“You’d better stand back

The flames are high

Better get help

Can’t stop the fire

Bell’s going to ring

Hear the alarms

Better tell the fire chief

To quit playing cards”

- The Rolling Stones

Well. Sparks did fly. The theme of our fall retreat was “iskra v tme” which means “a spark in the dark. We had a lot of fun. Around 40 students total showed up, lots of new faces, about 12 non-believers. (thats over 1/4th) Our students brought their non-believing friends, I think this is amazing. During the conference we had a speaker from the Eastern European national office speak. His name is Greg Pitts and he is the National Campus Director for Belarus. He has a really cool story, his visa was annulled while his wife and kids were still in country. The life of an overseas missionary is adventure. He brought a guy that works in the Eastern European headquarters, a Romanian named Cosmin. It was contagious being around them as they led a “ministry to movement” time. We invited our students personally to come to this talk, and in my unbelieving heart I didn’t think anyone would show up, but almost all of our students did. It was so awesome to me, and one of the first times I saw what a movement could look like. Cosmin has a great way of explaining what a movement is, something that I really thing think the US campus ministry could take cues from.

Anyway fall retreat was great and I’m very thankful for your prayers. Even before fall retreat I was thinking about the hundreds of people who were praying for us during that time. We really saw God work out a lot of details, things that could have potentially been disastrous, just weren’t. For instance, there were a lot of transportation details to work out, getting the bus to pick up people in different locations, picking up the bratislava people from a certain train station, Greg driving in to a remote part of Slovakia in the snow, and basically there were no issues. This to me is a testimony of God working things out. So we’re really thankful for how He worked. Thanks for your prayers. I really believe He was the one who did it.

Oh, and it snowed! It was beautiful. Here is a photo of what it looked like.

These are girls that I am trusting God with that I will be able to build a relationship with them and share the gospel with.

Bozeny (dorm)

Lenka and Ivonka – they are two girls that came to our Talk it Out (english) class in the dorm. They are eager to get to know us, it’s really fun to be able to build a relationship with them. Pray for their salvation and that we’ll continue to build relationships.

Ferka Urbanka (dorm)

Annie- she is a girl we met one night inviting people to Talk it Out. She speaks really great english, and the first day we met her she said “I will make time for you.” This NEVER happens. So pray that we’ll be able to naturally invite her to stuff.

Vet School (dorm)

Lucia and Klara-I was able to get into a spiritual conversation with them one day in their dorm room. Hopefully I’ll be meeting with them again next week. Pray for me to be bold in sharing the gospel and to be able to build a good friendship with them.

These are the 3 locations where I am currently working. Thanks for praying. It means so much.

Things here can be really comical. We had our weekly meeting last night, its called “stretko.” I walked into the room we had reserved first. Keep in mind we have a longstanding relationship with these people that we rent the room from. I walk in and there are rows and rows of beer lining the walls. I mean, it’s hilarious. This would never ever happen in America. But, I had to capture it on film after all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

You can see here, this is what the beer was “hidden with” upon entry to the room.

this is one that I took being sneaky of behind the curtains. This is nowhere near showing how much beer was in the room.

One of the really cool things about the stretko (beer version) was that there was a guy there whose purpose is guarder of the beer. During the meeting we watched a short film about unconditional love, based on the parable of the prodigal son produced by simplebulldog.

We had discussion groups and guarder-of-the-beer guy engaged in one and now might be coming to one of our bible studies and probably some other stuff too. I just think it’s cool what God chooses to do even in the midst of some pretty weird circumstances.

Here are a couple of videos detailing what it’s like to take the tram or elektri?ka here in Eastern Europe.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=FogVnxxnO9I]

and then inside the tram, the sneak peak…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nygl6MGzYA0]

Here are a couple of videos detailing what it’s like to take the tram or električka here in Eastern Europe.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=FogVnxxnO9I]

and then inside the tram, the sneak peak…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nygl6MGzYA0]

Last Monday was crazy. I haven’t really thought about the randomness of it till now. Carlyn and I headed to Ferka Urbanka, one of our dorms, about an hour early. We were going to pass out fliers for english class called, “talk it out.” I got there and honestly, I just didn’t want to do it. The dorms are dark, literally and figuratively, it was cold outside. It’s tough, really tough. We’re sitting there and we hear this loud music coming from somewhere, something like singing in this traditional rotund way. It’s not like Chingy or Nelly or something that you might expect to hear in a college dorm, it’s more operatic and accordianish. So, we just keep listening to the music…and I realize, I don’t know these people, their culture, it’s so different from my own.

