The subject of the book is real moving and at times comical stories from the life of the pilgrims who organized the state of former street kids “Republic Pilgrim”. The literature approach has quite a few religious elements but in the meanwhile it makes us rejoice seeing the success of one of the most exciting experiments of the social work with kids.
The titles of the chapters of the book sound rather unusual: “Cereal, steaks and Kuzia’s death..”, “ Curse to the city drug dealers”, “ The fight of whales” etc. The stories about fights in sewage pipes, about contradiction to the drug lords about deaths of the addicted boys and pedagogical success and mountainous ascensions, – all these can sound quite abnormal and fairly new for Russian Christian literature work.
In “ Non pedagogical poem” as well as in the previous apologetic book by Gennadiy Mokhnenko “To execute or to have mercy” there is a special caricature setting to illustrate stories depicting life of homeless kids who came to “Republic Pilgrim”. The subject of those caricatures as well as everything in the book is at times extremely informal. Sometimes the main hero provokes smile, sometimes – makes you think. The approach to such caricatures in the Christian books chosen by the author is quite an unusual for common norms of publishing of average Christian books.
In the foreword to “Non pedagogical poem” – there are some statements about “Republic Pilgrim” by the spouse of the pastor of one of the largest American church “Saddleback Church” Rick Warren – Kay Warren, as well as of the long term partner of “Pilgrim”, Pastor of the church “House of Bread” in Sacramento – Alexander Shevchenko, and, sure enough, of the permanent opponent of Gennadiy in TV program “ Two briefcases” Sergey Demidovich who stated in particular the following:
“He showed up in my life about 25 years ago. I didn’t know then that this quite a big fellow who is almost all the time hungry and with eyes of a tribe leader has got such a huge heart of integrity and kindheartedness. We had become friends. Gennadiy has an amazing ability to make everything he touches significant and prominent: a goal he scores, a homeless kid who has learnt the first 10 letters of ABC at the age of 14, a Sunday message , a new TV program and, sure enough, his precious spiritual child – “ Republic Pilgrim”. From one side, he is fairly the craziest pastor I have ever known but it is just what gives his character something extremely vivid and alive and natural so that I wish all other pastors to be at least a little bit as crazy as him… read this book and it will be easier for you to do it…
