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Pete Spackman
Director for Prisons in North and South America, Russia
(School of Christ Video Classes)
email – newconvictions@compuserve.com
My name is Pete Spackman. I am the director of the School of Christ International Prison Ministries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was involved in the prison ministry in Alabama. I worked as a volunteer for about ten hours a day in those prisons. I worked on the yards, preaching and playing ball with the men everyday. Pastor B. H. Clendennen had been a friend of mine for several years. At one point he came to the prisons in Alabama and preached with me for a week. That week we saw God move in a mighty way.
While Pastor Clendennen was in Russia, from 1991 to 1993, these things were on his heart. He called me in late 1992 and asked me to pray about the possibility of going to work with him in the prisons of Russia, presenting the School of Christ, which he had compiled throughout fifty years of ministry. Over the years his teachings had become an effective discipleship tool. For the past two years he had been teaching this to many young men and women in Moscow. Some of the students he had taught in the School of Christ had been in the Russian prisons. Among them were two young men named Alek and Oleg. One of them was from the Ukraine and the other from the Minsk area in Belarus. I knew that it was the will of God for me to go.
When I got to Russia, in January of 1993, Pastor Clendennen sent two young men to my hotel, the Hotel Russia in the middle of Moscow. I didn't know it at the time, but he had sent them to me because one of the men, Oleg, had had a dream. There was a knock on my door, and two guys stood outside, each one about six feet tall, one with gold teeth. The one with gold teeth looked something like Jaws from the James Bond movies.
They greeted me in Russian, I didn't know what it meant so I repeated what they said back, which simply meant, "Praise God!" After realizing that I didn't speak Russian, they went downstairs into the foyer of that huge hotel and found a young translator who spoke Swedish, Russian, and English. When they came back, the translator translated Oleg's dream to me. In his dream he said he was in dirty water catching big fish with his bare hands. Oleg had been in prison in Russia for eight years. He'd come through the School of Christ and now he felt that he wanted to go back into those prisons and preach Christ. He felt equipped now because he'd been through the School of Christ, but he just needed some help. So Pastor Clendennen sent him to me and on hearing his dream and desire I said, "Yeah, let's go for it."
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You can visit New Convictions Outreach in Wetumpka, AL at www.newconvictions.org
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