This spring was a transitionary time for our Senior Citizens’ ministry. Anya, who had been leading the ministry for the last few years, got married and moved away and we decided that instead of having one person take her place that we all would do a little bit extra and have the ministry team take her place. It has been a fairly smooth transition and we are all learning a lot about how to work better as a team.

Ukraine celebrates Memorial Day on the 9th of May (it is called Victory Day here). So this month for our senior citizens' evening we decided to have Memorial Day be the theme of the evening. We asked a couple members of our church who attend the evenings to share about their wartime memories.

Alexandra Ivanovna(lower right), who was born a month before the Soviets began fight-ing, told of her experiences as a child in wartime. She remembered the first time she saw sugar at 4 years old and didn't know what to do with it. She remembered her mom only had one dress that she wore day after day, washing it at night so it would be clean for work the next morning. She grew up in the generation that they call "children of the war." She talked about the mentality of her generation who even today save everything that they have and can't bring themselves to throw bread away.

Petro Palipovich (upper right) was 11 years old when the war started. He talked about the year that the German army was advancing through this region and local authorities ordered the tractors to plow up the fields so that the German's wouldn't be able to reap the wheat harvest. All the women of the area (all the men were fighting) went out to the fields and stood in front of the tractors to stop them from destroying their livelihood. The tractor drivers backed down and the Germans came and went without touching the wheat harvest. There were many more stories that others shared as well.

On Sunday afternoons Danny has been meeting with Zhenya, Petya, and Roma, three of the college age guys in our church, to discuss John Piper's book "Don't Waste Your Life" which In Lumine published last year. The book has been a good impetus to talk with these guys about many things that they are starting to face as they go off to college and get jobs and to help them think through the questions they need to be asking as they make descisions.

We aren’t sure which book to start reading through next but the guys all want to keep getting together to learn more about God, doctrine, and God’s will for their lives.

Once of the ministries we are involved in here in Calvary Chapel Kaharlyk is the worship ministry. Liese has been overseeing the worship team for about a year now. She schedules the worship bands, leads three times a month, fills in for people when they get sick, and finds and teaches the band and the church new songs. I play guitar twice a month and work with other musicians on the team to improve their guitar playing.

We are always thinking through various ways to help our church understand what worship is and then take that understanding and apply it to the church service and their lives. One of the ways we decided to do that was during the time of song I would talk briefly about one aspect of worship. We learned about worship expressed as giving, singing, clapping; about Jesus being the only mediator who brings us to God, corporate worship and individual worship, worship being a response to what God has done in Christ through His Spirit.

A couple months ago after spending time praying and talking with the church leadership we decided to split the time of song up so that there would be more time at the end of the service to respond to God in song after the sermon instead of just getting up and going home. The new format has required greater coordination between the worship leader and the preacher which has been good to build more togetherness in these two ministries. For me sometimes it is more difficult as sometimes I have to grab a guitar and play right after preaching for 40 minutes.

We've been living in our house for a year and a half now and we've gotten a majority of the major remodeling done. This spring while Liese cleaned old soviet paint off all the doors and jams and repainted them Danny insulated the entrance way which was an addition to the house and poorly insu-lated. We painted the bathroom which completed the remodel in that room. We also painted the kitchen making it nearly completed. The last thing to do is finish the floors and build cabinets and shelves.

We look at this remodel as a long-term strategic investment as we want our house to be useful for our ministries here in Kaharlyk. We want our home to be a place that we can invite people and where they will feel comfortable hanging out. We want it to be a place that we can have meetings and that we can use to serve the church. So we are spending a lot of our time this year trying to get things finished as best we can so that our house can finally be functional as more than just a place we live.

If you would like to help us with some of the remaining proj-ects here are some things that would be a huge blessing for us:

:: a decent ladder for exterior house repairs: $150:: replace the 5 remaining 30 year old wooden windows with energy efficient windows: $600 ($120 a window):: cabinets and shelves in kitchen: $400:: paint for the rooms that still need to be painted: $100:: new fence for the front of property: $400:: a new roof overhang over our front door: $75

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This is how the fence around our church building has looked for about the past 20 years (we've only owned the building for 10 of them). In Ukraine a fence is a symbol of ownership. It says that what is beyond the fence belongs to somebody and the state of the fence reflects the person who built/owns/maintains the fence. So when people walk by our church building (which is right in the center of town) and see the state of our fence it communicates to them that the people who own this building/land do not keep up their prop-erty, are not respectable, and do not value owning the land. So they cut through our lot and throw trash along the fence. The local gov-ernment is dissatisfied with us for not making the downtown area look nicer, and our goal of being examples in the community is thwarted at every gaze upon our humble fence.

