Heading to Ukraine

Today I am leaving for my first trip to Ukraine since the war escalated on February 24^th.  My trip will look different as I am not traveling with Beth, and we are not going to the places we normally work from.  We will be flying into Poland and driving across the land border to Ukraine.

We will be in Lviv.  While Lviv has been relatively quiet from a war damage perspective, there will still be impacts of the war we will feel such as the air raid sirens and the number of refugees that have moved from the east to the west of Ukraine.

I will be traveling with a group of leaders from Converge and we will be meeting with the leaders of the Baptist Union of Ukraine to discuss future ministry partnerships.  Humanitarian needs and support still exist, but we want to be preparing for the future and the spiritual needs of the people.  As some of you may know, Minnesota and other parts of the US have been working in Ukraine for the past 30 years.  There has been work with day camps, men’s and women’s meetings, sports camps and church partnerships.  Most of the work was done in the Cherkasy and Rivne regions and we want to talk about how to expand work across all the regions of Ukraine.

We want to listen to the needs and dreams of the leaders of the Baptist Union and discuss how we can continue to build on the existing partnerships and grow them even more.  God knows what the plans are for the future, but it is up to us to search for and discover those plans for us.  This could look like helping with church plants, developing new leaders, supporting missionaries who are being sent to unreached people groups and doing ministry in existing churches such as English camps, kids camps, etc.

As I leave for this trip, I have three prayers requests:

• PRAY for safety in travel and for our time in Ukraine.
• PRAY for our meetings that we see clearly where God wants us to partner together in the future.
• PRAY for Ukraine.  The war continues.  There are humanitarian needs for the refugees impacted in the war zones.  There are economic needs for those who were not refugees but have seen the economy destroyed due to Russia actions.  There are spiritual needs for those who feel hopeless and need a relationship with Jesus in their lives.