A New Vision For Ministry

A new church home

What do you see when you look at the above picture? Some see an old building in need of repair. Others see a vacant structure that has out lived its original purpose. The Brethren Church in Trinec see a ministry hub that will help them reach their city for Christ!

What a joy it was to walk through the Brethren Church's new building last Thursday afternoon. Much work is needed before they can move in, but everyone is excited about how God can use this new tool for ministry. Click on the picture above to see a slideshow of the building and the many residential flats that surround it.

The generosity of the people of New Covenant helped make this vision a reality. We collected over $30,000 for the purchase of the building! One person who doesn't even attend their church contributed to the project. It's exciting to see how God has provided resources to fund His vision for ministry.

The church is committed to use this facility as an outreach center into the surrounding neighborhood. Pray that God would bless their efforts as they seek to bring Jesus to children and families in Trinec, Czech Republic. It's a privilege and honor to be able to come alongside this church as they seek to impact their culture for Christ.

The church in Trinec is being built one person at a time. God is building His church around the world. He is giving people a heart for the lost and a new vision for ministry.

Truth Prevails

John Huss

In a recent poll, the Czech people voted John Huss as one of the people they most admired. John Huss was born in Bohemia in 1371. He was a Catholic Priest and Rector of Charles University in Prague. He also preached to the poor in the chapel of Bethlehem in Prague. Huss translated Wycliffe's works into Czech; and exposed superstitions, fraudulent miracles and the sale of indulgences within the Catholic Church.

In 1414 Huss was summoned to the Council of Constance to answer false charges of heresy. Although guaranteed safety, Huss was burned at the stake in 1415 after a mockery of a trial. After Huss's martyrdom his followers organized military resistance to the Holy Roman Empire and fought under Huss's motto: "truth prevails".

Today, the Czech Republic has adopted "Truth Prevails" as their national motto. The Czech people pride themselves as being intellectual seekers of truth. Today, a new revolution is needed in the Czech Republic. Not a violent or velvet revolution, but a revolution of the soul. This movement is in need of a new kind of revolutionary - men and women who have had a life-transforming encounter with the God of Truth and who infiltrate business, villages, neighborhoods, cafe's and the public square with the message of freedom!

There is much work to do in the Czech Republic. Communism, secularism and materialism have a firm grip on the heart and soul of the Czech people. But planted strategically in this atheist country there is a small band of Christ followers quietly preparing an uprising. God is on the move and He is at work in the lives of people. The wind of the Spirit of Truth is beginning to stir. The battle is on. The enemy is engaged. Truth prevails!

I have chosen the way of truth; I have set my heart on your law. I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free. Psalm 119:30, 32

Partnering Together for the Gospel

Cindy Howard

It seems hard to believe that our time in Trinec has just about come to a close. How can that be possible? We just arrived. Once again, God has done above and beyond all that we could ask or think. We have absolutely loved seeing Cindy in the Czech culture. During a sharing time this evening with the Elders and their wives, Cindy expressed that she was going to be sad to see us leave. Three women immediately told Cindy, "You belong to us, you are now here!" Trinec is now Cindy's home. Pray that she will be able to learn the language as soon as possible in order to build relationships and make friends.

The Leadership Training seminar on Friday and Saturday was well received. On Saturday evening we had dinner with several people that Ed and Christine had met at the Business/English Camps. By the end of the evening two single women and one young couple told us that they would like to come to church with us on Sunday. This is quite unusual as most people do not attend church or value spiritual things.

All four showed up today at church. I preached on the life of Joseph. Over the course of the morning we learned that this was the first church service the one couple had ever attended. They were excited when I began speaking about Joseph, as they had see the Prince of Egypt movie! We pray that all four will come to place their faith in Christ.

This afternoon and evening we spent time with the Elders and their families. We had a great time of fellowship, wonderful dinner and supper, a casual walk, a question and answer time regarding the information we had covered over the weekend, and a wonderful time of prayer. One of the Elders said he has realized this weekend that the church needs to look at lost people differently. The church needs to break down walls that separates them from people and build friends with unbelievers. Under communism the church was persecuted and marginalized. Even in 1983, eight members of their church were put in jail. He said that now that they have freedom, they need to stop being afraid, and be more open with their faith.

During our Q and A session we talked about adult Sunday School or ABFs (they have never heard of anything like it), women's ministry, the role of food and refreshments :o), how we became interested in the Czech Republic and their church in particular, and the Love and Respect marriage seminar that Ed and Christine have taught before.

As we prepare to leave, it is clear that God has given us a special relationship with this group of believers. They are brainstorming and planning already about the renovation of their new building so that they can move in as soon as possible. They were making plans even this evening in preparation for their first day of work on the building tomorrow. The Trinec Church sends their thanks to New Covenant for our generous financial gift that helped make this dream a reality.

