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I’ve used here the higher quality embedded video from Current TV . If you haven’t seen Current, it’s a cable TV channel that uses mainly viewer created content — short pieces about almost everything. The way it works is that people upload their videos and viewers can “green light” the video if they think it should be shown on TV. If a video gets enough green lights it gets shown on the cable channel. This would be a great promotion for this vital ministry to Christian teachers in the public schools of Ukraine. The link is here . You will have register a user name and password to vote, but it won’t take more than a minute.
For the first time in 90 years, Ukrainian students have the option of studying Christian ethics in the public schools. Christian ethics for the school curriculum was an initiative proposed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko shortly after the Orange Revolution in 2005.
The program calls for voluntary participation and is supported by the leaders of Ukraine’s largest Christian denominations. One Baptist church association, “Hope to People” of Rivne, Ukraine, sponsors teacher training at several fellowship camps throughout the year.
In the summer of 2007, I attended one of these fellowship camps for teachers of Christian ethics as a public high school teacher from the USA. The camp was held at the Vodogray resort in the beautiful Carpathian Mountain region of western Ukraine.
I asked the principal of a school in Kharkov: “Why is the culture and attitude toward religion of eastern and western Ukraine so different?”
“It’s not the same, eastern Ukraine and western Ukraine, because the western part of Ukraine was added to the Soviet Union later on, about 20 years. And this is why they could keep their national culture and national language as well. They resisted the communists who pressured them so that people here might speak Russian only. The Ukrainian language was forbidden as a language at school and even as a language of common fellowship.”
If you are interested in more information about the teachers camps or getting involved in missions to Ukraine in general, please email me.
