New Pastor at Antonesti

It was with some emotion that we attended the final Sunday of the ministry of Nicolai Sin in the Rep of Moldova.

He has been ministering and planting and growing churches all around the South of Moldova for the last 20 odd years and on Sunday many of his friends and peers gathered together to say a fond farewell as he and his family emigrate to USA.
His final pastorate has been the church in Antonesti ( while he has continued to mentor others where he was involved in planting the church )

Many of those that came to the front to share a short word were ones he had led to the Lord and who are now pastors or leaders in other churches or plants.

Some had travelled over 100Km to get there and as you can imagine it was an emotional time.

At the end of the meeting we had an unofficial hand over of the church leadership to the soon to be new pastor - Roma Munteanu. Here is with the members in the church at Antonesti as they said their testimonies to Nicolai and his minsitry to them and also gave him a small farewell gift ( in a future blog we will no doubt be doing a profile on Roma and Tanya and his family when we will have a better photo ).

Roma is and will be working with me as we go through the process of transfer so that he and the believers in the church find it as easy as possible to cope with the change. If all goes well we would expect Roma and Tanya to move to the village at the end of May and then we would take it from there.

Keep them in your prayers and Nicolai and his family also

Yours and His

Pastor Mark

Mission at Giurgulesti

The church at Giurgulesti had their annual outreach mission last week and we from Gotesti were invited to come with a team and do a programme and preach the gospel on Sunday the final day.

I came with 6 others including Slavic ( who led our programme) and Aliona his wife who together with Anisoara sang the songs in our programme.

Recently baptised ones Sergiu and Vasia gave their testimonies.

We took the passage from Luke 15 on the lost sheep and tried to show how this is an example of our experiences when we leave the Shepherd's way and go our own way i.e the lost sheep undoubtedly became hungry on it's own and so do we ( although ours is a spiritual hunger for love, assurance, purpose etc )
We then referred to the fact that Jesus is the answer to this emptiness - He Himself said "I am the bread of life" We looked at how the sheep probably got very hurt and how we also get hurt from various experiences in life - abuse rejection etc. Jesus said "I have come to heal the broken hearted" And various other things we also loooked at.

At the end of the message we made an appeal for anyone who wanted to come back to God and follow Him with the rest of their lives.

There were two that responded outwardly and here in the photo is Dana, one of those, being embraced by her father who is already a member in the church.

They held each other for a long time and wept.

It was a priviledge to be at that moment in her life and that of her family.

Pastor Mark

Chris Elston

We were pleased to have Chris Elston again with us at the church in Gotesti.

Chris has a teaching English ministry in Emanuel church in Cahul.

Around 80 students come in various groups and many then go on to come to the church regularly.

We were just at their end of term Christmas party when a great time was had by all.

Chris came on a visit to us in Gotesti and preached on Sunday morning.

His message was on the grace of God. God demonstrated how much he loves us by giving His only Son to die for us while we were still sinners - Is there therefore, anything good He will withhold from us if already gave us the best he has - his own Son. Many were touched by the timely reminder of His grace.

Ion Manica, a former student of our bible school was also with us along with his wife Irina.

He is from the village of Tartarul and the church there meets in his house. It's been hard work for them for many years and yet his message was from the Psalms about being thankful in all things. It encouraged us all as we all know how difficult things are for them.

Pastor Mark

Physically Disabled Meeting

A couple of weeks ago we had an intimate meal for our physically disabled members and church regulars.

Bottom right of picture is Nicu who has been blind from very early childhood and who was the first physically disabled person to get saved and become a member in our church.

Further up on the same side are Fedea and Gheorghe twins who have a degenerative disease that makes it very difficult for them to walk.

Having said that, they walk to church every Sunday for the meetings - takes them about an hour for a 10 min walk for the able bodied.

In this photo the physically disabled minsitry team are standing behind Fedea and Gheorghe.

The lady on the left wearing the hat is Valea. She is was that provided the food for the meal - a gift in celebration of her birthday although it was about a month early.

Interestingly hers is the one birthday of all our church members that I consistently remember because it is on the same day as mine.

Pastor Mark

Funeral at Moscovei

I was recently invited to preach at a funeral in the town of Moscovei.

The man who had died was a member in the church there but many years before his repentance he was a much respected brigade leader when the coountry was communist.

Thus the church were expecting many people to turn out for his funeral and indeed they did.