This year we decided that it was finally time we did something about it and so we used the money our church had been saving for the last year to begin construction on a new fence. One of the members of our church sent out his tractor to dig out the old fence posts as well as a trench. Another man in our church asked if he could lead the construction project and do all the work for cheap to save the church money. The fence will have a concrete foundation that will be raised to the level of the road. We'll lay cement blocks for the first three feet of the fence and then the last 2 feet will be wood boards attatched horizontally.

Danny has been the project manager which means counting up the cost of materials, deciding on the design of the fence, figuring out where to buy all the materials, etc. So far things are going fairly smoothly. We've just about run out of money so we won't get too far this year, but we'll have the foundation poured and hopefully some blocks laid along the wall.

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r This spring we finished our bible study through the book of Galatians. We'd been studying Galatians for most of this year as it has only worked out for us to meet about twice a month instead of weekly due to planting crops.

This group of guys has grown a lot in the nearly 9 months that they've been in the center. I am always encouraged as I see them grow in the grace of God, understand-ing the bible, and in physical health. Quite a few of them are finishing up their time in the center and will soon move back to Kiev or home. Three of them were baptized in the beginning of June and are just about ready to move home. Returning back to their lives is always a hard time for these guys as they still are not sure if they are ready to live with-out the structure and accountability of the rehab program. Many of them don't make it, and quite a few end up returiningto the center.

Usually we take a break over the summer as they work in their gardens (you can see one garden in the background of the picture), but this summer we decided to meet in the evening so that it won't prevent anyone from working and everyone can be there.

In April our church had its first funeral when a lady in our church named Valentina died of cancer. Funerals in Ukraine are full of traditions, whether Orthodox or Prot-estant, and we are realizing that we need to be prepared to serve grieving families by officiating funer-als. Pastor Wayne did the speaking and Danny was there to help out in whatever way was needed.

A couple weeks after that funeral Danny was asked to officiate the funeral of the father of a young man who used to go to our church years ago. Liese organized some music for the funeral.

We wrote a couple of blog posts about these funerals you can read them here and here.

In April In Lumine participated in an international Russian language book fair in Kiev. It was the first time we have been able to be a real participant at a book fair and not just a small-time pub-lisher with only a couple books.

We were able to print Mark Driscoll’s book “On Who is God? (A Book You’ll Actu-ally Read)” in time for the book fair. It is one in a series of four books that we have translated and are about ready for print. We also finally printed 4 short biogra-phies by John Piper that we’ve had ready to print for nearly a year. Both these proj-ects were funded solely by sales of In Lumine books which is a huge step in the direction that we want In Lumine to be going.

Our next project is finishing the transla-tion of Randy Alcorn’s “Heaven” and then getting it ready for print. Then we’ll begin translating John Piper’s “This Momentary Marriage.” Also in the works are a study guide to Wayne Grudem’s “Christian Beliefs” (which we published last year) and translating a children’s Sunday school curriculum from Children’s Desiring God.

Prayer Requests:: God’s daily grace as we serve the church in Kaharlyk:: God’s help in communicating in the Russian and Ukrainian languages:: That our church would grow in the grace and knowledge of God:: For opportunities to preach the gospel in Kaharlyk:: For our health and safety:: For financial provision

Praise God for:: God’s work in the lives of the men in the rehab center:: Progress on our house remodel:: Spiritual and musical growth in the musicians on the worship team

ukraine mailing address:prov. Pershoho Travnya #13

Kaharlyk, 09200Ukraine

usa mailing address:1136 Noyes Road

Arroyo Grande, CA93420

email: dannyliesefoote@gmail.comwebsite: calvarychapelkaharlyk.orgblog: footesinukraine.blogspot.comtwitter: twitter.com/dannyfoote

support address: Calvary SLO Church 4029 S. Higuera StSLO, CA93401 *please attach a note saying “for Daniel and Annaliese Foote”