Dear brothers and sisters,

The warmest greetings to you in the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

We are so much grateful to God for you and your prayer and financial support of our ministry to the Lord. It is a great blessing for us. May our Lord reward you hundredfold and generously provide for your every need!

We do not stop thanking God for the wonderful and favorable time for preaching of the Gospel in Ukraine. Recently to our church has joined the group of several new people. Therefore I send you the updated photo of our congregation (photo 1). Unfortunately, people around are more and more bogged down in sin and suffering. So few believers are ready to dedicate themselves to the ministry to the Lord for the salvation of those, who are dying in their sins.

We thank God for those people, who serve in our team. Thus, for the second year with us has served sister Natalia. Before this she had a good job, but she didn’t feel peace in her soul, feeling God’s calling to ministry, but her work schedule didn’t let her do it.

Natalia has an unbelieving husband, who didn’t want her to attend church and serve God. Therefore it was quite difficult for her to make this step of faith – leave her job and follow God’s calling. When she made this step, it was very hard at the beginning, when they were lacking funds for food for the children, and her relatives kept telling her that she was mindless. But Natasha kept in her heart the following words: “those who wait for me shall not be put to shame” (Isaiah 49:23).

After some time Natasha’s husband began receiving good orders, God abundantly blessed them financially and his heart has softened. Today Natasha serves the disadvantaged children and their families and God sent to her heart the love to them and she is happy. Of course, even today she faces hardships, because when we preach the Gospel, we often feel the spiritual fighting and confrontation. But we know that “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). (photo 2)

We also thank God for our brothers, who lead the day center ministry for the teenagers. Every time to our meetings come many teenage boys, who are in great need of men’s, father’s attention and support, but unfortunately they can’t receive it at home.

On the photo 3 is a boy Pavel, he is 14 years old. His mother became pregnant with him when she herself was a teenager and his father rejected him. Therefore Pavel has lived his entire life with this wound and offence: “My father left me!” Now this boy is raised by his grandmother, and his mother lives separately with her new family. Therefore, after his classes, Pavel runs to our day center, our leaders became His friends and teachers, and here he has found the acceptance and love, which he greatly needs.

Dear friends, please, pray also for the work with families of the children from our day center. Pray also, so that we will keep having funds to feed children on our day center meetings and for the required funds for them (photo 4).

Thanks to this ministry, one family and two mothers have started regularly attending our church ministries. We pray for them and believe that God will bring His order to these families, where reigns sin and mess.

May God abundantly bless you, dear friends!

With love and prayers for you,

Ruslan Buryachok

Dear brothers and sisters, dear fellow laborers,!

The warmest greetings to you in the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

God is being merciful to us and keeps sending to us everything needed for life and godliness. To Him be all glory! We are so much grateful to Him for you and your prayer and financial support of our ministry. It is a great blessing for us. May our Lord reward you hundredfold and generously provide for your every need!

With the aim to use more efficiently this favorable time for preaching of the Gospel in our country, we put accent on the development of our helpers and leaders. Two of the brothers and one sister continue their study in the Biblical Seminary. Sisters, who sing in the worship group, have started taking the vocal classes. Sister Alyona, who has finished the Christian school, together with her helper Diana is leading the Sunday school for children. We pray for the development of this ministry and call brothers and sisters to take their children and grandchildren to every Sunday worship service. Because Jesus Christ said “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14) (pho. 1)

It is a great encouragement for us that new people come to our Sunday worship services. We continue the ministry of the day center for children and teenagers. We see how God is changing them and it brings great joy to us. They have learned to pray, memorize Bible verses, and have started understanding the Scriptures. With many of the families of these children we have built friendly relationships and pray, so that God will open Himself to them. About a month ago on one of the meetings of our team we set an aim to do our evangelistic ministry more active and make our congregation known to people. Of course, we had done it before because “a city on the hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). But now we have started several new projects, i.e. distribution of bread and New Testaments on the day of the remembrance of the Famine. It touched people’s hearts so much that with tears in their eyes they thanked us. And even when the bread finished, people kept coming and taking New Testaments, saying “I wish there would be more people like you”. We invited everyone to our worship service (photos 2, 3).

