Greetings to all who work at HeartCry!

I thank God for you and your prayers for us.

Everything is well in our family, with the exception that our youngest daughter Lisa has a cold and now she has a fever, but we hope that she will soon recover. Our other daughter, Katya, is graduating from school soon and is getting ready to go to college.

Life in the church continues without any significant changes. We are learning God's Word step by step and God is blessing us in this. As before our Sunday services are followed by the Lord supper and fellowship meal after the service. We continue to meet in the house of prayer on Wednesdays that are dedicated to reading and studying the Bible. We are presently reading through Jeremiah. I have formed the group for catechization consisting of three persons, who most likely will be baptized this summer. They are:  sister Maria (Masha), her brother Dmitri and our new brother Nikolai. Besides them there are 2-3 persons of those who have already been baptized who attend the catechization sessions. This helps to renew their understanding about the basics of Christian faith. Usually they are brothers. Nikolai is attending the course of catechization, that is conducted on Tuesdays and we see a lot more interest in him towards the Word of God. He is trying to study some passages on a more in-depth level - Praise God! Sometimes I meet with him one on one as he needs it.

Now the winter is over and the river is open for transportation, but today it was snowing again. It looks like such weather will continue for another week. When spring started there was a big swamp in the yard of the prayer house. We had to stop working with walls and started the work on the yard. All funds went toward that. We bought construction material and spread it on the ground and we also poured some rocks, we would need to continue doing that for another week or two. Now we can bring lumber in and store it in a clean place. When we are done with the walls we may lay pavement blocks in the yard. The truck is still not sold and not rented so please pray that the Lord would provide a buyer for this.

On the 1st and 2nd of May we had to attend a youth conference at Baptist church in Surgut which is 260 kilometers from us. At first we were very excited to get in contact with a lot of Christian youth (80-90 people). We were quickly disappointed though. This people are youth but they can hardly be called Christian youth. Before the conference started there was a morning service that consisted of a dozen hymns and two sermons. But were they really sermons? One verse from the Bible and then the Bible was set aside and the preacher decided that pulpit is a good place to entertain people from by telling jokes and amusing stories from personal life.  All this was followed by the Lord's Supper. We were discouraged and wanted to leave . In all our attempts to talk about our concerns with the regional and local pastor we heard only one thing back: “Today the youth are different and understand things differently and serve God differently. Old fashioned times are over. We need to change everything around in order to attract people into the church. We need to make it interesting for them."
So this is what "interesting" baptist services look like today. Sadly, I think that today Russian baptists look more like this rather than those in England in times of John Bunyan. People are drawn into church with the use of abundant resources. Their house of prayer is a 70 foot tall, 10,000 sq ft building downtown. When new people come they are being taught how to sing and play musical instruments but after 2-3 years in the church they don't even know what their church believes or what they believe and what the main teaching of the Bible is. I thought that it might have been only a unique Surgut situation but there were people present from all of the Tumen region. All these people are in the same spiritual condition. Their leaders were boasting of theological education and degrees, they were boasting about how great things are in their baptist union and invited us to join... but they do not know Christ. Pray that we will not become like them.

I am hoping and waiting that we can finish construction of our own house of prayer and we will be able to invite those young people to our conferences so we can teach them the basics of the Christian faith. And while they are young, they can still listen and think what is the truth and what is not. Pray for us that the Lord will help us in this and use us for His glory in strengthening the believers and proclaiming the gospel to the lost.

With gratitude and love in Christ,
Brother Vladimir Radzihovski, family and church.