Dear friends and Christmas-types,

Thank you for all of your prayers and support – we need it. Good news this week is that our attendance for Awana last Sunday more than doubled, in part due to a couple of Christmas presentations I gave to 5^th grade classes. One child claimed that he had called five of his friends to get them to come – let’s pray that he calls them again. We really want Awana to grow and the program has been attacked by mistrusting parents, heavily restricting its growth.

As you know, it’s Christmas today, though not for me, since Russian Christmas is January 7^th. In fact, Russians don’t celebrate Christmas very much since the Soviets encouraged the people to celebrate “Novi God” instead (New Year) and Easter was always more important to the Orthodox Church in the first place. In any case, I would like to take this moment to remind all of the blog posters on stories on CNN.com that if Christianity really usurped Christmas from pagan traditions, then that in fact does not make Christmas a pagan holiday, unless the church was so inept as to unsuccessfully “usurp” the holiday, it would make it, in fact, a Christian holiday. As my business is not the “War on Christmas” which everybody seems to be getting so angry about in the states (I am often surprised by what people will write – on both sides). In the meantime, Merry Christmas (Not Angrymas).

Last week, Eric and I pulled out our guitars and participated in a Christmas concert at the Transportation University of Petrozavodsk. We played five traditional spirituals adapted from one of Bob Dylan’s favorite artists, Odetta (if you haven’t heard of her, Odetta’s Christmas spirituals are worth checking out). We were very well received and we rocked out, playing the songs as spirituals, bluegrass, and blues tunes. If we have more time in the coming months, we are considering recording these songs, so you can look forward to the musical stylings of Eric Debelak and Peter Bodurtha in the not too distant future. We have been invited by a group of Russian Orthodox Christians who hold Evangelical concerts to join them again for future concerts, so Eric and I are looking forward to those opportunities as well. Because we are American, play American styles, and sing in English, we provide the really interesting “Freak Show” to get people to come and sit down at the concert and then the Russians do the playing and preaching in Russian – it’s a really good system, so long as you don’t mind being the eye-catching gimmick rather than the meat of the ordeal, but hey, I am all about gimmicks, I have absolutely no problem with this, so long as people get to hear the Gospel. There were about 250 people there, a full auditorium, and they stayed till the very end, picking up 25 of the books the Russians were offering for free. The Russians are really great guys. Pray for their ministry (one of the guys runs an Alpha course at the main Orthodox Church in Petrozavodsk).


I wind up my presentations this Thursday, thank you for your prayers. I got into an interesting banter with a student about the merits of Nietzche – I am praying that she’ll come to the Christian Center to talk about it some time. I also met a student, the rare type that is studying religion and I’m praying she’ll come by as well, since we are the Christian Center Library after all – it would be a shame if she didn’t use us as a resource. Another highlight were the wonderful hand puppets created by a few 5^th grade students as pictured. Luckily, the teacher (pictured) was very nice and didn’t mind. Hand puppets are awesome.

Ok, that’s what I’ve got for now. Enjoy the pictures.

Sincerely,

Peter.