On the one hand, this month has been pretty normal. I was busy with what I do every month:

pastoral visits ( we have many old and sick people in our church and every family needs the pastor's visit, group visitation (the prayer group, the women, the charity group, the youth group and the prayer and bible study group with the men), and administrative work All these events took place during the first part of the month. Besides these, I also made preparations for the next week crusade in Pscov (the north-western part of Russia). I usually participate actively in these evangelistic crusades as I am an interpreter, translating from Romanian into Russian and Ukrainian. The area lies in the European side of Russia.  Sadly, the people and the churches are in a serious condition. The people's faith is nothing but an old tradition.

Drunkenness and poverty, escpecially in the villages, are at their highest. There are only seven baptist churches in the whole area. One of them is the church from Pscov. It has a little more than 100 members even though it is almost 100 years old. When we left, we thought we'd have a lot of people to reach according to their need. But when we got there I could see things were different. There was only one person interested in this ministry, and that was the community president (Romanian missionary from Cernauti) and another brother in Christ who had been a Christian for 10 years (originally from Belarus). Our team was made of 5 people (we were like the 2 fish and the 5 loaves of bread). I had never seen such a great indifference. We were asigned to different towns. The situation there was a complete disaster as there were roomy churches but few people. Even those were much divided. For many years these people had suffered persecutions, but when they had freedom, they started to fight against each other on theological issues which led to the church's deadness.

The president of the community, who used to be a missionary in Siberia, was very glad we came to help them. The only healthy ministry was the Rehabilitation centre for drug addicts and alcoholics. All week long we worked along side a wonderful man who had been addicted to drugs for 10 years. God saved him and now he serves the Lord with his guitar. He is 26 and is no longer addicted to drugs. He came with us throughout the towns of Dno and Porhov and a few other neighboring villages. Ee found people there who wanted to surrender their lives to Christ. Some of them already had. Sadly, most of our time was spent not sharing the Gospel, but trying to reconcile the Christians who were in conflict. Both my friend and I did that. Towards the end of the week, our brothers in Christ started to become aware of their situation and their need to change.  They realized that they could not tell the Gospel to others as long as division existed. When we went to Moscow, I got together with other Russian community presidents. We all came to the conclusion that we need to pray for these spiritually poor regions. Please join us. We were thankful to go back to Cernauti on December 2.