Romania
I spent month 7 in Dragonesti, Romania. It is a place where there is 60% unemployment. Most people live off the land in their back yard where they have a garden and some animals to provide food. It is an interesting village where it is common to see many horse and buggies on the road as well as a mixture of Porsche, Audi, and BMW. It doesn’t take long to see there is a large gap between the rich and poor in this area.
We had the opportunity to participate in a variety of different ministry opportunities while we were working with Hope Church. Most days we would spend the morning in worship and prayer. The afternoons were spent evangelizing in Dragonesti or other nearby villages, participating in kids clubs, and other various service projects that included construction, yard work, and picking up garbage.
One of my favorite things we did was helped start a new kids club. We spent one day walking around the village meeting people and handing out tracts and came back the next day and ended up with almost 20 kids who came. We played games with them, sang with songs, told the story of David and Goliath, and handed out presents from Operation Christmas Child.
Evangelizing in the villages was also very good but challenging. The language barrier made it difficult because everything had to be done through a translator, but we were still able to share our own story and the gospel with people. Another thing that made village evangelism difficult was that almost everyone in the village is Orthodox. Orthodox people call themselves Christians and say they believe in Jesus but if you ask questions about salvation you find that their answers are not biblical. Basically we were told that in the Orthodox church, people pay a priest to pray for their sins to be forgiven and the more you pay, the more sins you can have prayed for and forgiven. When someone passes away the priest also is paid to pray for that person to be able to go to heaven. These were a couple of the biggest obstacles we had while talking to people but we were able to have some good conversations and the people heard the gospel. Now we just pray and hope they understood and that God would continue to change their hearts.
Overall this was one of my favorite months of the race so far. If anyone is interested in helping out this ministry they are very short on missionaries and are praying and searching for more. They are also looking for someone familiar with farming who can oversee a new project that will consist of farming about 10 hectares of land, growing vegetables in greenhouses, plus all the ministry opportunities that go along with that. The land is being donated to the ministry as well as equipment to farm the land. All they need now is the right person or team of people to put everything into action. If anyone is interested you can let me know and I can put you in contact with the right people to help you get more information.
