A mission-news-blog

Throwing a Thanksgiving party is a great way to reach Hungarian kids for 3 reasons:

1. It’s a holiday that we don’t have and students are interested in learning something new from a different culture.
2. It’s easy to bring in the Gospel in a meaningful way.
3. The food is good and kids are hungry!

This event was a good opportunity to team up with the Christian students of the local International School, who took care of the program and did an excellent job. We had fun games, Gospel-presentation, and –again- good Thanksgiving food. I was happy to see those coming who are not committed to our youth, but still have a desperate need for Chirst.

Christmas outreach

The Christmas outreach was huge, a whole lot greater than I expected. We had over 350 people there, most of whom were the non-believer parents of the kids that come to our Bible clubs in the local secular school. About 90 kids took part in the program and there were 13 performances. Despite the great number, the programme was very exciting, for us especially as Esy sang a solo in a song that was performed by part of our worship team.

Updates on the new church law

• We’d been praying for the Constitutional Court to cancel the church law, which it actually did just before Christmas.
• However, a few days later, on December 30th the Parliament passed the very same law, with some minor changes.
• As the law did come into effect the government allowed those churches that had already sent in their request to stay like they were to keep their status until the Parliament makes a decision on them, but February 29th the latest. This includes us and 80 more -  from the 380. 

So here we are with 2 more months and still not sure what’s gonna happen.

We don’t meet the requirements of the law (1000 members, 20 years of existence in

Hungary or 100 years internationally) but we’re in discussion with other churches.

Please, keep us in your prayers.

The end of summer turned out to be pretty busy for us. As you could have read in our previous post we’d been invited to the youth camp of the Evangelical Church in Croatia. We’ve heard a lot of Orahovica, the town that hosted the camp, but we’d never been there, yet. Excited to see how a boarding camp works there we packed out stuff and took off. It was really humbling to see the group of 20 leaders who took time off work to serve as volunteers and make the camp possible for the 100 attending kids. It was funny, too, that it turned out upon our arrival that they expected something completely different than what I’d prepared for in advance. So I had to come up with something for the morning workshop sessions, and thank God they turned out to be really great. Each day we had another topic and a group had to prepare a small skit. The audience could jump in the place of one of the characters to ‘fix’ the given problem. These ‘improvisation plays’ proved to be a great tool for teaching as the kids could see by their own eyes whether one attitude works or not. What we also liked in this camp was that we could go as a family and our children had little friends to play with as our hosting family had similar aged sons. 

 (Not so) serious smallgroup discussion while the others were preparing for the skit

Everybody is up and ready at the morning briefing

I wasn’t planning to go to this year’s Sziget Music Festival but when I got a call in April that there’s a need for one more person, what’s more a staff leader, I didn’t say no. Why? Such unique opportunities show up to share our faith at the Sziget that would hardly be imaginable throughout the year. Here is a recent story to illustrate my point. I was sitting on a bench at the entrance of our tent waiting for people to come in when a Swedish guy stepped up to me saying “Hi, I’m an Atheist, but I’m fascinated by religions. Would you tell me about your faith?” This is how the hour long conversation with him started. After some time of intellectual debate I came to a point where I could share my personal testimony. At the end of the story he said he was really touched – and I could  also see that his eyes were wet – and that he would certainly continue thinking about this story. However, as usual we had other kinds of dicussions, too, like the time when some guys sat down in the tent to make fun of us and they happened to talk my most tired staff member, and the girl became totally upset by their arrogant and too personal style. We found her crying in the backstage.

Discussions about God by a hot cup of tea in the cold Sziget night

Debriefing after the night shift (2:30 a.m.)

If you’re tried, try the giant, comfortable steel-couches

There were plenty of exhibitionists this year, too

To sum it up: I still think the Sziget Mission fills a huge gap. There were 385,000 people at this year’s Sziget and about 600-700 came to our tent. Obviously we could only talk to a smaller part of them, but at least we DID represent Christ in this small way. I’d be overjoyed if there was Evangelical mission on the Sziget as they might proclaim Christ more effectively. (I had the impression that a good number of our staff had no idea what the Gospel was) I’m really proud of Esy, who was taking care of our kids while I was serving, but looking at my present schedule I don’t think I could join this mission again. Nevertheless, I’m really happy that Dávid came this year, too, so the next generation seems to take on the responsibility. Finally, I’m happy that we have our Converse! Camp at Paulus that has become a great tool to reach the young people.

So many things have been happening in the past month and half – it seems much longer than that.

Our youth was invited to join the national youth conference of the MEE (Hungarian Evanglical Church) and I was assigned to do the teaching. A good number of about 40 kids came together from 5 places countrywide. It was a great time of fun, worship, fellowship and learning. I taught on the will of God and lead the Saturday morning workshops and I asked Dávid, my young helper to do a small training on how to do evangelism.

