Kragujevac and a Men's Breakfast

Yesterday, Friday, Lee and I travelled with Vlada to Kragujevac which is in central Serbia, right in the heart of the nation.  It is the fourth largest city in Serbia and is well known for two events.  It was occupied by the Germans in WW2 in April 1941.  The local communist party decided to start an uprising against this. As a reprisal the Germans in 2 days shot more than 7,000 men including many boys.  There is a memorial to this event that we saw.

Then in April 1999 during the troubles here NATO bombed the Zastava car factory destroying it totally. 38,000 people lost their jobs overnight.  You can imagine the financial impact that had.  Now just recently Fiat have taken over the factory, but if you would like an old Zastava or Yugo car or spare parts, this is the place to be.  The streets are full of them.

We met with Ivan and Adriana in their home. Ivan is a former drug addict who gave his life to Jesus six years ago. He now runs a half way house helping drug users seek help from their addiction. He also runs a second hand clothes shop. Anything with English things on,  Union flag, names of music groups, etc. sells straightaway he says.  Adriana works at the Fiat factory. Together they gather people in their house and just recently nine people have their lives over to Jesus.  We talked together and prayed that God move more powerfully in this large city, said our farewells and headed for home.

Then this morning, we were up and about ready for the men's breakfast at 9.30.  An ample supply of bacon rolls was provided washed down with thin yoghurt to drink.  We worshipped, many of the songs we knew, and then Lee spoke really well about taking risks for Jesus.  He brought his talk alive telling us of the first time he made a bungee jump.  Definitely not for the feint hearted! Then we prayed for the guys, asking God they would be risk takers and bringing encouraging prophetic words to them.  We finished just after 12 and then it was time for us to walk into the centre of Niš and sit and have a coffee.

One thing I wanted Lee to see was the inside of an Orthodox Church. So we went to the local church.If you  have never been inside one it is an experience.  It is very brightly decorated with the paintings in a set style of Jesus, the disciples, events from the New Testament but also with Mary and her baby son and many, many saints.  There are no seats. You stand. People come and go all the time lighting candles, bowing low to the many icons and kissing them.  The Orthodox Church is tied to the State, so though few people go to church, the church receives money from the State and can therefore afford fine buildings etc.  To change from the Orthodox faith is seen as a denial of your nationhood, that you no longer wish to be Serb or Greek or whatever and you are in many cases made outcast from your family. This is the battle the local church has here in seeing people becoming added to them.

With a team from the Czech Republic having arrived this morning (they drove all the way in a minibus for 12 hours) we have vacated our room at the church building and are now installed in a small hotel for 2 nights.  Tomorrow I speak in the morning and we will have our last meeting with the
leaders so that on Monday we are ready to go south to Skopje, Macedonia.  There we meet Sasha and Marija and are ready for the next part of our journey.

Our love from Lee and me.

Corinth and the Edict of Milan

One of the joys of being in the Balkans is that you are not far from where the New Testament letters were written and where the early church was started. Thessaloniki for example is a few hours bus ride from here. Next week when we are in Macedonia and Albania we will be even nearer. So the culture here is much closer to that of Paul's day then we experience in Northern Europe.  This makes it fascinating for me and makes the words in scripture come alive. Events are much easier to imagine being here.
This morning Vlada led a fairly in depth bible study of the first nine verses of 1 Corinthians.  The group were reading from their Cyrillic script Bibles while I read along from my iPad.

Afterwards, Lee and I went for a walk to the local open air fruit and veg market. It is only 24 C here,  so people are still wrapped up in their winter coats, apart from us, who are enjoying this heat wave! Last year it reached 48 C to tell you how hot it can get.  The stalls are already laden with fresh locally outdoor grown lettuces, radishes, spring onions and potatoes. In addition there are all the other salad vegetables that have been brought on under plastic, tomatoes, chillies and so on.

Then a walk around the Niš fortress, the remains of a Turkish fort with walls 8 metres high and 3 metres thick. Niš is a university city and so it is full of young people from the city and surrounding area who have come here to study.

The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (photo above) was born here in Niš and in 313 he issued the Edict of Milan when Christianity was given equal  status with other religions in the Roman Empire. So this year 1700 years on, they are celebrating the Edict here in Niš.  Vlada has been approached by an Orthodox priest  to obtain Bibles and put them into the schools. Such an approach and openness to putting Bibles into state schools like this is unprecedented in Vlada's experience. So now we are meeting Vlada and another leader from Belgrade to talk this through.

Tomorrow we are of to a new church that has started in Kragujevac. But that is another day.

Lee and Ken

According to plan...

