What a mess

What a mess! Mot-to-mesk (just say what a mess) means thank you in Romanian or Moldovan.
Yesterday, was a mess. Our land line was down, so Jon & I had to find our way to the church office in the morning via trolley bus and minibus. We made it there only to not know which door goes to the church office. However, we found someone with a cell phone, and called, and to our surprise as well as Pastor Igor, we were standing right outside. I suppose we just chalked that one up to Moldovan time for being an hour late to the church planting meeting.

On a personal note, I am becoming more aware how the Holy Spirit prompts me to speak up. At home, I think I tend to dismiss His promptings. So at this particular meeting, our team met with their leaders (pastors Igor and Zimfir, and evangelist Johnson with Paul). My initial thought was I don't know anything about Church Planting so I will just listen and defer to Jon, Liz and KT. Then the Lord started to prompt me to speak up. At first, I tried to have Liz say something about what the Lord was speaking to me about, but quickly realized that I just need to speak up. So I did. I shared about the need to have organized the leadership around ministries that flow from one's giftings. If we are not leading/ministering out of our giftings, the church will not grow as well and one may risk being burned out. So I shared how we can diagram one's giftings (have a frank discussion about that), followed by the current assigned tasks, and see if there are ways to re-delegate ministries that better aligned to ones' gift clusters. Then Jon spoke more about this as well as KT and Liz. It was interesting to see us as a body working together as we "spoke from the seat of our pants" with wisdom that God gave us for the moment.

The night before we had this wonderful time with Pastor Zimfir and his wife Allah. It was really good relational time which I think is helping build some trust between us and the leadership here in Moldova. Yesterday afternoon in spite of the traffic jam due to some sort of protest - it took us a couple of hours to go a few blocks on a bus - Jon and I managed to make it in time for one of the boy's youth home group meetings. Great group of guys who are passionate in prayer and their love for Jesus. BTW Bible training is a huge area of need, as well as relational inner healing training. Just scratch the surface, and their is a lot of relational pain which I believe Jesus wants to heal.

Interestingly, most young people speak only Moldovan (Romanian) and not Russian. So establishing a church for the Romanian population is critical. Viorel (home group leader) and Serghei are both wanting to plant a Romanian speaking church. I might add they are younger than Jon!

Liz and KT, yesterday went to minister to the girls youth group. Today, Jon & I will be doing evangelism with Johnson (Nigerian). Liz and KT are planing to visit the street children ministry.
Tonight Liz will be speaking at the all church prayer meeting. It has been quite an adventure so far.