Ukrainian Pastor to Cycle All Over the World to Support Orphans

By Victoria Uzunova of the Christian Telegraph (www.christiantelegraph.com)  
Special to ASSIST News Service

EASTERN UKRAINE (ANS) -- Gennadiy Mokhnenko, Pastor of the Good Changes Church in Eastern Ukraine and founder of Republic Pilgrim, a children’s rehabilitation center presented a new project to support orphans, has announced a unique pedal power project in support of orphans.

Gennadiy Mokhnenko on his bicycle

Pastor Mokhnenko and patients of the rehabilitation center plan to travel all over the world on bicycles to promote their work.

He explained: “Our current call can be formulated in the motto ‘World without orphans.’ Maybe, it sounds defiant and unprecedented, but the founder of this rehabilitation center and his adopted children believe that the movement will become a factor in the popularization of family.”

The project aims to inspire people to bring up children in families, spread information about the world of orphans today, destroy myths about adoption and find partners to support the center’s mission.

The preliminary route is divided into two main branches. One branch includes such cities as Kiev, Kursk, Tula, Moscow, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Leninsk-Kuznetsk, Abakan, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Alaska, Canada, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.

The European branch includes Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Stuttgart, Strasbourg, Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon. The trip will last for four to five years and will start in August 2012. The tour will conclude in the USA.

During this bicycle tour, the participants will hold services in different Russian, European, Canadian and American churches to inspire people to adopt children.

Gennadiy Mokhnenko preaching

Gennadiy Mokhnenko founded Republic Pilgrim in 1998, but the official opening of the mission was in 2001. They started with feeding homeless children and then collected them from basements to rehabilitation center, where they have begun teaching and taking care of these children. 2,500 teenagers have gone through rehabilitation in this center.

More than 50% of them were returned to their families and orphanages or were adopted. In 2008, patients of the rehabilitation center climbed the highest mountain peak in all Europe - Mount Elbrus. In 2009 they climbed Mount Ararat. This summer, the adopted children cycled all across Ukraine with their parents under the motto “Ukraine without Orphans.”

They visited Ukrainian churches and told them about their dream – to see Ukraine without orphans. The summer bicycle tour became the first step before coming world tour.

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Victoria Uzunova is a correspondent for the Christian Telegraph [www.christiantelegraph.com], a unique Christian news service partnering with the largest Christian News Agency in the Russian language InVictory News [www.invictory.org/news/] which is one of few news gateways of what is happening in Christianity in such former USSR countries as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia and others.

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