The Autumn Conference of CCX Odessa “Bible & Life” took place in the village of Petrodolynske, not far from Odessa on October 6-7, 2017.
This year’s conference theme was “Christianity 24/7”.
The world is rapidly changing, becoming more stressful and deep. How can you live in this marvelous new world without losing yourself and your faith in Christ?
The main speaker of the conference was Benjamin Morrison, the pastor of Calvary Chapel in Svetlovodsk and coordinator of the City2City movement in Ukraine.
The first two weeks of September were marked by an important event – Freshers’ Week held in different universities around Kyiv. It was co-organized by the Ukrainian and English departments of CCX Kyiv, its six employees, two volunteers and 30 students of CCX. This project was aimed at:
1) Finding believing students (first-year students) and involving them in the communities of CCX;
2) Making friends with non-believers through fun and informal events; helping them integrate into university life and sharing the Gospel with them.
CCX Kharkiv is used to organizing large-scale projects. Over the past 3 years, with God's help, we held three Mission Weeks, several conferences and many open lectures at different universities. This autumn, the Lord gave us a good opportunity to try something new: we won a grant from the IFES world movement to hold our project for freshmen called “Fresh Fest". However, after the first team planning meeting, we realized that it would also be a great challenge, our "Goliath", which, it seemed, could not be overcome by our own strength.
We live in the twenty-first century, when everyone can be called anything. Someone is a beekeeper, someone is a numismatist ... You want to be a Christian? Doas you please, no problems.
We are the residents of a country in which most people consider themselves Christians. However, what do we mean when we say the word “Christian”?
CCX L’viv spent the weekend of Oct. 6-8, 2017, outside the city, in the Basilian Fathers monastery. During the conference “Bible & Life”, we focused on the theme “AChristian 24/7”.
Last month, CCX Ukraine began the new university year with a conference for employees and volunteers called "QUO VADIS?"
This event was aimed at preparing the team for the new university year and providing answers to those questions and challenges that have puzzled CCX staff for a while. The main goal was to rethink "Quo Vadis?" (Latin expression, which has become an aphorism, which means, "Where are you going?").
First, together with Roman Soloviy, Ph.D. and the head of the Resource-Research Center EAAA, we reflected on the times in which we live.
Everyone wants to be effective in what they do. Since effectiveness is most easily measured in figures, the reports on our ministry often boil down to dry statistics.
Yet each statistic has its own story, which tells about a student who found Christ through our ministry and years of work done by CCX! In order to give our readers insight into a non-statistical aspect of our work, we decided to share some of these stories.
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?”
