More Snow

I woke up this morning to about 10 inches of snow. Beautiful. . .until you have to shovel the walk.

Christmas 2009

Christmas eve: dinner, legos, and Elf at the Claycamps.

Christmas day: celebrating at the Pirinis with food, movies, music, games, and presents.

3 years of evenings for senior citizens

Last night we held our monthly evening for senior citizens and celebrated the 3rd anniversary of these events. In December of 2006 we started holding a monthly dinner for senior citizens in Kaharlyk as a way to show them God's love and invest in our community by doing something special for a demographic that is much overlooked in our city.

Through this ministry quite a few seniors have started coming regularly to our church and one Babushka repented and was baptized this summer. We've gotten to know quite of few of the senior citizens in our neighborhood as well as grown as a church in learning how to serve our community.

Here are some pictures from last night:

Liese and Natasha Vitenko preparing the meal.

Yulia Vitenko reciting a Christmas poem. Josie Claycamp and Anya Zahurska also performed on the piano, but you'll have to keep an eye out on the Claycamp's blog for photos of them.

These ladies have been attending our evenings since the very beginning and they sang a couple Ukrainian folk songs for everyone. They are pretty awesome. I recorded one of their encore songs with my camera (sorry if it is shaky):

Frosty Morning

The goings on in Kaharlyk

It has been a while since we last wrote so I thought I'd write a general "what we've been up to post".

Last weekend we took a road trip to Priluki to visit our friends there and go to their Sunday morning church service. For the last year or so we've only gone back to Priluki for the Thursday evening service and we don't get to see everyone at church. We stayed with Vlad and Zhana and had a good time hanging out at their house. Liese went to a women's bible study on Saturday afternoon while I hung out with Vlad. On the way home we stopped by our old neighbors in the BAM region of Priluki to see their new baby boy Bogdan.

We finished our 8 month study through Hebrews last week and this Sunday we'll be starting a new bible study series through I Timothy and Titus. We want to build a good foundation of church structure and as we study through these two books we'll be focusing on different aspects church structure. Wayne and I have been planning and preparing for this series for a couple months and this will be the first time we've started teaching a book with a plan on how we want to teach through it.

I've been working on the covers for the 4 biographies that In Lumine will be printing soon. They are pretty much done and ready to go to the printer. I've also been adding more content to pastorjohnpiper.ru, mostly just text of sermons but hopefully we'll have more audio up there soon as well.

We are getting near to finishing our bedroom remodel. This week I finished the shelving in our closet and Liese painted it. Liese has stripped just about all the old paint off the doors and jams. We still need to put up the closet doors, put in base boards, finish off the floor and paint the final coat of paint on the walls. Then we can move into a finished room.

That's basically what's been going on with us.

Wayne Grudem's "Christian Beliefs" in Russian

This week we received "Christian Beliefs" by Wayne Grudem from the printer. This is In Lumine's 6th book to be published and the third one that I've helped with the design.

In Lumine

One of the goals of In Lumine is to get as many good, God-centered, Christian resources into people's hands as we possibly can. One of the ways we try to do this is by offering our books at a low cost. The other way is by offering as much digital content as we can for free. We would love to have websites like Desiring God, TheResurgence, The Gospel Coalition, offering free content in Russian and Ukrainian. So we decided (with permission from Desiring God) to set up a website with all of John Piper's sermons and books so that people could easily find, read, listen and watch his sermons.

For the last few weeks I've been working on pastorjohnpiper.ru and it is pretty nearly done.

We've got audio and video from the Pastors' Conference in Samara, most of the books we've published in pdf, sermons, and links to purchase all his books. We'll be adding audio and video from Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ soon as well as more sermons that have been translated.

Christian Beliefs by Wayne Grudem is done printing. The printer is shipping them out this week.

With all the book sales we've had over the last few months we are able to print a series of short biographies that Piper wrote. This week I've been working on getting the covers finished. They are biographies of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. We'll be sending them to the printer soon.