Prayer Update for the Eurasia Institute

Wesley and Mary Downum are in the Ukraine with IFES (known in the US as Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship. As they begin their second week of service they shared the following update and prayer requests:

We are starting the second week of the IFES Eurasia Institute; training Inter Varsity staff workers for their work in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The picture is a general shot of the staff workers (or, to be precise, some of the staff, who work in less sensitive countries). I asked one of the 'students' (staff workers) here what surprised her most in the first week. She replied that she had been focused on the mechanics of building strong student leadership teams and strong groups. Things like encouraging prayer, regular Bible study, and how to do evangelism. She found herself surprised and challenged by the first week focus on recognizing that there is no simple check-list of activities that create a good Christian community environment.

The teachers spent much more time on encouraging the staff and their students to 'be' more than to 'do'. Be transparent in conversations, acknowledging your failures and your successes. Be working toward more Christian maturity (read 2 Timothy, if you are wondering what that means for a Christian leader). Be loving. This staff worker is starting to work through the issue of how to balance the temptation to focus on the activities instead of on the character. Mary and Wesley are tiring some. The four tea breaks a day imply a lot of standing on our feet, and there are always a small set of additional tasks, from checking the batteries in the receiver units for the times the teacher is translated (whether into English or into Russian) to the occasional 'clean up a room after a national group has held a planning session for the entire afternoon and has left their sketch-pads taped to all of the walls. And it still surprises us how much difference it makes that none of the flights of stairs are made up of 'all steps of the same height'. For some reason that does stress the feet unusually. That said, conversations like the one at the start of this letter make it all worthwhile and we are looking forward to more encouraging news for you. (And we promise to share the failures as well, when we return.)

Thank you for your prayers. Wesley & Mary