Chircani Vision

This is the centre of Chircani, a village 6Km South of Gotesti where our main church is.

In 1999 we preached the gospel there and the Lord graciously moved in the first meeting saving one of the listeners.

Quickly others were saved as we began to meet there regularly and we soon had 6 members, 20 children and 15-20 adults coming to the meetings. We then began to rent this former grocery shop in the picture where we began to have our meetings.

All went well until 2003 when the owners no longer permitted us to meet there not wanting to rent to Christians.

We already had quite a few children coming to the meetings and so our decision was to transport the adults to our twice weekly meetings in Gotesti but rent two rooms in the local school for the children's groups to meet. Thus things remained until 2008 when a new law was passed that prohibited schools from using their premesis for anything religious.

Around the same time the Lord had been moving amongst the unsaved that we were bringing to the meetings in Gotesti with another 6 becoming members and 20-30 adults coming to the meetings on a regular basis or taking part in an Alpha course that we ran last winter.

Three quarters of this Alpha course group in the picure were from Chircani

So we were in the position of having nowhere to meet even for the children while the Lord was adding numbers to the church and also the children's work. We felt the Lord was saying that we should be moving the church back to Chircani and that we needed to find a suitable building to meet in.

After prayer the Lord showed us the building:-

It was now up for sale and they did not mind selling it to Christians

The Lord confirmed this was the building because of it's soundness of structure, tremendious potential and the fact that a guest who was with us at the time provided a gift to buy the building.

Now the vision for the work and this the building is this;-

We have 2 rooms of 13m * 6m at the front as you look at the picture and 4 of 6.5m * 6m at the back.

In the front right will be our room for the church to meet on Wednesdays and Sundays then in the back will be two Sunday schools rooms, an adolescents\youth room and a sports room while the other long room in the front will be a centre for vulnerable people like children whose parents are away, the physically disabled, the needy etc - a sort of a drop in centre.

There is much work to be done and indeed finance needing to be raised.

Here some of Mission Direct team members are cleaning up the inside of the rooms that had around 6 inches of dirt on the floor from the leeking roof.

We will need to replace the roof and windows, replaster the walls, fit central heating, running water and electrics as well as decorate and equip all the rooms for minsitry and we estimate that the total costs may be as much as 74,000 pounds.

We have been blessed to already have received around 20,000 pds and work has begun. The two children's clubs are already meeting in the room where the church used to meet in the past and the numbers are growing.

When we advertised the restarting of these children's clubs we invited kids from 8-14 to come which they did but around 15 young people between 15 and 23 came also.

Ruslan asked them why they had come and they answered - "What else to do in this village" - we felt this was the Lord encouraging us to know that the youth room and the sports room are His plan and that souls are awaiting us.

Pray for Ruslan and Larisa who will be assisting me as pastor of the church in Chircani while steadily moving into primary responsibility for this church plant.

Larisa is already responsibile for the children's work and Ruslan is already discipling the new believers.

Pastor Mark

Election July 29

This Wednesday, July 29, we will have the second general election in Moldova in as many months.

The communists won the last election amid opposition claims of 20,000 dead people on the electoral register that voted communist and a serious riot the day after in Chisinau.

The communists fell one member of parliament short of being able to have 61 out of 101 votes that would have meant that they could elect their own president. The president has the main power in this country.
The 3 democratic parties had campaigned that they would do no deals with the communists ( as at the previous election some democratic parties voted with the communists after the eection and the communists were able to elect their own president ).
They stood by their word and so new elections were needed.

The picture above is that of Valeriu Ghilecthii who is the outgoing bishop of the Baptist Union ( having served his allowed 2 terms ).
He is standing with the steajarul party although he is not a member and they have given him 11th place in their electoral lists (it is proportional representation here )
His party gained 15 seats I think in the last election and he therefore secured a seat.
We are praying that his party again gets enough votes for him to be elected so that we might have a true man of God in the centre of the parliament for this country of ours here.

