The days finally arrived. After a lot of preparation, furniture buying, interior renovations and much prayer, we had our opening of the St. Luke's Children's Center and the first worship service of the St. Luke's United Methodist Church of Kiev this past Saturday and Sunday. Festivities on Saturday night included a dinner, musical entertainment from a musical group from our UM church in Chernovtsi, a slide show on the history of the street children center, congratulations from various guests from Norway, America and Ukraine, an address from our Bishop Hans Vaxby and of course, if a Norwegian has anything to do with the organization, coffee with cakes.
You may notice the name of the center is now the St. Luke's Children's Center. Our organization is called Dosvitok, which is a poetic Ukrainian word meaning daybreak, but it was decided to name the center St. Luke's, the same name as the new church which will meet at the center. St. Luke's was chosen because because when Jesus announced his ministry in Luke 4, he read from Isaiah where it said:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
We strive for this emphasis to be the emphasis of our ministry for both the Children's Center and the new church.
Also, we were so grateful to hear of two gifts to the ministry, one of $90,000 from Blacksburg United Methodist Church in Blacksburg VA and also one of $46,000 from Molde United Methodist Church of Molde, Norway and the Central UM Church of Bergen, Norway. All three of these churches have been active in supporting our work, sending teams to participate with the children and lifting us up in prayer. This gift means that our $150,000 loan has only $14,000 left in less than a year from the time we purchased the center! We thank God for the way God has used these congregations and other supporters as instruments for enabling the St. Luke's Children Center and United Methodist Church to have a permanent home.
Here are some pictures from the events:
Click here for the Saturday Night Opening celebration.
Click here for the Sunday Morning Facility Dedication worship service, the first service for St. Luke's UMC.
4 comments:
Congratulations on starting the St. Luke's Church and Childrens Center.
Are you in need of further supplies to continue the ministry?
My name is Scott McDonald and I am organizing a trip to Ukraine for our church, Central UMC in Asheville, NC, in September 2008. We are taking this trip in association with TEAR (The Evangelistic Association of Russia)
TEAR, a non-denominational evagelical group, has been working in orphanages all over Russia for several years. They are now shifting their efforts to include the Ukraine. We are planning to collect goods such as tables, chairs, chalkboards, clothes, backpacks, colors, markers, paper, filing cabinets,sports items, bicycles and more to supply to orphanages, hospitals, churches and christian schools. These items will be shipped over in late May. Upon arrival in September our team will oversee distribution to the different places we visit. While we will be primarily visiting places that TEAR has set up, we would be very interested in meeting the Lovelaces and supplying some of your immediate needs.
In addition, the evangelism and missions committee of our church has voted to reach out and support a church in Eastern Europe with monitary gifts and work teams as needed. Originally we had contacted the World Methodist Evangelism Board to make inital contact with a new start up church but they have not been able to recommend a Methodist church for us to contact to work together with. As the past chair of the missions committee I can assure you we could build a working relationship with your new church or another local Methodist church you may know of that is in need of support.
Please contact me by email mcdonald.scott@att.net, our minister in charge of evagelism Tony Bell email tbell@centralumc.org, or our church liason for Missions Jessica Tripp email jtripp@centralumc.org to make initial contact.
I hope that we can work together to build a relationship that would be mutually beneficial to all.
Thank you for your time.
Scott McDonald
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