Bishop Jonathan Keaton’s aspiration is to have the light of advent shine half way around the globe, and through the annual Bishop’s Advent Offering at local churches in November and December the Michigan Area is responding to the hungry bellies and often, starving souls, of social orphans in Russia.
Social orphans are children who have parents, but live in crisis conditions due to poverty, alcoholism, drug addictions, etc. There are approximately 270,000 orphans living in Russian “orphan houses”, of which around 7,000 are adopted annually, according to Grace United Methodist Church in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Grace UMC is not a congregation that just acknowledges the epidemic though — they are diligent Methodists who have worked to attenuate the crisis conditions of children all over St. Petersburg through the United Methodist Children’s Center, which it opened in 2002.
Thanks to donations from all over the globe — include funding from The Advance — the Center is able to provide social orphans from “at-risk families” with hot meals, clothes, medicines, education programs, camps and a chance to hear the message of Jesus Christ.
The well-traveled Bishop Keaton said he has much heart for providing young people with hope and necessities and he was led to reach out to the Children’s Center by a few people who support the seminary in Russia.
“One of the best things we can do with our young people here and around the world is to do everything we can to enhance their quality of life number one,” he said. “And to do everything we can to help them to live a life that won’t put them in a position where they will injure their bodies, find themselves incarcerated and/or find themselves on the outs with society and/or their family and extended family.”
According to the Center’s website, www.churchgrace.org, there are only two churches that serve nearly half a million people in the Primorsky district of St. Petersburg.
The Children’s Center not only houses up to 40 children on a daily basis, but they offer youth the opportunity to engage in arts, sports, music, tutoring and more through a staff made up of primarily of Grace UMC volunteers.
The stories of the children that come to the center are difficult to classify, other than to call them all heart stirring.
Dasha is a 4-year-old girl at the center whose family consists mainly of alcoholics and her father left when she was a baby. Her uncle has been convicted of murder and she has witnessed more violence than many people see in a lifetime, but the center has made a profound impact.
“She comes to Grace UMC Sunday School and (the) Center as a safe place for her, a good place for education and watching that not all adults drink and quarrel,” reads the Center’s website. “We believe God will develop Dasha's intelligence and through the church's help will give her a blessed future both to her and her family.”
The center is a home to kids who have been used to buy drugs for parents, kids who have run away from home and still others who tried to take their own lives at a young age.
Keaton said those kinds of stories are a gateway to golden opportunities of assistance and discipleship through giving.
“The church is a place for both saints and sinners and when the church is involved in that kind of ministry — (it) makes me think a little bit of when Jesus was in the synagogue, giving his first sermon,” Keaton said. “He said, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’ and he talked about preaching Good News to the poor, etc. So the church needs to be the place where young people can hear the Good News."
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