2,000 People Evacuated and One Million Pounds of Food and Supplies Delivered!

June/July 2023

Hello dear friends,

I hope all you are all enjoying your summer. It has been extremely rainy so far in Colorado. This next month, we will be celebrating four things in our family: two birthday’s (Hannah 18) and Brianna (14), Hannah’s graduation from High School, and our 20-year anniversary of marriage. July is always a big month for the Putnam household!

If you receive my emails, I updated everyone in early June on the horrible death toll of this unending war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian counter offensive is somewhat under way, but all reports indicate that it will be slow and consistent (I don’t know what that means), but it sounds like this war isn’t ending anytime soon, which breaks all our hearts and exhausts us all!

2,000 People Evacuated and One Million Pounds of Food and Supplies Delivered!

“Hello dear friends, my name is Vlad Kalin. I am married to my beautiful wife, Elena for 25 years and I have two wonderful children who are active in serving our Lord Jesus. For 20 years I have been the pastor of New Life Church in Kharkov, Ukraine. After being born in Kazakhstan, my family moved to Ukraine when I was five years old. In 1993, I gave my life to the Lord and at 22 years old, I decided to go into ministry. I began as a youth leader and also was participating in the worship ministry too. Since beginning New Life Church, we made it our aim to work with low-income families, those in hospice care, prisoners, and be a chaplain for the military community in our area. There was much life and joy in our church services for many years.

When the war began, things changed overnight; most of our church and those we served in the community fled or safety. Those that stayed behind became a band of volunteers helping out in any way possible. We have evacuated more than 2,000 people out of harms way (most of them were women and children whose husbands were serving in the war).

Our church has also delivered over 1,000,000 pounds of food and supplies to those too poor to leave Kharkiv and the surrounding towns and villages, as well as, traveling to the very dangerous war zones of Donetsk and Lugansk where there has been massive fighting going on for a long time.

For more than a year now, we have been sharing the Good News of Jesus in makeshift outreaches everywhere we go to deliver food and supplies. We have worship, a sermon, and we offer the prayer of salvation before we hand out the food, supplies, and biblical literature. With the warmer weather, we have also been able to have children’s programs with games, competitions, a puppet theatre, etc. We do all we can to bring joy of the Lord and a moment of solace to the children.

Your partnership with Slavic Christian Ministries has been a huge blessing to us since the beginning of this war until now. You have helped us in so many ways – with food, supplies, biblical resources, gasoline, generators, heating units, taking care of our vehicle repairs, and in so many other ways. We cannot express how thankful we are to you and God working through you so we can continue the work of saving lives every day! Your prayers are invaluable to us! My family and church thank our Lord Jesus for everything you have done and continue to do! We give all glory to God, but it doesn’t happen without the help of so many believers like yourself - thank you very much! Please continue to keep us in your prayers, because there is still so much work to be done. The resources are diminishing, so please don’t get tired of helping us. There are huge needs and massive destruction everywhere. Thank you so much for everything!” – Vlad

Dear friends, Vlad has been a wonderful brother and resource over the years. He has helped us with some of our past employees, he has been a consistent and loving pastor to whom we have been blessed to know for many years. To the best of our ability, we continue to partner with this amazing man of God. Please keep him, his family, and his ministry in your prayers – he and his team work tirelessly every day. They often go into very dangerous locations where there is still intense fighting. I have placed more photos of their ministry on our Slavic Christian Ministries Facebook page, if you want to view more of their ministry activities.

If you would like to donate to our ministry, please go to slavicchristian.org/donate or mail in a check to us at the address above. All gifts are tax deductible and we cannot continue without your help - what you are sponsoring is food, medicine, supplies, and biblical resources. Thank you so very much!!!

In Jesus’ love,

Ron