Chilly news from Ukrainian seminary

by Norman Threinen
The nights are getting longer, the weather colder, coughs and colds more common, sweaters and warm jackets worn both inside and outside. And the little band of future preachers for the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Ukraine is faced with a grim reality—the promised natural gas hook-up which was to provide heat for the new seminary building for the cold winter ahead will not materialize until spring 2011 at the earliest.

Since we rely on electrical heaters for some warmth we hope the occasional power outages are few and short-lived. And we pray for a mild winter!

Odessa seminary students face cool classes until a natural gas line is connected

In the midst of these difficulties, the eight students, translator and professor remain in good spirits. Our cook, Larisa, is providing a somewhat varied menu for meals. She has become a genuine house-mother, beaming as students come back for seconds of borsch and chiding a student on occasion for not finishing his plate of food.

In the academic area, more gifted students help other students who struggle to understand the problems associated with the current courses: New Testament Introduction and Lutheran Confessions. Tatania, our new interpreter from Lviv, is finding it necessary to expand both her Russian and English vocabulary with the help of textbooks we use and is meeting the challenge admirably.

As the instructor, I’ve have found it interesting to work with four different translations of the Book of Concord in my Lutheran Confessions course: my English Tappert translation; a Ukrainian translation; and two Russian translations, one translated from English and the other translated from the original German and Latin. Each student will receive personal copies of the Russian volumes when they arrive from Finland, but everything seems to take longer in Ukraine than back home.

My personal four-month tour of duty will extend until November 28, hopefully before the snow and the subzero weather come.

Rev. Dr. Norman Threinen is rector of Concordia Seminary in Odessa, Ukraine. He is a professor emeritus of Concordia Lutheran Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta.