Skip Navigation

The Greenhouse that is Growing a Church

By Rick Ferrari, Ukraine

The Gospel Life Baptist Church in Kharkiv, Ukraine, met together for the first time in October of 2001. The place: a former ABWE apartment where our various North Ukraine Team missionary families have lived since 1994.

For three years, the church often filled the two rooms of the apartment, with Ukrainian Pastor Sasha Dribnohod leading the service from the corridor between the two rooms. Services were usually full with sixty people in the small rooms, reaching over seventy on several occasions in 2005. Often we noticed that prospective visitors would leave before entering when they noticed the crowded conditions, or some apparently determined not to return a second time after enduring the embarrassment of trying to find a seat that did not exist.

Because the church continually met opposition when trying to rent a facility, it finally purchased land on which to build a church structure when the Lord provided the funds.

During the transition time, the church decided to erect a tent on its land site in order to make more room for first-time visitors who are present for almost every service. But where could they find such a tent structure and how could they erect it economically? Our ABWE Team had an idea.

For several years, our Ukraine Team had helped national partners with a greenhouse venture to support church planting in Odessa. Unfortunately, since Black Sea coastal winds were too much for the plastic on metal, a different structure was erected. Now the North Ukraine Team needed the steel structure for a tent. The tent arrived by truck in late April, just in time for Easter service, May 1, 2005.

The first service had over ninety people at the service, and the church conducted several ministry outreaches during the summer and fall. Pastor Sasha works closely with our ABWE missionary team. His vision is to plant a metropolitan church that would support a church planting movement, sending missionaries into Ukrainian villages and cities, and into the Russian-speaking world. He has already organized a missionary team in the Kharkiv region that regularly reaches over 200 village preaching points on a weekly basis.

Pray with us for the necessary seed money to build the basement level of the church by this winter, and pray with us that the Lord will continue to grow this church whose roots grow in a greenhouse.