Russia Outreach Report
King’s Kids El Paso sent a team of 29 teenagers and staff to Central Russia for 4 1/2 weeks this summer. Here’s our team, including 19 Russian King’s Kids and staff, in front of a statue of Lenin, with the New Testament Church building behind it. We ministered at their Saturday youth service and two children’s church services.
We began in the city of Perm and traveled to other cities and villages nearby. One of the areas that the Lord blessed the most was our investment in Russian Christian youth. Training young Russians in sharing their faith, living a life of holiness and devotion to the Lord and personal prayer and ministry was very fruitful. It’s not easy for them to live for the Lord. Little Anya said she is the only Christian in her class. Natasha spoke about how her peers mock her, and Maksim, whose life so clearly shows the call of God, has only two believers in his entire school. They were very encouraged as we lived together and traveled in ministry throughout the region. The two groups really made friends and bonded together, despite the language barrier.
This was much more of a seed planting and plowing ministry than a harvesting time. The unsaved Russian teenagers are a tough crowd! We were surprised by their spiritual disinterest. It’s not as though they would profess to be atheists, with an intellectually prepared argument against the existence of God. Instead, they have a cultural relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church but no real belief in anything. The numbers of churches are astonishingly low. When we were in Ekaterinberg, the youth pastor told us his city has 22 Christian churches for over 2 million people, and most churches are small! Perm has one megachurch and fewer than 20 others, for 1.5 million people. Many people have never heard a clear presentation of the Gospel in the villages. Russia has laws against proselytizing children, so we had to be careful. Altar calls would be considered coercion, so individual conversations after ministry times were all we could do.
We saw some breakthroughs. Ministry at a Perm drug rehab for teenagers went so well that the administration invited our team to the adult ward the next day. We made friends with the local children through the Vacation Bible School, which was small but went well, and we did service projects for orphanages also. The Russian government requires anyone who has contact with the orphans to take HIV and TB tests plus a physical exam, and then get official approval, which effectively keeps out most ministry to the 650,000 kids in the orphanage system. Some long term YWAM missionaries have gone through all the required steps and are now ministering to the children in the system.
We held evening outdoor evangelistic meetings in the Kislotnyi Dachi neighborhood where we lived. It's a poor area of rundown apartments where cars seldom come down the streets. People walk and take the bus. Heroin use is common, but there's no sign of gang activity or street crime. We saw needles laying on the ground. One young man spoke for his peers and said in broken English, “Jesus is your leader. Jesus isn't our leader, drugs is our leader.”
The teenagers were intimidating to many of our kids. They are a jaded bunch who come to the park to drink, flirt and hang out. When we did a powerful evangelistic drama that has been effective all over the world, most seemed completely unfazed. Some were willing to talk afterward and were interested in the topic of eternity, but the others kept trying to change the subject to anything but the Lord. We distributed Bibles at the park to the kids we had been talking with all week. Most wanted Bibles, except the Muslim and Russian Orthodox kids. Coffeehouse and village evangelism also put us in contact with many lost kids and young adults .
In Ekaterinberg, we worked with a youth pastor and his youth group at a drug rehab center and a special meeting at the church for youth. He was thrilled at the turnout of new kids and several came to the Lord that night.
The food was good. We ate borscht (beet soup), lots of sausage and pelmeni (like ravioli), and mayonnaise served on everything, Russian style. We also ate at the largest McDonalds in the world, which is in Moscow
… One of the interesting things is how many of our team kids and young staff felt a strong attachment to the Russian people. About 10 out of the 29 that we took from the US and Mexico said they were considering coming back to Russia for YWAM’s 6 month Discipleship Training School (DTS), which is the next step for budding missionaries and committed Christian kids who come out of King’s Kids. Two kids will be taking Russian as their foreign language this year in school, and a young man who was already studying Russian before we even announced we would be going there this year has made plans to go back to Perm for his DTS in January...We were far enough north that the sun didn’t set until around midnight! ...Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which has many of the same letters as ours but gives some entirely different meanings. Add to this 11 completely different letters than ours and you'll see the challenge. For example:
Russian / English letter
B = v, 3 = z, H = n, P = r, c = s, y = oo, x = h, backwards N = ee, backwards r = ya
We are grateful to the Lord to open up the opportunity for us to reach out in Russia this year!
China Summer Outreach Report
This was the third straight summer for King’s Kids El Paso to send an outreach team to China. Our group of five college students, led by Joe Feuille, met with King’s Kids International leaders in Hong Kong to serve at the Gateway Camp, which trained and sent 1000 youth and their leaders into Mainland China for outreaches across the nation.
The Sunshine Camp near Beijing continues to expand each year, with invitations from the Chinese government to begin similar programs in high schools and universities all over the country. Our team served in the camp and saw the Lord work in many ways among the Chinese kids there. Next year, KKI plans to have a much larger training program in Hong Kong, followed by thousands of kids going into China during the Olympics.
Local Teams and Staff Update
We’ve seen more applicants than ever before interested in joining our local King’s Kids teams. Over 40 new children and teenagers have applied this year! Some are the younger brothers and sisters or friends of team members, while others found us through our website or heard about King’s Kids through word of mouth.
While this growth is exciting, it is also a challenge to our small staff. We are very blessed to welcome Trey Valadez, a former KKEP team member who completed his YWAM training in Argentina, as our newest worker. He will focus his attention on ministering to the boys in the group and the Senior Team. Please join our prayers for more laborers to help in the harvest field of reaching and discipling young people!