My usual threee-weeks-long teaching trip to Russia will be somewhat extended in time and significantly expanded in space this time around due to the invitation I received from a great ministry friend currently serving in Vietnam.
After a week of teaching in Belarus at youth conferences – “Let’s Talk” in Minsk and “Real Talk” in Brest – I will keep going East all the way to Omsk, Siberia. A Lutheran Church pastor put together a solid week-long teaching schedule augmented by Orthodox Church groups and parishes’ events, as well as two university lectures. That will leave me just a few days in my home-city of Moscow where I will speak at a teachers’ conference, teach at the university students’ organization called “Acdemisty,” and try to make sense of what doing missions work in Russia will be like in the coming years.
A red-eye flight to Ho Chi Min City will carry me from Siberian taiga to the jungles of Vietnam. For the second two-weeks-long segment of this trip, I am totally putting myself in the hands of my local ministry partners in HCMC, Hanoi, Nha Trang, and later in Hong Kong. From what I know at this point, they will keep me busy teaching at their churches, Bible colleges, and universities; to the locals, Russian-speaking immigrants, and international students. My event on the last stop in Seoul, South Korea, is still to be confirmed but I am pretty sure the Lord will not let me just sit there idle for the day-long layover before returning to Minnesota a day younger and just in time for voting on November 3.
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