March Update from Croatia

As anyone working for the Church will tell you, things get busy in March.

Planning for this year's Champ's Camp is well under way, and the Easter retreat is less than a month away. That means we're spending more time writing lessons, planning crafts, and going to meetings (and I'm learning to drive a manual). And we LOVE it! The spring weather in Zagreb feels great and we do too.

Last Sunday, I was able to preach the Sunday sermon.

I spoke about prayer. Here's the lite version: Praying can be difficult, and when you really start praying, there are questions and doubts that come along. Jesus acknowledges and answers those doubts (Luke 18:1-8). But even after Jesus's answer, the doubts won't leave us alone, so what do we do with them? We use them as a stairway straight to God, just like Job did. Job didn't bury his questions or doubt. Like a child, he demanded an explanation from his Father. In the end, he got to talk with God, and that was enough for Job. Re-imagine our doubts and questions as a need like hunger or thirst. God is the object of our hunger. Prayer is the method of our satisfaction.

I could go on (it pains me to leave something half-explained), but there are other things I want to tell you about--like this week's English Club!

We had four kids at the church building this week. Though, one of them is hiding behind Savannah, and the other was a few minutes late, so you can only see two here haha. We had fun with animals and numbers.

One of the kids, not pictured, came because Savannah met his mom in the dog park. He asked a lot about the church and when his mom came, she was interested too, which was really encouraging to us.

Most people are pretty hesitant about doing something in the church building. Since we're not Catholic, that's a red flag for some people here. For others, they just don't want anything religion related to come near their kids at all. A free English club has been a way for us to bridge that gap.

It's really great to see how this ministry can break down the stigmas people have about the Church.

We also had our first Discipleship Making Movement (DMM) training weekend.

Representatives from congregations in Rijeka (a coastal city) and Varazdin (a town north of Zagreb) joined us in the bible institute classroom for two days of training.

You can think of DMM as a different method for evangelizing. It has a broader focus with 1 on 2-4 evangelism as opposed to 1 on 1. It also focuses less on getting people to come to a church building and more on finding people who are seeking God (think of the Ethiopian eunuch) and teaching them to be a disciple of Jesus where they already are. What we love most about DMM is that it's very practical and obedience-based.

How do you find those people? What do you do once you've found them? That's what the training is all about. We'll have another meeting in a couple weeks.

Thank you so much for all of your encouragement and prayer! We especially want to thank those who responded to our special update email.

God bless you. Peace.