In Moldovan evangelical funerals the body is kept in an open casket and the procession starts from the house. This is where I had the privilidege of speaking. I shared how the body dies but not the soul, the person we are inside. We spoke of the Bible's teaching that there are 2 places after death and we will spend eternity either in heaven or in hell. I shared that both Vanya ( the dead man ) and his wife Ania knew before he died that they both will be in heaven and so they will one day meet again with joy. I explained that in 1 John5:13 we are told we also can know this for certain before we die if we put our trust in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.

Under communism evangelical churches were not permitted to preach the gospel publically except at funerals and weddings which is probably why they use the opportunity to preach several times throughout the funeral service to the many unsaved that come.

We walked from the house to the graveyard and stopped at various points to share the gospel. Here Sergiu the pastor of Moscovei Baptist church is speaking to the crowd as they stopped outside the church building. I cannot tell you what he was preaching as he spoke in Russian ( indeed my message was translated into Russian also, as, for most people in the village Russian is their first language). ( Moscovei is often called little Moscow by locals)

Mari was very poorly at home so I did not go all the way with them to the graveyard but they insisted that they feed me before I went so I sat down in the newly built canteen that they have for the vulnerable children's ministry and ate a lovely bors.

While I was eating the lady in this picture approached me - her name is Masa. She asked me if I remembered a mission that we did in 1996 in the cultural house in Moscovei. I said I remembered it well ( we had to get a translator to come from Chisinau, the capital, as Russian translators in the South were hard to find) I also said that we had done the mission at the cultural house in the centre of Moscovei and that a lot of people came every night of the mission but during the whole week only one person came out to the front in response to daily appeals to repentance. She said "Yes that is true - I am at that person" Despite a very hard life both before and after her commitment to Christ she is a member in the church and has been going on with God and serving Him ever since.

Go knows how to encourage us

Pastor Mark

Alpha Course

Our winter Alpha course began on 30th October and we are now into the 5th week. The numbers have again been good this year with 50-70 coming each week.

We have had groups from Cantemir, Porumbesti, Badicu, Chircani and Gotesti as before and this year Dorin Moga who is responsible for the church at Baurcii has been bringing seekers each week.

As in all Alpha courses there is a meal to start with and we serve pizzas in our course which seems to go down well with everybody. There has been so many questions over the weeks that we decided to add an extra topic for this week - Repent and Believe. In the message we spoke of how we can never make ourselves good enough for God by good works on our part because He is perfect and our sins will not permit us to come into His presence but that He has resolved this Himself by putting all our sins and their judgment on Jesus His Son on the cross. We then explained how we need to put our trust in this work that Jesus did on the cross and thereby be counted righteous by God ( or counted as if we had never sinned ). Then we looked at how the Bible says we also need to repent and what that means i.e giving our whole lives over to Christ and committing ourselves with the Holy Spirit's help to obey Him in everything.

The message was followed by splitting into groups to discuss what we had heard.

Here Ruslan is with the group from Baurcii - some were hearing this message for the first time.

I helped lead Lucian's group from Badicu and was very encouraged about how open and honest they were about the state of their souls.

They all seemed to have grasped about repentance meaning making Jesus Lord of your life and were honest about the reasons they had not made the committment yet.

We'd value your prayers for these ones and the others as they consider these big decisions for their lives

Pastor Mark

Progress with Chircani Building

We thank God, that with His enabling, and your support we are making progress with the Chircani building.

This is phase 1 we are working on which is replacing the roof.

As you can see the facia has been stripped to the brick and the roof top removed.

The double glazed windows have been fitted for quite a while.

Unfortunately as we began the work of roof replacement we discovered that there was more needing done than the original drawings required in terms of underpinning and raising coulmns which has added to the expense substiantially but the weather has remained kind and it has meant that if we do not run out of money we may indeed get phase 1 completed before the winter sets in which was our objective.


This is Avram whom many of you know. He is a member at Gotesti church and a very experienced and wise master builder - like Bezalel Ex 35:30,31- Avram is our foreman on the site at Chircani . He has been a real provision of the Lord as there has been a lot of specialist work needed regarding underpinning and columns etc and he has been that man.

We have had between 5 and 7 people working on site including a watchman.

If we finish this phase before winter then we hope to start phase 2 in the Spring which would be outside plastering and inside meeting room and hopefully 2 Sunday school rooms .

This architect's picture is the goal we are all working towards

Thanks for all your support

Pastor Mark

P.S Latest - we have started on the roof itself see photo