Greetings in the name of Jesus!

     Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The short Russian Far East summer is already coming to a close.  In the States the symbolic end to summer is September first, when school starts again.  Here, this is the literal end to summer.  The hillsides are already blushing with dull shades of red mixed with yellow hues.  The temperature is still warm when the sun is high, but nightfall is a time for jackets and seeing your breath.

So it was in a last ditch effort to savor the few remaining warm weekends that we have left that we decided to go on a trip.  Burning within me was a fire for adventure being fueled by John Eldridge’s book “Wild at Heart.”  I was desperate to get out of the city and see something more of the surrounding beauty. (read more…)

Christians among the thousands making their way to China.

Chi Ha-yang, an elderly North Korean widow, waited for night to fall before meeting secretly with three friends and sneaking across the North Korean border to China.
At age 76 Chi Ha-yang commands respect for her many years as a Christian in North Korea. Some call her a “mother of the North Korea church.” Ill and hoping to tell others of Christ’s work in North Korea, Ha-yang believed it was time to escape.
“Go,” she prodded her friends as they hurried through the darkness. They were headed toward a secret crossing point along the 350-mile northern border separating North Korea from Manchuria.
Refugee Crisis

(read more…)

New law would expand special status for Russian Orthodoxy.
By Felix Corley and Geraldine Fagan, Keston News Service | posted 06/07/2002
Russian Orthodox leaders, anxious about growing Protestant churches and the Vatican’s plans to strengthen its Russian presence, are pressuring local and national officials to expand privileges for “traditional” religions.
According to Operation World estimates, both Protestants and Catholics in Russia are growing about 3 percent annually. Russian Orthodoxy shows few signs of any demographic growth.

(read more…)