Will you pray for this also and that the elections would be fair and true and that there would be no violence before, during or after.

Will you pray that he is light and salt and a flame in the parliament and in our country

Pastor Mark

Karis Pizza update

Our pizza restaurant is going on well.

We're are still hitting the spiritual objectives of meeting and building relationships with new people who would never come into the church as well as work and growth for the Christian staff etc

The summer time is generally more encouraging from a financial perspective as there are generally more customers.

These pictures are of a full day we had when it was the last day of our local school's year. Above are those graduating at the equivalent of A level.

In this picture the boys are ones passing their end of year exams.

It's a big occassion and teachers and pupils alike filled the pizzaria all day.

Here are a group of Americans who had being doing a summer camp in Larga, a nearby village.

They were on their way to Chisinau but Anatol the pastor of the Emanuel church in Cahul told them of us and the vision for the business and they came to eat a pizza each at us by way of supporting the ministry.

This is truly God's blessing and He has been sustaining the business through these kinds of blessings throughout.

We had another group of pastors from Lafayette do a conference in Cahul for all us pastors and they put the order to us - 110 pizzas.

We had further encouragement that on July 12, which is our village carnaval day, we had our biggest takings so far and almost all were from Gotesti.

We met many new people and the day was very busy ( we stayed open until 2.30 am when we normally shut at 10.00pm ). The day was so busy in fact that I did not even have time to take a photo

Keep praying though we still have plenty of discouraging days when we maybe have only one client all day

Pastor Mark

May Baptism

We've been away in the UK for a while and only managed to update with 2 posts hence the lateness of this post for example and the others thatwill shortly follow.

This baptism took place in May.

On the right are twins Gheorghe and Fedea who have physical disablities but they've been coming to the church for some time now aided by the vehcile for the physically disabled that we have.

On the left is Nadina who some of you might recognise as the daughter of Avram.

Here is John Dyson one of the trustees from our mission Moldovan Mission preaching at the baptism.

Our trustees come to us every year at this time and we have in recent times always been able to have a baptism meeting while they are here

This is Sasa who was also baptised and here he is giving testimony at the baptism meeting.

He is from Chircani and was the clearest fruit from the Alpha course that we ran in the winter that saw quite a few respond at various levels from Chircani - please keep praying for them.

In the first week of the Alpha course as all participated in sharing their "experiences of God" Sasa spoke of how when he was in prison in Germany for illegal immigration he cried out to God and not only did God answer by releasing him from prison but he was allowed to stay in Germany and work - quite an answer indeed but it was clear as he spoke that in his thinking this proved that he believed in God ( i.e that God existed ) and that made him a Christian.

It was intersting to see how he became increasingly shaken over the next 2 weeks of the Alpha course as the realisation dawned over him that being a true Christian means having a personal relationship with God and that this has implications on our attitudes and behaviour

Then it was wonderful to see how God worked the following Sunday when he came to the morning meeting.

I was in the middle of a series of preaches on "Forgive one another ..... Eph 4:32" and was speaking on the most difficult aspect - "giving forgiveness when it is not asked for"

I was sharing a personal experience where as a new Christian I had lent the friend of a friend a substantial amount of money to pay a debt to save him from going to prison.

He escaped prison but after a few months refused to keep up with repaying the loan.

Now I was hurt and angry with this and struggling to forgive but I knew the scripture taught me to do so. As I sought the Lord for a solution He spoke to me out of the book of Philemon.

In this book Paul is writing to Philemon's about Philenon's slave Onesimus.

It seems Onesimus had run away from Philemon and got to Paul who had then led him to the Lord and he had become a very useful servant of Paul who wanted Philemon to permit Onesimus to remain with him. Obviously he could not do this without Philemon's permission and as he writes for this permission Paul says

"...if he owes you anything charge it to my account ... I will repay and a little later he says "not to mention that you owe me your very own life"

Now imediately Jesus spoke it to me "Mark, if William ( not his real name ) owes you anything charge it to my account not to mention that you owe me your own life"

This of course immediately broke me - everything I have and own belongs to Jesus including all my money and if He wants to waste His money on William then that His problem. And the price Jesus paid for me? I couldn't even think about the debt that I needed to cancel in comparison.

