90 scholars spending 25 years translating could have missed something...

Something to remember while studying:


From www.stickworldcomics.com

(via 22 words)

Here we are in Yuba City

We've been in Yuba City for most of this week and have had a grand old time hanging out with family, spending time with our 3 year old niece Sarah (who makes killer grilled ham and cheese) and meeting our 2 day old niece Ella (time flies, she's 5 days old already).

[photo from brother in-law Justin]

This Sunday we'll be speaking at Calvary Chapel Gridley. Then, next week if all goes according to plan we'll be visiting Grants Pass, then Salem, then Portland, OR.

More travels

After the Desiring God conference Liese and I spent a few days with Dawn and David Dietrich. We talked about future ministry partnerships with their church and got to meet with some of their church's elders.

Then we drove to my sister's in Goodyear, Arizona. We missed a huge storm by one day, but we got to see the lightning in front of us as we drove across the desert at night.

We got to spend a lot of time with our niece Ina who is 2 and half years old and some time with Sarah and Shawn doing fun stuff like swimming, kettle bell workouts, hanging out at the pool, going to the mall, celebrating Oktoberfest, and eating really good food.



We also went to Arizona to speak at Calvary Chapel Maricopa and Calvary Chapel Casa Grande. Both these churches support missionaries in Kaharlyk and have been praying for our church and we wanted to meet them and share with them more about what God is doing in Ukraine.

Some great ministries I found out about at the DG Conference

I think my favorite part of the DG conference was going around and talking with the different ministries in the exhibition hall.

Here are a few that I thought were really great:

"The Elisha Foundation was founded to provide refreshment and encouragement to families caring for people with special needs. Through our programs we seek to provide access to resource professionals, educational specialists and other valuable resources."

These guys are great. We talked with them a lot about helping families with special needs in Ukraine and, as the founder (Justin Reimer) and his wife have spent a lot of time working in Russia with orphans, they understood many of the problems people in Ukraine with special needs children face and many of the problems churches face in trying to reach out to families with special needs children.

We are hoping in the future to work with them to get resources to churches as well as hopefully have them come out to Ukraine.


These guys had a booth right next to ours and so we got to talk quite a bit. Their mission is alleviate the suffering of children by equipping God's Church to communicate the Gospel through effective compassion ministry. They are beginning to start working in eastern Europe and maybe down the road we will be able to partner with them by helping connect them with churches who are active in local compassion ministries.



Food for the Hungry
This is probably the most holistic, comprehensive, long-term, ministry that I have ever seen. Their goal is to work with churches in communities that need radical transformation and they do this by working with the whole community to alleviate poverty, provide health care and education, working with local businesses and enterprises, working with local government and community leaders, providing training and education for families, etc.



See Jesus
This is a ministry of Paul Miller who wrote Discipling by Grace (which In Lumine has been working to get the rights to publish in Russian).

I'll just let two men I respect say what they think about this ministry:

"If Jesus or Jesus' saving grace is just an abstraction to you, Paul Miller will be a great help in making his love a living reality to your heart."

— Tim Keller

"We evangelicals don’t have a good handle on who our Lord is and what he is like: how he treats people, how he feels, how he reacts to people, how he times his interactions. Paul Miller helps you sit at the feet of Jesus and look at how Jesus lives and speaks." — David Powlison

We hope to work with this ministry to get their group resources into the Russian language as well as possibly have them come out to Ukraine to conduct seminars on how to lead small group discussions.

Desiring God National Conference 2010

It has been a busy couple of weeks with a lot of traveling so I haven't updated our blog much. But now that we are back on the Central Coast for a bit I'll try to write about some of the places we went and the people we visited.

First the Desiring God Nation Conference. When we started planning this trip to the US last year we decided that I should try to attend the DG conference to represent In Lumine, build relationships with people there and network with like-minded ministries. We didn't have enough money for both Liese and I to go, so I went by myself which I don't ever want to do again. But it did work out that our whole In Lumine team (at least the Ukraine side) was able to attend the conference. It was a very fruitful time on many levels.

The teachings were excellent, we made a lot of great contacts, we were able to promote In Lumine, and we had a lot of fun.

I would recommend listening to the audio from the conference, it can be downloaded at DesiringGod.org

The In Lumine team with Ethan and Elysia Larson who were our gracious hosts in Minneapolis.


Jake, Olya, and Myself at the In Lumine table. I think Jake is giving us a thumbs up (oh, and I stole these pictures from his blog knotts.com.ua)

"World Commission" this weekend at CalvarySLO

This weekend CalvarySLO is hosting a missions conference.

If you are in the area you should come — it is going to be a great conference.

I'll be speaking on Saturday afternoon. Jake Knotts, Bryan Stupar, David Foote, Christine Zurbach, and Tim Fox are among the other speakers.

It starts at 7pm on Friday and continues on Saturday afternoon. Read more about it here.


UPDATE: sorry everyone, Tim Fox is not going to be speaking. Greg Squires is. Greg is also awesome.