Dara meets us at the front desk so we can get the key to the room that we have reserved to have our meeting in. [note: she has to meet us because we don't speak Slovak and wouldn't be able to communicate with the guy at the front desk.] We get up to the room and time begins to pass. We do have one girl that shows up, her name is Jarka, she goes to the Vet School, and is Mirka’s cousin. Dara tells us we might need to go knock on doors and invite people to come. [note: I do not want to do this, I start feeling a little queasy at the very thought of it] Yet, we do it. Me, Shannon, and Matt. I mean full force, we’re knocking on doors inviting them to english class. Upstairs on the top floor, there is some super loud music, bass cranking, but we’re going, and we see this group of people out in the hall way, sitting on cushions of some sort, taking shots, and smoking their own personal hookah. We walk by to go invite people on the hallway and when we come back out we just start talking to them. I’m pretty sure Matt got offered a shot, and me and Shannon conversed with the girls.

After a significant amount of knocking, we went back to our room. We had another guy there, his name is Jan (John) and we conducted class as usual. Jan didn’t speak hardly any english so class went a bit slow at times. Anyway, afterwards as we were leaving we took note that there is a club downstairs in the dorm, I mean, a full on real club, complete with a broken fuss ball table, beer, and even tea. [we are in europe]. So, we went, there were students in there hanging out, drinking beer, enjoying each others company. That was new for me, it’s the first time I’ve seen students doing something like that, that we’re able to access and come in and meet them. This for me was revolutionary.

Later, after we left the dorm, we headed to another dorm called Jedlikova, where we read that there was some type of event going on, we weren’t sure what it was, but me, Matt, Shannon, and Aaron went out there. And I mean it was a real live techno party. Complete with lasers, fog machines, strobe lights, really extremely loud techno music, and guys that couldn’t dance.

This was just in a 4 hour span. My life here is random, sometimes I forget how random it truly is.

I just wanted to take a second and write to let you know what has been going on here. We’ve been on campus now for a good four weeks. The first two weeks we concentrated heavily on passing out an evangelistic cd that bratislava developed with their own bare hands. We also were planning a party in the midst of this to announce the winner of the free housing contest. I can’t tell you really how much energy, time, and money went into this very thing. We even have billboards around town proclaiming the cd, the billboards read, “do you have it yet?” We ended up giving out about 1,400 of these bad boys, originally we were to have 2,500, but were thankful when we saw the difficulty that it was to get this cd into the hands of Slovak students. They are skeptical, they think we have an agenda. Cults and sects are something that these students are very sensitive to, we have to go out of our way to make sure we don’t appear to be one of them. The reality is the cd produced less of a response than we had hoped, out of the 1,400 cds, only 17 people responded to the housing contest, and out of those 17 only 2 of them showed up to our party that we had last Tuesday night. The girl who won the free housing contest is already involved with us. I think this just shows the reality of an effort, even a good effort here, isn’t really all it takes.

For me, I think it goes back to the wing of effectiveness that I tend to soar on. As an ESTJ, (meyers briggs) a part of my personality is that I look, observe, and think about systems, the way they are now and the way they could be. I recognize one of the hardest parts of ministry here is that we don’t really know what works. We’ve been assertive in getting on campus and handing out a cd, we collected contact cards from people and we have in turn gone back to campus and knocked on their doors to hand out articles they requested on their survey. We go into these dorms that are dark and difficult and knock on doors to often be rejected or to meet students that don’t speak a single word of english, except for “no.” We’ve tried holding a free english class on Monday nights in one of the dorms, however, no one wants to come because, as part of the European Union, they can travel to England during the summer, learn english, and make money doing it.

Nine years ago when Crusade started here, it was right after the fall of communism, Slovaks were eager to talk to Americans, now this is not the case. We are not novel, in fact we are either viewed as war-loving-imperialists or as rich Americans who take advantage of the culture. Slovaks then didn’t really travel in the summers, and so the idea of holding english camp (like the one I was a part of in 2002) was great! They loved it, there was a community that formed of “Speak Out” goers. The three Slovak national staff in Kosice came as a result of Speak Out english camps.

We’re at a pivot point. Knocking on doors isn’t working. Holding English class isn’t working. Speak Out camps won’t work. What else might there be? Would you join me in praying for us as we try to decode a culture that is constantly changing and forming into something drastically different than it was 9 years ago? We know for sure the ideas of “American ministry” doesn’t work here. We’ve gotta get inside of the way Slovaks think, what they see as suspiscious, what they see as inviting, what is attractive to them.

The ministry here is in a transitional stage. God has moved here and has raised up Slovak nationals who will lead this ministry far beyond my commitment here. Our goal is to pour into them and to build them up to lead this movement well. We need momentum, we need a break through. We desperately need God to work.

We’ll be trying new things. All in hopes of reaching Slovaks with the message of the gospel and forming friendships.

These things are difficult, they are difficult to be a part of. Humbling to see when a strategy fails. All to prove the necessity of dependence on God.

I’m asking God to redefine my definition of success, to redefine what I see as progress. To help me to supernaturally understand a culture that is not my own.

Here is my september prayer letter

including

-stint briefing

-arrival in slovakia

-prayer requests

I hope you enjoy reading it.

one might think that a package has completed it’s journey once it arrives in Slovakia or America, from wherever it may come…but allow me to prove you wrong for just a minute, or a minute and 29 seconds to be exact.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaBjVKX6Ahc]