There are times when I like things to go according to plan.  Yesterday was one of those days. We left Heathrow on time with JAT airlines flying direct to Belgrade. On landing the captain must have thought he was a formula 1 driver.  I believe we were doing over 100 mph taxiing to the airport. I have never been so fast in a plane that was not about to take off! So we arrived on time, straight through immigration, bags duly arrived, changed a small amount of money, and then caught a bus with no fuss straight to the city centre. I chose the hotel we stayed in because it is right opposite the main railway station where the airport bus stops. 100 yards to the hotel and they were expecting us! All according to plan! And joy on joy. It was warm! I have not felt warmth like this since last summer!

Lee and I enjoyed our breakfast this morning. There was a choice of 3 types of breakfast , or you could have your pick from all three!! Southern European, fruit juices, fruit, yoghurt, cheese, meat, breads and wonderful pastries; Slav style, black bread, more meat, sausages, pickles, or English with bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, fried eggs sunny side up, and toast and marmalade tea and coffee. Guess what we had?

Then we went for a short stroll taking in the train station before Vlada arrived. He then walked us up, up, up to a high point in Belgrade to Kalemegdan Park which overlooks where the river Sava joins the river Danube on its long journey to the Black Sea.  It is a favourite place for the locals to walk especially in the warm summer evenings.  Vlada got very passionate about Serbia when I asked him how it felt to be Serbian after the breakup of Yugoslavia and see this once proud nation held together by Tito, crumble into its many parts.

Back to the car through the pedestrian shopping areas and then on our way south to Niš, a two and a half hour journey. As I mentioned before, this road is a main route south to Greece or east to Turkey and so the toll road was full of trucks. Now we are installed in the church building where we sleep and stay for the next few days until a Czech group arrive this weekend. 

Come 5 pm, Miloš the worship leader took us to a restaurant to eat real Serbian food. Lee and Miloš tucked into pork with cheese while I sampled the local, very long, very spicy sausages. Very good. We will definitely go back there! Over the meal Miloš picked our brains and experience on forming and leading teams, with loads of questions. Do you have ground rules, how do you build team, how and when do you delegate responsibilities, what if you make mistakes, how do you correct people and so on. Time flew by. Now we are back in our room and writing and emailing.

It is exciting to be here and we are looking forward to the days ahead. Do keep praying for us as we look forward to seeing God move in this pioneering situation.

Lee and Ken

Serbia

 
Today I am on my way with Lee Layton-Matthews, one of our pastors, to Beograd, the capital of Serbia. I have been to Serbia just once before in April last year with Ann. This led to me be asked to return and spend a week here. Today should be a simple matter of getting there and finding our accommodation. Tomorrow we will be met by Vlada who with his English wife Sonja, run a church in Nis in the south of Serbia.

Just a bit of history. Serbia is the part that is left of what was Yugoslavia. As soon as communism fell, then Yugoslavia which had been a federation, quickly split into its separate parts. Slovenia, now part of the EU, broke away, then Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia Herzegovina and lastly Kosovo, leaving Serbia. 

The country is landlocked but has the river Danube run through the capital Beograd (Belgrade) on its way to the Black Sea.  The main tourist image and attraction in Belgrade is the Orthodox Church of St Sava, pictured above. It is the largest Orthodox Church in the Balkans and holds 10,400 people. Though you stand up in Orthodox services and are not seated! It overlooks the whole city.

Serbia is the only European country which officially has two alphabets the Latin one we write in, and the Cyrillic. Niš where we will stay has a population of about 183,000 and we will be going also to Kragujevac with 150,000, the 3^rd and 4^th largest Serbian cities. The population is 90% Orthodox.  So building a non-Orthodox church is a huge challenge.  I look forward to the challenges that lie ahead.

Please pray for us both. This is the first time Lee will have been to Serbia, to a Slav country, and to an Orthodox country that has a distinct Christian heritage differnt from anything he will have encountered before.

Ken

 

Terminal

I am with Liam, our Youth pastor here in Tallinn the capital of Estonia. It is 59 degrees north, a bit further north than Inverness and Aberdeen, as far north as parts of Alaska, so the days are short. (Or if you are in the southern hemisphere, further south than anywhere in South America or New Zealand.) We have had a couple of days here for Liam to see a few sights and get the feel of the culture of Estonia, (the apostle Paul did that in Athens) so that he was all the better equipped when meeting last night with the young people from the main Pentecostal church at their meeting called Terminal.  The photo is of Virge who comes from Estonia and was part of our church, Liam and the youth pastor Ivo. 

It was brilliant. Excellent worship, then Liam spoke and there was a really good response to what he brought. Liam was straight to the point, "tell your friends about Jesus, as He can change their life", "you are God's messenger to many". We had a good time with their youth pastor Ivo and his wife and we will meet up again on Monday just before we fly home.

Now today, Saturday we are travelling 4 hours, inc a short ferry journey, to Kuressaare Virge's home town where we speak first on local radio, then have lunch with the pastor Alur and his wife Marvi at their home, then talk to church leaders, have tea and then meet the young people from the church.

