International Leadership Academy in Belarus | Our graduates

Alexey Gromyko reports

Dear brothers and sisters, I greet you in the name of Jesus. I am a minister at the baptist church in the village of Otradnoye. I have my ministry here for ten months already and I am thankful to God for His help and blessings. I was born into an unbelievers' family and did not hear anything about the Lord. By the age of 16 I became an alcoholic and did not know how to free myself from alcoholic dependence. When I was 17 I met young believers and began to attend the Baptist church in my town Zhodino. I realized that my salvation was only in God. I repented, asked God to forgive me and soon I was baptized.

Now I am a second year student of the Bible college in Minsk. In August 2002 I was married and now my wife is pregnant, we are expecting our first child. Pray that our first born also becomes a Christian.

Our church consists of 21 members and 2 friends. There are about 40 children in our Sunday school. We have 10 teenagers in the youth group. As we have only one study for the Sunday school and there is not sufficient room for everybody some children stopped visiting the church. Very often it is very cold in the church because of the bad heating system. For this reason the attendance goes down among the adults too. We ask you to pray that the Lord blesses us with money to fix the church building. We also pray for the opening a rehabilitation center for drug and alcohol addicts in our village