A simple ministry + a dream = a wall burnt down
The past few weeks we’ve been doing something called English club in the afternoons. We invite the kids from the schools we teach at to come to church and play games, teach them some English words, and then play ninja game, after ninja game, after ninja game until it’s time to say bye.
Quite simple, except for the fact that our creativity started to run out- but that’s irrelevant.
To give you a background of the work we are doing here, we are working with the Baptist church in a small town in Ukraine. They have a building beside the church where upstairs, they have a housing program for boys that want to go to college after they leave one of a few orphanages in the area, and we live in the downstairs area.
Here there is a very big divide (almost a grudge) between Russian orthodox (the predominant religion) and protestants. The divide is so big, that some people refuse to drive up the hill our church is located on, even if it’s just to bring their kids to English club. They are afraid of what someone driving by might think.
That being said, we had a student at school who dreams of becoming a translater. So, without knowing who she was or her background, we invited her to come practice English by talking with us and she has been coming almost every day for the past 3 weeks.
Little did we know that she is our host’s neighbor and after years of trying to minister to her family, they had yet to set foot in church.
However, her father, doing the fatherly thing of wanting to see your child’s dream come true, started bringing her to the bottom of the hill everyday.
In 2 weeks of driving to the bottom of the hill and dropping her off, he never came up. But on the third week, our host received a visitor. His neighbor, our friend’s father, wanted to know more about the summer camps the church puts together every year.
It might seem for some like nothing or only a small window. But for us, it’s worth a month of work. It’s a reason to rejoice. For it’s a window that was sealed shut for years and now it’s cracked open.
