A mission-news-blog

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.