Dmitry, Susanna, Nicole, Daniel Isakovsky

We welcome the Isakovsky family to our fellowship at Arlington Forest and are looking forward to working with them as part of our Christian family.  The follow is a bio of the family provide by Dmitry.

Susanna was born into a family of Pentecostal believers in the Soviet Union. As you know Ukraine was one of the fifteen Soviet Republics. Her entire family underwent some serious persecution on religious grounds. One of the family members was even imprisoned for refusing to join the ranks of the Red Army. Even as a child she had to put up with a ridicule, taunting and abuse on the part of her school teachers and classmates. At present Susanna' family, for the most part, lives in Minneapolis, MN. One of her elder brothers still pastors a big charismatic church in Chernovtsy, Ukraine.  Dmitry, in his turn, was born into a family of stout Soviet atheists. The turning point in my relationships with God came when my father got diagnosed with and began to die of cancer. Before his death in 1995, I got baptized in the Orthodox Church, in the Ukraine.  Having finished Sumy Military Academy I was commissioned by the government to serve on the Ukrainian-Polish border as a company commander at one of the former Soviet military bases. There one day, walking through the city, I met a black guy from Nigeria. We became friends and he invited me to attend a little Pentecostal church that he had just begun visiting.  That was a congregation where my future wife sang in the praise band and where I began getting answers to many outstanding existential questions. Becoming a Christian in earnest caused some severe ostracism and persecution on the part of my military commandment. So I had to leave my post.  We got married and settled in Chernovtsy as a family. In a couple of years I began representing our church at the Annual Conference Of Russia UMC in Moscow, since we had decided to broaden our Christian fellowship and join the RUMC. Both Nicole and Daniel were born during that time in the Ukraine. In 2003 Susanna and I entered theological studies at Moscow Theological Seminary. There we met the Dean of Wesley Theological Seminary, Bruce Birch. He came as a visiting professor to teach the course on the Hebrew Bible. By that moment the U.S. embassy in Moscow had already granted our family the status of religious refugees and we were getting ready to leave for the U.S. Dean Birch was a God sent and instrumental in allowing us to continue our theological studies in Washington DC. For the last three years of our lives we have been living, studying, and working in this area. It's been both challenging and exciting. Since my studies at Wesley are almost over we are waiting for God to give us new directions, even as I have started a process of ordination with the UMC. To God be the glory! He will finish the good work that He has begun in us!

God bless! Dmitry, Susanna, Nicole, Daniel Isakovsky