camp and offered them some help at a day camp that they have been having. They let us come 2 times each week to help them! It went well! They are opening up more and more to cooperate with us and we will see what God has in mind as far as this relationship.

Summer Camps:

Summer camp preparations are pretty much over just small things left here and there. Thank you so much to those who have been praying for the recruitment of the campers. The youth camp is full and the amount of people who would still like to go is huge. Only with the people who are on the waiting list we could have another full youth camp. Thank you again for praying for that. With the family camp things are moving along but rather slowly. We got about 6 families registered so far and few potential ones. We praise the Lord for those families which are coming and we trust God to bring more.

Bible Study Group:

Bible Study has been going good. As we wrote to you before, we got through the book of 1^st John. After we were done with it we asked the group what they would like to learn about God, themselves and the world around them in the month of June. We got a lot of different and interesting topics. Arkadiy and Mark would alter weekly in sharing God’s truth on some specific topic. It has been a delight to see students learning from the word of God of what the Lord has to say about a specific matter.

One on One Discipleship:

That has been going well, however the main difficulty is that most of the people had their exams in the month of June. In Ukraine the month of June is the exams time. But we still were able to have our meetings and we have thoroughly enjoyed almost all of them. A great disappointment was a brother whom Arkadiy disciples. He started choosing to believe the wrong things. He knows the truth he just does not want to follow it. He tries to fit the things in his theology that don’t belong there and are controversial yet he chooses to believe them.
Arkadiy still pursues meetings with him trusting the Lord to take the veil off his eyes and help to him to come back to his senses.

Opportunities are everywhere…

And he said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Luke 10:2)

Last week we got a call from our ministry partner who said that he met a lady who was interested in the English Clubs we do and he gave her Arkadiy’s phone number. Few minutes later she called and told Arkadiy that she teaches at the local University and asked about the work we do here in Odessa. Arkadiy said that we don’t have English clubs in summer but we have English camps and asked her whether she would be interested in getting some application forms. She said yes and so we met. At that meeting she read through the forms and listened to Arkadiy talk about the camps for 5 minutes, told Arkadiy that it is all understandable and then she asked him: “ok, that is clear, so now tell me what do you believe?”. Arkadiy shared the Gospel with her for 2 hours; she had a lot of questions and was very interested. She has never heard before despite the fact that she has been going to the Russian Orthodox Church all of her life. Praise God for that opportunity! Her name is Oksana. Please keep her in your prayers.

Prayer Requests of July:

Please pray:*For more campers for the family camp

*For the final preparations for the camps
*For Oksana, that God would keep drawing her closer to Himself
*For the hearts of people who will come to the youth and family camps
Camps dates are:
Youth camp 16.07 – 25.07, Gospel Night on the 23.07
Family camp 5.08 – 14.08, Gospel Night on the 12.08