LOOKING BACK AT THE YEAR OF 2009

This year is coming to the end and Trinity church is going through some rapid changes. Starting from this September, Oleg Pastuh and Andriy Melnichuk started leading the church as potential two pastors. The church has moved into a new place for meetings – a nice public school named “Hope”. Location is okay and we get a nice hall for the church services.

Looks like the church has formed a worship band. We’ve been praying for worship leaders for our church and now Sasha Melnichuk, Ihor Savka, Olya Shabliy, Vitya Kazymyrovych and Natalia Lyoda started leading worship. They meet during the week to rehearse and this last Sunday they had their debut which was simply beautiful.

In November we as the church organized a short event in the Ocean area to remember a terrible event that happened in Ukraine in 1932-1933 – Holodomor (more about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)

In the morning we organized feeding homeless action and in the evening we gathered some people by the lake. We lit some candles open, Andriy Melnichuk shared a short word about the bread of life.

As we planned we will be running church club once a month in a party format. We did it in November as the ‘fall club’. This time we will do it in December as a Christmas café. We will have some hot chocolate with apple pie; we all are excited about caroling and just the spirit of this wonderful holiday.

The team went on a retreat to plan and strategize for the next year. We are launching two new groups – girls will actually start their meeting together. And Olya, Ira and Maryna want to get baptized, so there will be classes for baptism preparation led by Saško. Beside these two, the whole church will be split into small Bible study groups that will be meeting every Sunday night and will be led by a couple of church leaders.

Elements group ended and we are thinking of starting another one and maybe even joining it with “Cooking with Jesus” group since it is still in the air.

We are expecting Jori’s mom to visit us and we all are getting ready for Christmas which is celebrated on January 7th in Ukraine.

–Saško Nezamutdinov