robhindman.com News and thoughts from the Hindman family

Combined Assembly

(Note: in order to not reinvent the wheel, I am just adapting a blog post about this event from one of our teammates' blogs, rather than write basically the same thing myself. Original post on the Prices' blog here.)

To our knowledge there are a total of five congregations of the churches of Christ in Kharkov. The largest is around fifty or so, ours is somewhere around twenty, and the other three are under ten people (one has about three, I think). Kharkov is a city of about 1.5 million people, so having several congregations is definitely a good thing.

However, like many churches of Christ it seems, there isn’t a lot of communication between the different groups. One of the reasons why is because these five churches have been started by three different efforts over several years. Over time these groups have learned about each other, but there still hasn’t been a lot done as far as fellowship activities go.

Our dream for the churches we plant here in Kharkov is to keep them simple and, ideally, to continue to meet in apartments all around the city. Because one congregation can’t grow very large in number in a living room, we have had the long-term dream to have all the congregations that are started meet together once a month or so to encourage one another in a larger group. It’d be a time to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and that we are part of a much larger family in this city.

Though our own group is just getting large enough to merit dividing into two groups, we have not made the move quite yet. However, we thought it’d be a great idea to try out one of these larger meetings by inviting all the churches of Christ in Kharkov to an area-wide worship service and to use that meeting to do some good. Our own congregation collected money to rent a place big enough for us all to meet in. Then an invitation was sent out to join us on May 1st to worship together and to take up a collection for a Christian organization working to provide relief in Japan for the earth quake and tsunami victims.

Sunday, May 1st was the big day and we were blessed to see 39 people come together that evening from all five congregations to worship and encourage one another. We arranged the schedule to allow men from all five groups to participate in the service, which turned out really well. It was so encouraging to see everyone fellowshipping with one another afterward, getting acquainted with their fellow brothers and sisters they hadn’t met before. We were told by several that if we hadn’t had this meeting on Ukraine’s Memorial Day weekend that we would have had many more which was good to hear. And, through our efforts of working together, we collected and sent $310 (USD) to the relief efforts in Japan.

Yesterday was the beginning of something very good in Kharkov, and we look forward to seeing how God grows this effort to bless Christians and non-Christians alike here in this great city.