Matt Gurtler

On Tuesday I returned from 2 weeks in Ukraine, as part of a team of UK students helping at an English camp run by CCX (The Ukrainian equivalent of UCCF).

As we arrived in Kiev, we were greeted by a smiling CCX volunteer and taken to have dinner before getting on the overnight train to Lviv, which was an experience…
When we arrived at the campsite we had four days of pre-camp, which involved Bible study preparation, getting to know the Ukrainian and American staff members and going over the schedule for camp, which started on the subsequent Sunday.

On Sunday morning, the staff who had been to camp before were ridiculously excited about the arrival of the students, which was a little odd to me, but a few days later I realised that their excitement had been entirely justified. The students were all fantastic and I would say meeting them was the highlight of the trip.

The camp was rather chaotic, getting up at 7am every day for staff devotional and meeting. The days were full of team building activities, workshops (including a standup comedy one run by me, which went surprisingly well), Bible studies, morning and evening meetings, which I was co-hosting, and evening entertainments. The latter ranged from a Worship night, to an international night where the UK team presented a little about british culture.

The camp was pretty exhausting, but so much fun. It’s referred to by CCX as a ‘porch event’, basically an attempt not to bring students to Christ during the camp, but to get them interested and connected with Christians in their Universities. In that vein it was greatly successful. Several students had loads of questions in the Bible studies. One in particular moved to a position where she believes in God and was really touched by the way people were worshipping at the worship night. God is certainly at work through the CCX movement in Ukraine and we can continue praying that he will bring the students who were at camp to him, whether it be today, this week or in twenty years time.

Thank you all for your prayers, it was a fantastic trip and I would love to go again. UCCF run summer teams for students in all regions of the UK, so if you or anyone you know will be going to University this coming year, I fully recommend looking into going on one of these trips.
https://www.uccf.org.uk/ summer-teams/