This conference was special to me because one of the groups was from a gypsy church and it’s up-lifting to see different ethic groups worship the same Lord together in the setting of recent ethnic tensions in Hungary (read more on these tension here).

One step closer to moving to Diósd

It’s been more than a year now that we decided to move to Diósd and put our condo to the market. It wasn’t an easy decision, but we had to make it anyway as our distance from the community of Diósd came to be unmanagable in our situation. So far we haven’t been able to sell our place, the estate-business is pretty much dead here. However, a few months ago a former classmate of mine from high-school called me and said that he was going to build a house in Diósd and told me about the piece of land next to them that was for sale. So we felt this was our chance and after a time of prayerful consideration and taking advice from a number of people we signed the contract and bought the lot with help for 1/3 of the market price!

For sure it’s still a long way until we’ll be able to move in, but we know that everything is possible with God. Now our prayer is to be able to get the paperworks done as soon as possible and to sell our condo by next spring.

Getting ready for the summer camps

I had my last English classes last week and now our primary focus is the youth and the summer camps. Bellow is our schedule frame for the summer. Please, remember us in your prayers throughout the season.

Thank God, Miklós, the biologist from our church, managed to come as scheduled to give his lecture on Creation (Feb. 25th). It was interesting to listen to a professional talking about the structure of living cells and the coded information that describes the attributes of living things. Too bad that not many of the youth could come so there were only 15 of us including the junior high group. However, it felt really great when one of the non-believer guys approached with the request that he wanted to get the presentation for himself, beaceuse he had found it useful and wanted to use the material for a Biology contest.

Since then we’ve covered topics like “Archeology and faith”, “Time spent with God” és “Nationalism vs. Love for the country”. Though a couple of non-believers have been showing up on a regular bases this month, I would say that for March our focus was building and training our youth.

Teljes album megtekintése

March started with the Proverbs Project, which aimed at the development of our kids Bible knowledge. In the 31 days of this month they have to read 31 chapters of Proverbs, and share the most important thought from each day preferably in their own words. This is a new thing that we try, and we also included facebook in the project, as the youth can post their observations on the Youth Club’s discussion board. It’s really fascinating to their enthusiasm in doing this!

Beside the Bible study group for girls that has been running for many months now finally we managed to get the boys Bible study group going this month. It’s before the regular youth meetings on Fridays. To our great surprise – and joy – almost everyone could come who we had invited including two non-believer guys: Laci and Szabolcs.

Plans:

On April 1st, while the men go on a men’s retreat, the girls from the youth are having a payamas party in the Outreach Center, where they invite their non-believer friends, so we’re praying for opportunities to share their faith with them. We’re planning a 12 hour Walt Disney Marathon, which is a great opportunity to invite unchurched kids. We’re giving a Gospel presentation is one of the breaks between the movies. Please, pray for all these events and the Converse English and Sports Camp as we’re in the planning phase with full steam.

We’re thankful for the growth we’ve been experiencing in the youth club – as the fruit of your prayer and support!

G62 – Student Ministry Team

The goal to have students be more involved in the life and ministry of the Youth Club arrived at a new level, when we started the G62 (based on Galatians 6:2) the student ministry team made up of 5 enthusiastic students. We’ve concluded the 6 session training with them, and now we use our regular Monday night meetings to plan the weekly youth meetings and the special events – like the Banana Night.

Banana Night

As part of the G62 training we had our student leaders to organize a special event, namely the Banana Night in November. The goal was to invite un-churched kids, who had never been at our youth meetings. The dress-code was “yellow” and the ‘entrance fee’ was a banana. We had a lot of fun, and at the summit of the event we invited the kids to the regular youth meetings. About 40 people showed up and a couple of them have been coming since the event.

Teljes album megtekintése

Follow-up

A few weeks ago a new Bible-study group was started to teach the basics of the Christian life to those who had accepted Christ in the past few months. We’re right in the middle of this  six-step follow-up study and the 4 students and 2 G62 kids attend regularly – the latter to be able to do follow-up themselves in the future.

Regional Youth Christmas

The latest challenge is the Regional Youth Christmas which is a gathering of the nearby suburban youthgroups organized by our youthgroup. This coming Friday we’re expecting 60 kids to celebrate Christ coming to us in a tea-house setting, with worship, thought-provoking presentations and fellowship, fellowship, fellowship. Please, pray for this event.

Next year…

Please, also pray for us as we’re planning the coming year. We have a lot to thank God for, and looking forward to see His mighty hands at work through the Youth in Diósd…