Amazing! These teachers came for my hour-long training on how to teach the “Intro to the Christian Culture”; and two-thirds of them were willing to stay for the complete two-and-a-half-hour long FaithSearchDiscovery presentation! Even the organizers of this event in Nizhniy Novgorod were caught by surprise: “How can you hold your audience’s attention? Our teachers always complain about our trainings being too long for their busy schedules.” Well, I shouldn’t actually be surprised–they were learning about the most important thing in their life and they clearly knew it!
They also realized that as teachers they cannot present the “ICC” course to their students without knowing first what all this Christianity is about. They wanted to learn what stands behind those masterpieces of Christian art, literature and music they will be teaching about in their classrooms. They needed to know who is this God Jesus Christ who inspired generations of artists, philosophers, scientists and statesmen throughout Russian history. My presentation on the “Historic Foundation of the Christian Faith” (a.k.a. FaithSearch Discovery) comes in very handy!
The next morning, I was presenting the same material to an audience of Orthodox seminary students and faculty. Surprise! They wanted to hear it, too! For them, most of the material was already familiar. But the class is so clearly structured, so nicely illustrated and so creatively presented that it provides them with a new tool for introducing their faith to some difficult audiences. Naturally, they were very curious to know what questions and what challenges I face while presenting it in secular schools and universities. As always, we ran out of time and I had to promise them to return another time for more discussion and sharing.
My driver, Senior Pastor for the Nizhniy Novgorod Region, was already waiting for me outside the Seminary doors to take me on a three-hour trip to Cheboksary. Their local Evangelical church made an announcement about my presentation all around the city and in many other communities. Several groups came by trains and buses from a one-hundred-fifty kilometer radius. What a blessing to see such an interest and such devotion! Because everybody (myself included) had to go back to their home towns, I had to speak for three hours straight without a break, leaving only twenty minutes for the Q&A.
Then I talked for three more hours–just to keep my driver awake on our long drive back to Nizhniy Novgorod through this frozen land. His beat-up diesel minivan was only a few degrees warmer inside that the world outside, but my heart was still burning hot from the all the excitement I experienced that day.