So this of course was the grace from God that I needed to be able to charge this debt to Jesus's account and leave it all in His hands and forgive William which came easily ( since he didn't now owe me any money.)

The relevance:- Sasa was in exactly the same position at that very moment. He had lent a sizeable amount of money ( in Moldovan terms ) to a "friend" to get him out of trouble who was now refusing to pay it back and on that very day Sasa was planning to get some mates from Chircani and go to the guy and beat him up until he paid back the money.

So now the practical implications of a personal relationship with God became very real to Sasa - would he obey or not.

Well praise God he went home and commited the whole thing to God forgiving and releasing the "friend" and instantly found release for himself and a great joy from God in return.

He came back the next Sunday still full of this joy and asking how he might give his whole life to God. We led him to the Lord before the meeting started with an equal amount of joy.

He's still on fire.

Pastor Mark

Meeting the veterans

After the war memorial day we felt it would be good to visit the remaining veterans or widows and bring an aid packet.

There were 4 veterans and 6 widows still alive in our village.

This man has been blind for 5 or 6 years but was very lucid and spoke some moving stories of his war experience.

However like all the veterans and widows we visited he spoke more of the harrowing experiences of the famine that took place after the war in Moldova.

This widow spoke of how they had to try to hide their wheat harvest as the Russians came to Moldova and took all the harvest to tkae back to Russia.

Three of her siblings died of starvation.

Unbelievably they ate weeds every day - to fill their stomachs.

They even searched out the mouse nests to see if any wheat had been stolen and stored by the mice.

Others told of a rich family in the village that would sell a golden spoon for a loaf of bread and went through all their riches during this time to keep the family alive.

I wonder how much of this news got through to the post war West?

Pastor Mark

Remembering the war heros

To-day, 9th May ,was a day for remembering those were lost or suffered loss in the wars that have affected Rep of Moldova over the years.

The one primarily remembered of course was the second world war.

From Gotesti 240 young men went to war and 93 did not come back.

The mayor of our village was there to lead proceedings and Anton, the priest of the Orthodox church spoke a word honouring those who fought and gave their lives for the freedom of Moldova

I am glad to say that the mayor had the monument repainted for the occassion - those of you that have been here will remember it as an oxidising green colour an unintentional testimony to a lack of remembrance.

There are only 4 surviving veterans and 8 surviving widows of the 240 and here 87 yr David Ion is speaking of his experiences.

He was called into the war as an 18yr old and within a short period of time was shot in the arm as he colleaugue beside him lost his life in the same attack .

A tank attack some time afterwards saw him suffer 2 broken legs and he was invalided out of the war.

Children from our local school did a programme of songs and poems and then inundated him with flowers

A volley of shots honoured those who had died and then

the local children came and laid a wreath.

It was a dignified occassion and I was blessed to see that the mayor, when he mentioned the names of the remaining veterans and widows, did not need to look at his notes.

Remembrance - love's last gift

Pastor Mark

Simple family simply satisfied

This is Valera with his wife of 48 years.

She has had heart problems, blood circulation problems and arthritis for over 20 years.

He has quietly nursed her over all these years doing nearly all the work in the house and garden as well as trying to eek out a living.

He comes every Sunday to the meeting. She is not able to because of her disablities although we plan to get her to the odd special meeting now we have the car for the physically disabled.

Thanks to the help of many of you out there we were able to bring a sack of aid ( rice, pasta sugar etc ) and a sack of flour.

They were emotional and thankful for God's kindness. And we were moved especaily regarding Valera, a simple man who is content and has no complaints about his lot in life even though at 70 he is a full time carer for his wife with a pension of about 30$ per month.

You can't buy that kind of contentment.

Pastor Mark