I have been absent from this
space for over a month as I was traveling to Ukraine and then up to my eyeballs
in running FCA Power Camps in my area. Four of our six camps are now completed
and I am coming up for air today.
I would like to share with
you the tremendous success we enjoyed at the Sports Chaplaincy School in Kyiv,
Ukraine at the beginning of June. Sara Hurst of FCA at the University of
Illinois (USA) and I shared the presentation responsibilities with the fifty
people who had come from all across Ukraine for this training. Our colleagues
of FCA Ukraine had received and translated into Russian, all the material on
the web at www.globalsportschaplaincy.org
and they translated the PowerPoint presentations I had created for the
training. This work was done with excellence and fidelity.
We delivered the material as
it appears on the web site, but with much more depth as we engaged them in many
small group discussions to help them process and to enculturate the concepts of
serving as a sports chaplain. We used the six session format and spread the
training across three days. We were thrilled with the way all our Ukrainian
teammates engaged with the material and with each other in learning and
applying each section. We also provided a model for our Ukrainian teammate,
Oleg, to lead further training sessions in Ukraine and in surrounding Russian
speaking nations.
One of the greatest outcomes
of this training is that we now have the materials, both in a workbook format
and in PowerPoint presentation in Russian. This stands to further develop this
form of ministry in sport across the Russian speaking portion of the world.
Thank you to everyone from our FCA Ukraine team, especially those who helped us
with translation, interpretation, and facilitation of discussion.
We anticipate similar
opportunities in other nations, with other languages, and on other continents.
Thanks again to everyone from across the globe for your contributions to the
development of www.globalsportschaplaincy.org
and the growth of this ministry around the world.