On the following Wednesday our team continued this outreach with the free distribution of tea, coffee and Christian literature on the central square of our village. It was a very favorable time, when we have an opportunity to tell people about Christ while they drink tea or coffee and in the end, to give the New Testaments to everyone who wishes.

We ask you to pray, so that this ministry will develop and so that we will have funds to continue it (photo 4).

In addition, >we gather during the Christmas Holidays to visit and congratulate all the staff of the county and village administrations and give them Bibles.

And in the end we want to thank you for your support and for the joint ministry for God’s glory. Now we’re praying, so that God will use us for the spiritual support in the neighbor villages. We also continue holding the groups of Bible study in the villages Grynivtsi in the house of our sister Lyudmila. By the way, not only her husband but her older sons also have started attending our worship services. And younger sons attend our Sunday school.

We also have started attending with preaching of God’s Word, the group of believers in the village Vygnanka. There to our meetings gather up to 8 people in the unheated place in the state of emergency. There was a large Christian congregation there in the past, but when local ministers were gone, younger believers scattered and older believers passed away. It saddens me greatly and I pray, so that God will restore the church there.

Dear friends, we are very much grateful to God for your support, which is very valuable for us. May in the coming year the Lord will strengthen us in the ministry for His glory!

With love and prayers for you,

Ruslan Buryachok

Dear brothers and sisters!

The warmest greetings to you in the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

Dear brothers and sisters, we are very much grateful to God for you and your prayer and financial support of our ministry. It is a great blessing for us. May our Lord reward you hundredfold and generously provide for your every need! I am happy to tell you about God’s work in our family and congregation.

Thanks to God, in our family we have wonderful relationships with wife and children. It is a great encouragement for me as a minister (photo 1). But I continue to constantly pray, so that in future we won’t lose relationships with one another, because my biggest dream is so that our children will become good Christians.

Our great prayer request is for the young families in our church, because many of them have problems in relationships. Especially it is in those families, where one of the spouses has to go abroad to make money for living.

Therefore, we see a great need in the development of the family ministry. And often we organize the informal family meetings, trips and rest, to inspire them for the ministry to the Lord and to witness with our personal example.

We thank you for your prayers for the teenagers’ ministry in our church. This year we had a very blessed trip with teenagers to the mountains. We had a wonderful time of unity with God and nature. We learned more about each other and had good conversations. In addition, we invited to go with us a father of two boys, Maksim and Misha. On this trip he was encouraged and reconsidered his life. Now he is always in the church with his family (photo 2).

The great joy for us is to see the fruits of our ministry among children and youth. This year two young people, Diana and Yaroslav, have been baptized. They are those, who grew up in our Sunday school (photo 3). Praise God!

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).

With the beginning of fall, in our church we have started the ministry of the so-called Day Center for children and teenagers from the crisis families. We ask you to pray, so that God will bless this ministry and will help us reaching children and their parents with the Gospel.

We thank God for you and our joint ministry for His glory and for the advance of His Kingdom. May our gracious Heavenly Father shed His abundant blessings upon you!

With love and prayers for you,

Ruslan Buryachok

Dear brothers and sisters!

The warmest greetings to you in the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

We are very much grateful to you for your prayer and financial support of our ministry to the Lord. It is a great blessing for us. May our gracious Heavenly Father reward you hundredfold and generously provide for our every need!

Thank God, recent months were especially rich with ministries and events. I am glad to write you this letter and tell you about the main events, which happened.

In May in our church was held a prayer conference for women. We invited ladies of the neighboring churches to join us. We prepared a program and spent together a wonderful day in prayer and worship to the Lord. We thanked for the kindness and love of God to us, asked for spiritual renewal and peace in the country. The encouraging for us was the fact that on this service repented a woman from a neighboring town. It reminded me once again the words of Jesus Christ from Luke 18:1 – “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (photo 1).

I believe that it is a miracle that each year some public schools invite us to hold camps for children at school. This year was no exception. Thanks to the Lord we had an opportunity during the week to communicate the Gospel to children in two schools. Children actively participated in games and listened to Bible stories, answered well and prayed in the classroom, which is a great joy. Teachers were also present at these meetings, they were amazed with how well children behaved and how simple and clear were the Biblical truths (photo 2).

