How many hands we raised…

One month into my Epic Outreach with YWAM hockey I have so much to say I don’t know where to start.

So before I go into detail about each of the places we visited, I want to just give a general update about what YWAM hockey is all about, what we’re doing here in Russia and how it’s affecting me.

Before I left China for Finland all I concretely knew was that I was joining YWAM Hockey to play and coach hockey across Finland, Russia and China with the YWAM hockey’s motto in mind; a passion for Jesus, a passion for hockey.

I tried to rally financial support from back home before I came and I think for some people the idea of a hockey ministry is hard to wrap their heads around, because we’re not your typical, stand on a soap box and preach the gospel, kind of missionaries, we’re not saving orphans or bringing food to the hungry.  We don’t do alter calls, we don’t ask people to raise there hands so we can give our congregations back home a number of people who we’ve converted.  Nope, we’re sneaky.

After one month in Finland and Russia I can see how creative our God is.  We want to reach people with the God we know, so how do we do it?  Get them to play hockey with a bunch of Canadians and then BAM. share our passion for Jesus with them.  It’s crazy, because once you gain their respect for being Canadian hockey players, they can’t help but stay and listen to what we have to say.  We’ve been given the opportunity to speak into the lives of people who probably would never hear what we want to share…all because we play hockey. Thousands of people have come out to see who we are, because we’re hockey players from Canada, the crazy thing about it is; they walk away knowing so much more. 

When people ask our team what the goal of this outreach is; our answer is simple, be authentic Christians.  We don’t want to share religion with the world, we don’t want to be a ‘stereotypical Christian’ we want people to see who Jesus is to us and have that image make them want to ask questions.  We want people to see that me+God isn’t a bunch of rules to follow and verses to read, that it’s our lives, it’s our passion, it’s our hope.  People have enough religion, we’re here to give them something real.

So.  Right now I’m sitting in a dingy ‘hotel’ in a town about an hour outside of Vladivostok, our last major stop in Russia.  Over the past three weeks we’ve had the opportunity to visit quite a few places in Russia, I met the team in St. Petersburg (they had spent a few days in Northern Russia while I got my Russian visa in Finland), after which we hopped a trained to Moscow, then to Perm (24 hours…), Kushva, Nizhny Tagil, Yekanterinburg, and yesterday we boarded a plane for a 10 hour flight to Vladivostok in Russia’s far East. 

Lives are changing.