Due to a lot of travel, lots of work around The Mill and some special guests, we haven’t been posting much… but we’ve been doing lots of porch sittin’ and thinkin’. We’ll fire things back up soon. In the meanwhile, here’s our latest ministry update: May Update from the Bakers
Author: Jim Baker
Marginal Mission Network leader with ReachGlobal Europe, passionate about serving at the margins. We are now living in the woods in VA working on restoring an old grist mill and farmhouse to host a community that will provide, rest, restoration, reflection, training, connections... and lots of good music!
What I saw in the hotbed of Extremism, Part Two
I visited Maidan just before it was transformed by the massive murderous violence of late February. At that point it was still a (some said desperate) attempt to carve out and define what free society might look like… or else it was a seething hotbed of violent insurrectionist neo-Nazis. Again, what narrative is being told,…
What I saw in the Den of Extremism – My visit to Maidan (Part One)
As the focus of recent events has turned to the Crimean peninsula in the south and the eastern provinces of Ukraine, part of a narrative being spun to justify the assimilation is that Russians or Russian speakers in the East are under grave threat from violent, neo-Nazi fascist extremists from Kyiv and the West. It…
“Not my will, but Yours…”
A month has gone by since I was on Maidan (and what a month!). However, I still am sorting through my impressions from that time – which are not built upon a single visit, but informed by a good dozen years of living “embedded” in the culture, sharing the heart of the marvelous people of…
Table talk in crisis time – real people seeking real answers to real problems
I signed off last time with an urgent request for prayer, sensing that the situation in Kyiv was at a critical point. Since then, we saw an all-out violent assault on Maidan, in which scores of people were killed, the majority shot in the street by snipers, an abortive attempt at a “negotiated settlement” (which…
Mission as transformation
Because it sums up a lot of what I’ve heard from fellow believers and Ukraine, and illustrates the above post on what “real people” need in times of crisis, I pass along the following blog, posted around the time of my visit, by Mykhailo Cherenkov of Association for Spiritual Renewal. I believe he has a…
Prayer on Maidan
Following on my last post about the significance of spiritual unity, particularly prayer, on Maidan in Kyiv these days, I wanted to pass along my translation of a post “Euromaidan on its knees” that illustrates it well. The original can be found at: http://paus144.livejournal.com/20705.html It was an indescribable sight! I saw it with my own…
The heart of Maidan – touched by prayer
It was -15F, the frost on the window next to my bed has become a thick coating of ice. But the sun is shining for the first time since I arrived. I had an opportunity to meet with Sergei, an evangelical leader whom I had not seen for many years. We met at a nice…
Mill Pond Porch 