Sochi

We took a team of performing artists to Sochi, Russia, during the Winter Olympics!

Watch our performance and read about why we chose the piece at www.WhoistheFish.com.

You can see more photos here.

Here's a report the organizers sent out...

Engage Sochi partners and friends -
We have just finished working through all of the contact sheets for the Engage Sochi project and have been crunching the numbers. As you know, it was our goal that Engage Sochi would be primarily about church planting, specifically in the host city of Sochi. And, the goal of this phase of the project was to generate new contacts so that IMB church planters in Sochi could follow-up and host events that will draw these new people into English Clubs, Bible studies, etc. While statistics do not always paint a complete picture, I think that you can see that the goal was achieved.

Through February and March we hosted approximately 230 volunteers, 14 IMB personnel, and 2 MKs. We estimate that the combined group distributed between 17,000-17,500 evangelism pins.

During the Olympic period, we saw 5 people make professions of faith!

The group recorded approximately 400 individual contacts, some of which did not contain enough information for church planters to be able to make follow-up contact, so 371 contacts.Of those contacts, 94 percent of the people came from Russia. Of that 94-percent, 47-percent (164 people) were from Sochi; 33-percent (115 people) were from European Russia. Siberia and the Far East each had 3-percent of the contacts. And 14-percent (50 people) gave contact information but did not include from which city the contact came.

Six-percent of the contacts came from countries outside of Russia and included: Kazakstan, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Australia, Latvia, England, Spain, France, Turkey, Canada, and Japan.

Kellye reports "Every one of these folks was interested in being contacted, especially about English clubs. But reading the stories was a holy experience, as time and time again, people were interested in how God is at work in the lives of His people. I have cried some tears of real joy. To God be the glory--great things He has done!!"

Thanks to each of you for the role you played in making this project possible. It has been exciting to see God’s hand at work through this entire project and know that there is much more fruit that will come to bear as a result of the Engage Sochi project.

Two of those five professions of faith came through our team, one of dozens! One profession of faith happened while a Ukrainian-American on our team was shopping for Olympic gear and a Ukrainian agreed to pray with her. The second was when we stopped for dinner. I bought some glow-in-the-dark helicopters for my nephews...and me, and I told the Ukrainian-American in our group that the fellow who sold me the helicopters is Ukrainian. She wanted to grab food before I introduced her to the young man, but as we walked to the restaurant a glow-in-the-dark helicopter landed on her purse! That same young man came running up to apologize, so I introduced him to our Ukrainian-American friend! She said, in Ukrainian, "We're praying for the Ukraine." Kiev was under attack by Russia at the time, so when he heard those words in his native tongue he burst into tears. He said that his grandmother taught him about God, but she died. I told him the Lord sent us to him to teach him more about God. While we were leading him in a prayer to give his life to the Lord one of his friends came running up to us, but the young man waved him away. He was doing serious business. 

Between the two of us, Joyce and I have been to Lillehammer, Barcelona, Beijing, Vancouver, Singapore, London, and now Sochi during the Olympics or Youth Olympics. In London we counted people from 30 nations from all inhabited continents that we spoke to after my performances in those cities.