For those who have already been following our news for many years there will be nothing new. It is our 4th time that we hosted a large-scale project like mission week. It always includes 3 basic elements: a creative invitation, lunch lectures in universities and an evening event in a nice venue. Year by year we tried to increase the scale of this project (it shows the success of the week, isn’t it?). In 2014 we focused on one university, in 2015 we already took three, and a month ago we did a mission in 6 universities at the same time.
CCX Ukraine ministry began as a result of InterVarsity USA outreach programs to Ukraine in early 90-s. Groups of American students were coming for a short mission trips under the Global Project program. Some of them became our first staff and mentored the next generation of Ukrainian leadership. Below is the story of David Wehrle, one of the first IV students to come to Ukraine.
"I joined the Global Project to Kiev in 1990 because of my wife’s influence. It was following our Freshman (first) year in college.
“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?”
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.
