Two great worship services, one Sunday morning at the Lake

Services on the East side of the Pavilion at Lakeside at 8:30 a.m. is always wonderful.  Communion looking over the lake, brilliant sun, cool breeze, and a good sermon by Pastor Irwin Jennings. Then breakfast at the patio.  Today I decided to also take in the more formal service at Hoover Auditorium at 10:30  to hear Dr. Sergei Nikolaev, professor of Evangelism and President of the Moscow United Methodist Seminary in Moscow, Russia.  There were four selections by the Firelands String Quartet, prelude, postlude, offertory and anthem with the choir—a different kind of wonderful. Dr. Nikolaev told us a little about himself—raised in a atheist home in the USSR, he became a Christian while studying engineering physics.  One grandfather was educated and a teacher, but an atheist who travelled giving “sermons” on atheism, and the other was a simple bee-keeper, an Orthodox Christian who had icons in his home and would cross himself before meals. When the children of the family would ask what he was doing, they were told he was just a crazy old man.  I’m looking forward to his lectures this week.  He said as a Methodist, he doesn’t experience overt persecution, but his church is considered a cult by many and there is peer pressure and some harassment. With the problems between Russian and Ukraine he doesn’t see the Methodists as having some of the problems of the other Protestant groups in part because they are unified by one bishop and one seminary.  They pray for each other.

http://blog.lakesideohio.com/2015/08/02/preacher-of-the-week-the-rev-dr-sergei-nikolaev/