Greetings in this New Year

Greetings in this New Year. It is now the holiday season in Russia and from January 1 to the 10 everything is closed and it is not the best time to be looking for a new location for our church. However what confidence we have in the Lord knowing that He cares more for His church than we could ever care. Last week Natasha and I spent most of the week before the holiday looking at future locations where we will be able to rent our own place. I was very encouraged in the fact that there are places in our region that can be rented on a full time basis. We will continue our search after the holidays. We also continue to look for a place where we can at least rent temporarily for our Sunday service. We had a few possibilities but because of the holiday season we were not able to provide a place for last Sunday. Now the 7th of January is coming soon, (the Russian Christmas) and no place to meet as of today.

Our last service at the Hotel Sokol.

We had received news during our staff meeting two weeks ago that we would not have the opportunity to continue meeting at the hotel. We were told that the mid week service would be our last day.

It just so happens that same day Natasha and I were invited by Jews for Jesus to attend their Hanukkah service that night. (As Natasha mentioned on an early post). At that Hanukkah service Tanya, who works for Jews for Jesus, (I married her and her husband John about two years ago), showed me pictures of their new baby boy. Tanya wanted to dedicate little Emanuel on the next Sunday. Only one problem, we could no longer meet at the Hotel. The next day we went to meet with the assistant director of the hotel, to see if we could at least meet one more Sunday, which we had planned for our Christmas service and also we needed to inform the church members that we could no longer meet at the hotel. They graciously granted our request and so the 24th of December was our last service. The worship team read from the gospels the recorded Birth of Christ. With each section of scripture we sang a worship song appropriate to the scripture. Then I taught on the birth of Christ. What made our celebration of the birth of the Savior such a special time was that we were able to dedicate little Emanuel to the Lord. It could not have been a more fitting time to have John and Tanya bring their little baby and dedicate him to the Lord and was such a blessing for our church. Thank you all for praying for our situation here in Moscow. God Bless you and all the Lord has called you to do for His kingdom. dean