Anyone who spends two minutes with Alex Yefetov gets a sense of his heartbeat for redemption.
Ask Alex, 58, nearly any question and he will bend it into his commitment to share the Gospel with the world, including his home in Kyiv, Ukraine.
“We are in the Golden Age of the Church in Ukraine,” a nonplussed Alex said, following a day when two Russian drones pelted the area around his house with ballistics.
War may be relentless but Alex is hopeful that good will prevail: “We are seeing a spiritual hunger now and the church is responding.”
Alex is active in faith-based book publishing and began his circuitous journey into the world of Christian-oriented magazines following his rise in the world of physics and his foray into computer-oriented magazines.
And that’s when he met the champions at Magazine Training International. An enterprising wordsmith who was trained in the esoteric world of theoretical physics, Alex entered publishing without any training. Once he found saving faith, he decided to pivot from computer magazines into magazines that provide eternal hope with divine help.
“A friend who had gone to prison in the 1990s found Christ and the Lord set him free spiritually,” Alex said of his 1999 conversion. “He challenged me to read the scriptures and I realized I had never read the scriptures. He told me to ask the scriptures to talk to me.”
Today Alex said he remains grateful for his friend’s challenge and he is a bit amused about his naiveté in Christian publishing. Enter Sharon Mumper and her MTI team. Alex attended an MTI conference and before long he took on the role of MTI business trainer in India 2012 and taught a couple of webinars in 2018 and 2021.
“I fell in love with MTI,” Alex said, his face beaming as he talked from his living room via WhatsApp.
“God put me in the right place at the right time,” Alex said. “I first met with MTI on a steep rise in my secular publishing career, being editor-in-chief of the most successful special-interest magazine project in Ukraine at the time. It was called “JV” with a German partner, so I had a tremendous opportunity to learn the most up-to-date skills and strategies from the leading European publishers–just to mention Burda.”
As Alex shared his back story, his body a human accordion of energy as he talked of MTI’s contribution to his publishing and his life.
“When I first visited an MTI seminar in Ukraine, I was just astonished by the level and depth of teaching,” Alex said, face bright from the living room light. “It wasn’t anything close to what was available at that time in secular publishing in the country, not to mention the Christian media projects. It was that kind of cutting-edge teaching for which we had to invite European gurus and pay them up to 500 Deutschmarks an hour–and it was offered absolutely for free!”
In addition to free training, MTI and his coaches offered strategies and prayer for his future.
“This evidence of the enormous Lord’s provision and care for His church here made me immediately fall in love with MTI,” said Alex. “My strong desire to become a part of this great blessing translated soon into participation in adaptation/editing of the Russian versions of several courses, then videos, and finally teachings. So, I was in a position to assess the MTI’s teaching quality being not a provider of it but rather a beneficiary.”
Alex’s computer magazines faded while his Christian-based magazines found success until they too faded, and Alex took his hard-earned knowledge of publishing and joined Knigi365, Books365, a joint-initiative of Christian publishers and businessman in Ukraine in 2009, despite the economic downturn in Ukraine.
The venture’s ambitious goal is to make Christian books that help readers grow in their faith and the books are made available for free to churches, Christian groups, and individuals who desire faith-based books but can’t afford them.
With his years of magazine work and some MTI ideas, Alex’s group is working with thousands of churches of all Protestant denomination while a Russo-Ukrainian war swirls around their work.
“We’ve distributed more than 400,000 copes of 50 titles,” he said, adding that many of the books are penned by Charles Colson, Philip Yancey, Henri Nouwen and others—all in the name of spreading the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Most Ukrainians speak Russian, but Alex’s goal is to publish books in Ukrainian in the days ahead.
While Alex and I talked, the law in Ukraine mandated that any male 18 to 60 could be mustered into the military.
“Are you concerned at age 58?”
“God is in control,” Alex said with confidence. “God will do something good. I do not know how it will end but God has a plan.”
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Magazine Training International’s mission is to encourage, strengthen, and provide training and resources to Christian magazine publishers as they seek to build the church and reach their societies for Christ.