Sports Chaplaincy Training in Ukraine

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.