March 18, 2005

Greetings from Ufa!  The temperatures are slowly warming up here, though we are still getting some good snowfalls.

 We wanted to give you a quick update on prayer needs: 

1. Many of you have been praying for and financially supporting Faiz (Fah-EEZ) through a serious medical situation in his life…wanted you to know that Faiz finally arrived back home two days ago in MUCH better health than when he came to Ufa last month…he had two major surgeries through which the Lord literally saved his life…one was to pulverize some serious kidney stones in one kidney, and the other operation was to remove the 2^nd kidney which was in too bad of condition to do anything else…Faiz is in much better health and spirits these days, thanks to your prayer support and generosity…he would have died if he had arrived in Ufa just two days later than he did…he is a member of the church in Uchali…pray for him that the Lord would work mightily in his life to share about God’s goodness and mercy for all of us!

      2.    Pray for our team as we seek the Lord’s will about some new and different approaches to ministry here in Ufa, such as chronological bible storying, business  development (“business as mission”) as a tool to bring better financial stability to local churches/leadership, & increased use of stateside volunteers to accomplish church-planting goals here in Ufa.

      3.        Pray for new team members Victor & Susan Bauer…they were hoping to arrive in Russia next January, but Victor is facing a knee surgery that may delay their arrival several months past that date…pray for a soon resolution to the timing of the surgery, that the Lord’s perfect will might be accomplished…

     4.       Pray for open doors as we seek to connect with local university students to share the gospel and start new churches…pray for a teacher named Alex, that the Lord would bless him and open his heart to receive the gospel and help us gain even better access to the students…

     5.       Pray for students like Julia, Elena, Radmir, and Michael, who attend our weekly English club…some of them have made moves toward repentance and expressed a desire to know and experience more what we keep telling them about Jesus…one of them repented 3 months ago but was warned by a relative to avoid us because we aren’t connected with Russian Orthodoxy…pray the Satan will be thwarted in his attempts to steal the seed that falls upon the soil of people’s hearts here in Ufa…

    6.       Pray for two volunteer teams that will be coming from the cities of Richmond and Tulsa this May…they will be working in the Sipailovo (See-PIE-lah-vah)  & Nizhegorodka (Knee-zheh-gah-ROAD-kah) parts of the city (with a collective population of almost 300,000) to help us plant new churches where there is not any kind of evangelistic witness…pray that the existing churches and believers in Ufa will join in this work & catch a vision to fan out across this great city to share the gospel, lead evangelistic Bible studies, plant new churches, minister to human needs, and bring hope to every heart and a church-planting movement to every people group.

    7.       Pray for Valera and Alex, two young men with whom we are working in the Telecenter district of Ufa, as they lead out in children’s and youth evangelism through kid’s clubs, an evangelistic youth café, and other special evangelistic events…pray that their hearts will be teachable and moldable, and that they will naturally pass on their training and invest themselves in other emerging leaders

    8.       Pray for us as we are attempting to get an evangelistic website (in Russian) up and running in coming weeks…pray for the Lord to show us the right person who can take over the work of regularly writing the computer code and maintaing the site…we are so thankful to Adam Covington in our Moscow office for helping us get this project initially off the ground…pray also for Adam as he finishes up a public relations media piece that will be turned into different forms of media, in order to help us get out the word here in Ufa to key individuals, regarding who Baptists and evangelicals are…

    9.       Pray for Grace Church which meets in the Telecenter district of Ufa…this 12-member church is a little over a year old, and led by their pastor Zhenya, they are  starting to branch out into several areas of evangelism to reach kids and their parents, youth, those struggling with addictions, church planting in two different parts of the city, along with desiring to start evangelistic work in up to 6 small towns on the periphery of Ufa…pray for this little congregation, which though small in number, is exhibiting signs of trying to reproduce itself!

    10.   Pray for our team as we are sometimes confronted with discouragement, attacks from both within and without the kingdom, entrenched traditions and legalism, and concern about relationships with local authorities…please pray that we would live out the expectations of Col. 3:12-17. 

Thanks for standing with us in prayer…we invite you to consider joining us in the work here by coming on a volunteer trip in the coming months and years…we know that much of our church planting, evangelism, gospel-sowing, and leadership training work will need to be accomplished by volunteers from around the world… 

And thanks for your sacrificial support of the work here through your giving to the Cooperative Program, Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Int’l Missions, and through the many direct special gifts that many of you have given…we thank you for having a heart for the peoples of the mega-city of Ufa.

 Remember to periodically check out our website for updates and prayer needs: www.hope4ufa.com (thanks to Carl and Arline Ryan for this wonderful work!)

 Blessings!

Chris, Eileen, Nathan, Timothy, Heather, Stephen, and Seth Carr

Int’l Mission Board workers in Ufa, Russia

Feb 28 2005

Here is an update on Faiz (the believer who has bad health):

 Faiz had his surgery a little over a week ago; as far as I understand, it was successful in that the doctors were able to pulverize/remove kidney stones from one kidney, but it looks like they will remove the other kidney perhaps sometime next week.  I hope to hear more news today about him.  Keep praying, he still has a long road ahead of him.

 Blessings,

Chris

Feb. 26,  2005

1) Team Ufa asks you to pray for an Evangelical English class that the team will be leading from now until the end of the school year in late May. The team will use press articles and film clips that lead to spiritual discussions with the students, before turning to the Bible as an English text the last 40 minutes of the class. The students are mostly intermediate English speakers who study at one of Ufa’s many universities. Pray that God’s Word will not come back void and that some of the students will come to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus.

2) Team Ufa asks you to pray for the Sipailovo (sea-PIE-lava) district of Ufa. The bedroom district of Sipailovo is home to a populace of what is now known to be some 250,000 souls, and yet, has almost no Christian witness. We finally have an apartment to use as a base of operations to reach the district, and an international church planting team has been formed, but there are some disagreements as to how to proceed. Some want to gather known believers, while others want to focus on non-Christians. Some want a strong identification with Russian Baptists, while others want something more fresh and youth oriented. Pray for unity, as Russian Baptists tend not to move forward unless everyone is on board. Pray for the long awaited start of evangelical work in Sipailovo.

3) Team Ufa asks you to pray for an Experiencing God discipleship course that Apprentice Missionary Larry is leading Ufa Bible Church through. The Wednesday night course will continue until late May. Pray that this will be a life changing event for UBC’s young people. Pray that the course will help the students to be sensitive to where and how God is working around them, and then to join Him in His work. Pray that the course might engender a passion within the students to plant reproducing churches and share the gospel with those who are perishing without Christ.

4) Team Ufa asks you to pray for efforts to reach Ufa’s 90,000 college, university, and technical school students for Christ. We have little access to the students. We are seldom allowed on Ufa’s campuses (there are guards), and even then, what we can say once there is restricted. And we have virtually no access to the scores of dormitories in the city (again, there are guards). We can’t even pass out literature on university territory. Frankly, we do not know the way ahead. Pray that God will show us where He is working among Ufa’s tens of thousands of college students. Especially ask Him to lead us to male students who are seeking Him, as roughly 50% of them are either drug addicts or alcoholics. And there are exceedingly few male Christians on Ufa’s campuses.