Inspired with camps in schools, sisters immediately began preparations for the camp in our church for the children of our day center. We were blessed to hold a wonderful camp in the territory of our church, which was attended by more than thirty children. We borrowed a trampoline and swimming pool and it caused an incredible joy in children. I am particularly encouraged that the boys from the older group were good day center helpers. I think that on the next year they will be the full leaders in this ministry (photo 3).

Particularly responsible and distinguished, is Yaroslav, the brother of Alexander, who was baptized last summer. I wrote you about him before. These boys are from a dysfunctional family, where their mother is a drug user and even has AIDS. These boys do not know their father. But as children they attended Sunday school and, praise the Lord, the seeds of the truth of the Gospel have grown. Yaroslav said that like his younger brother, he wants to take baptism and serve to orphans and children from dysfunctional families.

Yaroslav is involved in sports and wants to use it for evangelism. He asked the church to build near the House of Prayer a small complex of horizontal bars to hold sports meetings for young people and preach the Gospel to them. We now pray about it.

In early summer brother Nikolai, who is responsible for the ministry among teenagers in our church, and his wife went on a missionary trip across Ukraine. So the mood among teenagers declined slightly, but we still continue to develop this ministry. We organize sports competitions and meetings outdoors (photo 4).

We pray, so that God will allow us to organize a small camp for the most open to the Lord adolescents. We want to take three leaders and six teenagers and go with them on a week trip to the mountains. The idea was to spend more time with them, so that they will learn from us the practice of Christian life.

Dear friends, thank you for your cooperation and for your prayers for us. We love you although we have never seen you and we ask God to bless you.

With love and prayers for you,

Ruslan Buryachok

Greetings to you, dear friends, brothers and sisters!

This is pastor Ruslan Buryachok from Lubar writing to you. I am extremely thankful to the Lord for you! We are delighted to work together with you in serving the Lord!

First, I would like to share about God’s blessings in spreading the Gospel through the street outreach program, when we present paintings depicting the episodes from the life of Jesus on the earth to the people. Recently we could visit three villages where we had an opportunity to share the Gospel in schools and on the streets. People would receive the message very well, after an explanatory tour with the paintings, many stayed to ask questions and talk, were interested in Christian literature. However, the most important thing for us was to get an opportunity for an outreach to children in public schools through this ministry. (Photo 1)

Last time I briefly mentioned about our ministry for teenagers, so today I would like to report on it in more detail. For nearly four years, our church has been holding a Day Center for children; moreover, since last year we have started working with teenagers from disadvantaged families who lack adequate parental care. We are delighted that by God’s grace we are able now to welcome these teens five times a week at our place, interact with them, counsel and take care of them. (Photo 2)

Not much time has passed, and we started to notice major changes in their attitude towards the church and to each other. Through this ministry, we can also outreach to parents of these children. We get acquainted with their parents, provide food assistance, and share with them about God's plan of salvation. We established very good relationships with some of the families, so that they call to ask for advice or just to talk. For example, a man whom you can see on the Photo 3 is Ruslan, a father of four. Three of them attend our Day Center. He found out about our ministry from his children, and came to inquire about any job opportunity. Ruslan has been unemployed for a long time; his wife has a criminal record, and that fact poses an obstacle for him in finding a job. He has been helping around the church for a few days after his first visit, and we became good friends. Recently, while visiting them at home, we prayed together, and after the prayer, he and his wife showed an interest in coming to the worship service.

The situation in most of the families of the teens is much worse. Many of them live with their mothers or grandmothers, and never knew their fathers. Therefore, Kolya, one of the ministers of the Center, and I are like parents for them. The boys come to our place and share about their dreams and failures, expecting encouragement and support. We are happy that three of them began to study the Bible and attend the Sunday services.

I am very grateful to the Lord that He uses us in this ministry. Our watchword written in 1 John 3:18 reads: "Let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth." This is exactly what these kids really need. Oftentimes, they are less upset because of torn sneakers or lack of warm clothing. The hardest thing for their hearts is lack of love and acceptance, frequent family quarrels and fights, drunken parents and ridicule of peers.

We understand that there are many sorrows and pain in this world and it is only God’s heart that can take all of it. Nevertheless, to those who are near, to those whom He has given us, we should show love.

“I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Faithfully in Christ,

Ruslan Buryachok