Slavic Missionary Service

Pray for your local church and the local churches in Slavic countries. Ask the Lord to increase the spiritual life of each member of the church. Ask Him to assist your church in the area where you live to seek souls with salvation from sin. And may this assistance extend throughout the whole world. Pray for your pastor and leadership, as well as the pastors and leadership in the Slavic world. Pray for peace in the world. Ask God to restrain evil through the Holy Spirit in order that His Word may have free course in every country.

Paul prayed for the churches founded under his ministry, as well as churches that sent leaders to him for counsel. He also felt personal concern for many individuals and mentioned them in his epistles. “Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:28). Paul understood that the leadership of each church community (as well as all members) needed to band together for strength and support.

As leadership cooperates together within each church, the Christian influence will spread in that community and country. Every member in the church must minister together in order to bring glory to God. “But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired” (1 Corinthians 12:18). A complete consciousness that God has set each Christian in his or her specific position of service should dispel any envy of another’s abilities or talents. Every believer should encourage one another to fulfill the ministry that God has chosen to complete within the body of Christ.

Slavic Missionary Service encourages all of its missionaries to fellowship together as much as possible within their own countries. Because Alex Leonovich, the former director of SMS, was born in Belarus, that country became the first place that SMS found national workers to support. Now, eighteen missionaries gather together each month at the SMS office in Minsk for fellowship and prayer, as well as to receive their stipends. Some of those missionaries join together to organize youth conferences, summer camps or just to visit one another with Christian love and encouragement.

The eleven SMS missionaries in Western Ukraine, as well, try to meet together in their regions for fellowship and prayer. The last time the interim director of SMS taught the book of Zechariah in Borislav to the leaders, all five of the missionaries in that region came to listen and learn. When visiting the Volyn region, six missionaries gathered together with the SMS director to share reports about their ministries and fellowship around God’s Word.

How important it is for missionaries to have a support team. SMS instructs and encourages each missionary to be accountable not only to the members of their churches but also to the spiritual leadership in each country. Pray that the SMS missionaries will partner together in their countries in different types of outreaches in order to further the progress of the Gospel. And pray that the SMS missionaries will be transparent in all things in order to “give no offense either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32) and that they would be “children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom (they) shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15).

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13

God’s strategy for world evangelism calls for two equally important elements: Co-missionaries and Go-missionaries, the senders and the sent, the supporters and the workers. A Christian church without missionary enthusiasm is a contradiction. God depends upon the faithful testimony of His people for the evangelization of the world. The Savior expects those who have tasted the sweetness of salvation to spread the news far and wide. He has commissioned His children to share His Word to the lost in every country.