Russia (MNN) — With last year’s Summer Olympics at our backs, many people are already looking forward to the Winter Olympics next year.
The 2014 Winter Olympics will be held in Sochi, Russia February 7-23, 2014.
SOAR International Mission is already planning with Sochi churches for three weeks of Olympic outreach. While other organizations will focus on the international crowd, SOAR and the local churches will reach the Sochi population.
Over the three weeks of the 2014 Winter Olympics, SOAR will send three different mission teams to Sochi—one team per week.
SOAR Director Dick Page explains, “[The churches] are creating Fun Zones at 4-10 local churches. In most cases, it will be their sanctuary kind of converted. It’ll be a hospitality center; it’ll [have] a big screen for watching Olympic events, refreshments, and then it’ll be staffed with people who can visit and share the Gospel.
“Teams will go out to a number of local parks and other public centers [doing] some fun ministry like balloons and bubbles…and invite people to come back to the Fun Zones at the churches,” says Page.
The Sochi churches will coordinate housing for the SOAR teams. Any donations that SOAR gives for housing will go toward church planting in the nearby, self-declared nation of Abkhazia.
Olympic ministry ideas are still in development, but SOAR will eventually need 90 people–30 per mission team–to pull this off.
If you are interested in being on the team or simply learning more, click here to contact SOAR.
Meanwhile, here’s how you can pray: “Pray that God will choose the right people to go and raise up a good team. Pray that God will provide the resources so that we can be effective. There will be a lot of complicated details and logistics to work through with all the security and everything that’s involved in the Olympics."
