Greetings from the Carr family in Ufa, Russia!  We wanted to give you an update on the Lord's work here in Ufa, so that you can rejoice and pray with us for the Lord's blessings:

 1. Pray for a new church which met for the first time on January 25 here in Ufa...pray that the Lord would add new believers to this new fellowship; pray for leaders named Zhenya and Sasha as they preach, receive leadership training, and visit folks with the good news.  Pray for the Lord to raise up each member of the church to accept the call for the church to have a reproductive mentality in order to birth another fellowship of believers within 6 months.

 2. Praise the Lord that we have recently received invitations (through the local Baptist association of churches) to obtain multi-entry one year visas.  We will be flying to Finland near the end of the month to apply for the visas; pray for the Lord's blessing on this endeavor, and that we have good a travel experience flying back and forth with our small children

3. Thank the Lord with us for the 18 students in the Ufa Bible School. Chris just this past week finished teaching an introductory course on Missiology...many of the students have been touched and challenged to change their mentality toward church planting...they have learned how to better see and read scripture in the light of our great God who is always on mission to bring the lost to Himself; they have been challenged to put their exposure to missiology into practice instead of just keeping it in their heads in the theoretical realm.

 4. Pray for Chris as he prepares lectures to deliver starting in late February in the Ufa Bible School, on the subject of church history; pray for clarity of thought as he writes some of the lectures and some in English, translating along the way into Russian.  He has a great desire for the students to see how the providence of God is clearly evident within the history of the Christian church, so that they will burn with a desire to be on mission with the God of creation and redemption.

5. Pray that the 23 Baptist churches and bible study groups across Bashkortostan would take seriously their personal responsibility to be equipping their members for church planting activities; pray that their pastors would take the lead in training the members in simple church planting principles and then turn them loose to do the work of ministry; pray that the Baptists of Bashkortostan would move from being a people satisfied to add a few churches a year, to being a people who will embrace a "house-church" and "cell-church" mentality which has the potential of leading to hundreds of new churches and thousands of new believers in the coming years.

 6. Celebrate with us for the completion of our advocacy video project!  1000 copies of the DVD have been made and are  ready for distribution.  Many of you will be able to see the DVD through your church or group in the coming months; in order to help us verify that each potential church is on the distribution list, please contact us with the name of your church/group and we will make sure it is on the list already; if not, we will add it.

Please contact us this week if at all possible, as we anticipate that distribution will start in the next week or so. 

 We are grateful to Carl and Arline Ryan (Cassville Mo) and New Life Baptist Church (Tulsa, OK) for their generosity in initiating and implementing this project &  for their generous financial support to see the project through. 

   The DVD contains 110 minutes of video and audio information concerning the ministry work of Team Ufa and the Baptists of Bashkortostan. It will help you know about our lives, work conditions, needs, and ways you can be personally involved.

   For more information, see our website at: www.hope4ufa.com

 Thank you for your prayer support, it is VITAL to our personal spiritual and physical health and to the health and success of the Lord's work here in Ufa and across Bashkortostan.  For those of you who are Southern Baptists, we thank you for your generous financial support of the Cooperative Program and Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Int'l Missions.  If you are not Southern Baptist and would like to learn of different ways you can financially assist us with special strategic ministry projects, feel free to write us and we will pass on information to you.

 Blessings!

Chris and Eileen Carr

Your IMB workers in Ufa, Russia