This year we had a great opportunity to celebrate Easter in Germany together with forty other movements of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) in Europe. We visited a unique event – European student conference Presence.
The scale of the conference was impressive. Seventeen hundred university students attended. The Ukrainian delegation was greatly amazed by the bold topics and questions raised and discussed there.
“Five years ago, together with Denys Gorenkov, we arrived in Pereyaslav-Khmelnytsky, a little town at the edge of Kyiv region, for the first time at the invitation of a youth pastor,” says Yuliya Nikolaychuk, Executive Director of CCX Ukraine on her Facebook page. “We made a presentation about starting an CCX group to several people at a local church and to a couple of students. To tell you the truth, we had little hope of a successful outcome.”
Thankfully, the CCX movement got off to a good start even without an CCX staff worker and it has been active for five years.
In 1969, in a Catholic family which kept religious traditions (not more than that) a girl was born, Irena Huseva. Her parents believed in God but their faith was limited to the celebration of Christmas and Easter, and she disliked Easter!
The fourth evangelism Mission Week at Kyiv universities was held during February, 2017. This year we called it “Myth Busters”.
The title speaks for itself: Christian students and speakers were destroying different myths of non-believing students about life, Christianity and God.
Prejudices against faith sounded like this: “All religions lead to Paradise”, “God is against sex” or “God is for weaklings; I was born to suffer”, and even “The Bible is the cruelest book in the world!? How can it be trusted?”
God was guiding us through the whole project “Christianity without Censorship 2” with His wise hand of providence. This large-scale project was held February 27 through March 3, 2017, at three major universities in Kharkiv on the same dates.
The title of the project implied that for Christian students, scientific knowledge of the world does not contradict faith in God but results from it. We oppose censorship of Christian thought at the universities.
According to a good tradition, the cold January of 2017 ended in the long-awaited English camp of CCX Ukraine: Next Generation--BEYOND. Winter Camp is an annual evangelistic educational project first organized 12 years ago as a follow-up or a smaller version of our large scale event, summer English camp. However, due to a larger number of campers it has gradually become a self-sufficient project. We cannot but be happy. as this year 51 students from Kyiv, Kharkiv and L’viv were plunged into the atmosphere of the event for almost a week.
The 2017 all-Ukrainian student conference Salt was the 5th one - a small anniversary. This enabled us to take into account the experience of all previous conferences and develop an integral concept of the program.
One month ago the CCX Mission Week in Odessa ended.
During Mission Week Christian students encouraged their non-believing friends to talk about serious theological issues. According to Sasha Zhakun, the CCX Coordinator for the South Region and Crimea, Christian outreach activities in southern Palmira did not end with Mission Week. Here’s what is happening:
July 21, 2015 student Christians from Kharkiv headed by Denis Synelnikov went on a 800 km cycling marathon from Kharkiv to Odesa. Their primary goal was to display unity between East and South of Ukraine, turn local churches’ and other students’ attention towards CCX and witness God’s love and mercy.
