From: Evangelical Reformed Seminary of Ukraine
Dear Friends of ERSU,
We’re delighted to update you after an eventful past two weeks at our seminary in Kyiv. We’ve just completed our latest teaching module, with Fedir teaching the second Hebrew class and Valerii teaching for the first time our Pastoral Counseling class. At the end of the first week we had a Board meeting. As it was also October 31, 2025, we celebrated Reformation Day and marked the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Council (!) with a big conference in our new auditorium (3 speakers and a book presentation) in the evening.
It was great once again to have several students with us in the building as well as those online. The interaction and fellowship is always encouraging as we share coffee breaks and lunch together, and of course this goes too for the Board meeting and conference (where as well as our Board and faculty members we were even joined by two representatives from our sponsors in the Netherlands.)
We had a pretty full auditorium for the conference, with some young men coming from as far as Vinnitsa for it, and others joining online. We did a presentation of our forthcoming publication of the first Reformed Systematic Theology in Ukrainian, and the author was one of our conference speakers. The students I heard feedback from about Valerii’s Pastoral Counseling course found it extremely useful, including one student who is already doing informal chaplaincy work close to the front line and whose church is not too far from the front, where many people have experienced bereavement and suffering.
There were major attacks on Kyiv right before our module (Sat 25th) and in the middle (Sat Nov 2nd). Electricity rationing (with timetable outages) began just about a week or so before that, but after the Nov 2nd attack with the Russians again attacking Kyiv’s and other major Ukrainian power stations, the outages became much more frequent and currently in Kyiv we have electricity on most days for less than half the day. That being said we’re very grateful that we were able to conduct all our classes, meetings and conference without interruption, even if we did often need our generator.
Thanks for your prayers!
Voice of Ukraine 