Here is Liam with Tiina who translated for us and Walter who runs the radio station.  Tomorrow we speak at the Sunday morning meeting. I am blogging this whilst having breakfast of rice pudder, rice porridge, like rice pudding and coffee. Sophia, Mike and Virge's daughter is gurgling and making noises as 1 year olds do. At the same time I am reading our names in the Kuressaare newspaper. Liam is billed as the "noortepastor" , youth pastor, pronounced naughty pastor!

Please pray that we have an effective time here in Estonia.

Sunday lunch in Kukes

 

This is my first attempt at writing my blog using Blogsy. Any errors blame me

The photo above is of the whole kid that was placed on the table along with several types of goats cheese, salads, chips and corn bread for us to devour.

 

This second photo perhaps gives you a clearer idea of some of the spread. No that is not HP sauce in the bottle but beer from Korca.

Sitting down to eat was Nadi and Sofi, Ida, her sister Mira, Elsa, Nida, Nadi's sister from Michigan, Gezim, who gave me a bottle of local blackberry raki, Elsa, another girl and Ann and me. So here is a photo of the girls after our meal. What you cannot tell from the photo is that we are half way up a mountainside overlooking a huge reservoir with mountains surrounding us and the hot air from the mountains blowing down on us. The temperature was 43C, but fortunately we were in the shade.

So we have from l to r Ann, Sofi, Ida, ?, Elsa and in front Mira and Nida. After lunch it was time to go back to the hotel, shower, have a rest and get ready for the evening wedding party. You will appreciate that for the girls to get ready took a while. Ida said she would be ready for about 8, but when I phoned her just after 8 the girls were still at the hairdressers!!

Then it was off to the final wedding celebration along with 300 other friends and relatives! An evening of dancing, eating, singing and celebration until 3 in the morning. More to follow..

 

 

Final wedding party!

After lunch on the Sunday afternoon it was time to return to our hotel and a bedroom that is air conditioned-wonderful! A chance to cool down, have a shower and a brief rest before getting ready for the final event. The wedding parties started last Wednesday! We were collected and taken with Ida to the final wedding party with 300 people present. Food was already laid out on the table and the eating and drinking and dancing began. If you have ever been to a disco or similar then you will have experienced when the noise from the sound system vibrates your internal organs. Well it was like that when we walked in the door! There is a formality to the occasion with different family members being seated in the right place and the bride and groom are at a table overlooking the whole proceedings, but they stand up all the time, yes all the time, as a mark of respect to everyone present. The bride looks miserable, which she is supposed to do, as she is leaving her parents home. Part way through the evening her father came with about a dozen other family members. That are clapped as they come in, are seated and fed whole roast lamb, exchange pleasantries with the grooms family and them after a while leave, again to applause. The women's dresses are a sight to behold. Only photos will do them justice. All the women on our table had 2 dresses for the wedding party that night and changed half way through the evening. Sofi, declared that she had bought 10 dresses with her for all the wedding events. As the women are all dark haired and darker skinned than Ann, they wore vibrant colours. Silver, gold, orange, crimson red, royal blue, purple and so on. I am told they are bought on line or in Albania or I know they are easily obtainable in Kosovo only a few miles away where dresses come from Iran and Turkey. The dancing, similar to Greek style, is done holding hands in a circle always moving anti clockwise. You never dance on your toes, it is always with a flat foot to the ground. Different men and women lead the dancing, sometimes it is the fathers friends who dance, then the mothers friends and so on. Songs are sung to the music all the time. At specific times the groom and then the bride and groom dance in the middle of the room and they are showered with money, notes, no coins! Food keeps coming and drinks are replenished immediately. Eventually at 2.30 am the bride and groom leave and go to his parents house for the night. And this is where they live until they go to a house the groom will provide. If he had insufficient money, then they would live with his parents and the bride would be at the mother in laws beck and call. That is the custom in Albania and has been for centuries. This results in families building many storied houses, 4 stories is common, with parents living on one level and their sons with wives on other levels. And so to bed! Hot and tired. But up in the morning and after breakfast, topped up my mobile phone (I have an Albanian SIM card), and then had coffee with Nadi, Sofi's husband who had kindly booked us a seat on the bus back to Tirana. Kukes and the mountains and the stifling heat were left behind with memories of a wonderful wedding and new people we had met. PS the blog has been written from my iPad which is great in one way in that like now I am using a hotel wi-fi to send this and I don't have to hunt for an Internet cafe. The down side is that I haven't yet worked out how to add pictures to a blog when sending from the iPad. From a computer no problem, just down load photos from our camera and then up load them to the blog. So sorry no photos as yet as we have been on the move from event to event and meeting one person to the next,without getting to an Internet cafe. But photos will be added. Love to you all, Ken and Ann