Over the past several days we have made new friends and strengthened old ones. Our love for one another has deepened. It's a joy and priviledge to partner together for the sake of the gospel!

We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. 1 Thessalonians 2:8

Servant Leadership Training

It's 11:15 PM Czech time so this post will be rather short. Ed and I enjoyed accompanying Bronek to his conversational English lesson. We met with Adam and Tadek at their place of work for a 1 1/2 lesson. Tadek owns a company that specializes in currency trading and exchange. We learned about their families, hobbies, and business. It was a facinating conversation.

This evening I shared from Mark 10:35-45 on Servant Leadership. There were at least five pastors and 40 people in attendance. It was a much larger turn out than I had expected. The picture above was taken at the training seminar. Pastor Marek is the person closest to the camera on the left. He is the pastor of the Brethren Church in Trinec.

Sharon accompanied Cindy to her English class and talked about life on a farm growing up in Iowa. Sharon and Cindy also spent some time in prayer together, walking around the neighborhood where their new church is located. It has been so good spending time with Cindy in the Czech culture.

Continue to pray for us. We have two more training sessions tomorro; one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Pray that what we have to share about casting and implementing vision, and strategic planning will be helpful to the churches here. Pray for clarity of communication as we speak through an interpreter. Tomorrow evening we will be meeting with some of the business people from camp, many of whom do not know the Lord. Pray for that time of interaction. I will be preaching on Sunday morning, so pray that God would speak His truth through me.

The Luebe's and Pagel's feel honored to be able to represent New Covenant Bible Church on this trip. Thank you for your prayer support.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Prague Train Station

We arrived safely in Trinec this afternoon after an 8 hour flight, 5 hour train ride and an interesting taxi tour of the back streets of Prague on our way to the train station! I took this picture as we boarded the train this morning. We arrived just in time to board with all our luggage, so that meant no posing for pictures!

It was so good to see Cindy when we arrived. Sharon and I are staying with Cindy in her apartment. Larissa fixed us an awesome Czech meal this evening. We were so honored. Their little kitchen/dining room can only seat five so they served us first and Bronek and Larissa and their three children ate after we finished. Bronek and Larissa are missionaries with International Messengers. Bronek is also an elder in the Brethern Church that we are partnering with and helps set up the English/Business Camps that we help teach each summer.

Tomorrow we will be accompanying Cindy and Bronek to the English classes that they each teach. And the first training session with church leaders begins tomorrow evening. Please pray that we would be a blessing and that the things we share will be useful to the churches here. Thank you so much for your prayers. We experienced a minimal amount of jet lagg and got a great nigthts sleep last night. It's off to bed and a full day tomorrow.

Leaving Today

We are leaving today for the Czech Republic. As always there are a bunch of last minute details, including updating my blog!

Provided that I have internet connection, I plan to make posts on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Those are the days we will be in Trinec. Ed and I will be training church leaders on Friday and Saturday. We return on Wednesday, October 26.

Please pray for our trip:

• Safety as we travel
• Logistics with flight arrangements and luggage - last January our luggage arrived a day later!
• That we would be an encouragement to Cindy, Bronek and Larisa
• Wisdom for Ed and I as we teach on servant leadership and strategic planning
• That we would be available to serve God's purpose and accomplish what He wants us to do on this trip

Thanks for your prayers. We will be having some people over when we return to debrief, show pictures and share stories of what God is doing. Let me know if you would like to be part of something like this. Talk to you later!

Taking Christ into the Darkness

Christianity Today just posted an awesome article on the evangelical church in Czech Republic and Poland. You can read the entire article here. I am posting excerpts from the article. The Brethren church in Trinec that New Covenant is partnering with is part of the evangelical Brethren Church referred to in the article as one of the only denominations in Czech Republic that is growing. One remarkable survey result is that more Czechs believe in UFOs than in God! Please pray for the Czech people and for the outreach of the church in Trinec.

Common wisdom has it that the Czechs are a nation of atheists, with alcoholics outnumbering evangelicals and more believers in ufos than in God—and this isn't far from the truth. Census data from 1991 and 2001 show that in the decade after communism, the percentage of Czechs who identified as atheist surged from 40 to 60 percent, and a June 2005 Eurobarometer survey from the European Union shows that only 19 percent of Czechs believe in God.
Though priests of all denominations in the Czech Republic still get modest salaries from the government, their churches are increasingly empty. This is in part due to bad press from the most contentious property restitution process in the region. The issue has especially harmed the Roman Catholic Church, which lost a third of its members during the 1990s. Today it continues to press the government for a return of more fields, farms, cloisters, and hospitals, but the increasing perception in society is that the church is greedy.

Karel Taschner, director of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Prague, says that when Czechs speak about the church, they say, "Ah, ah, we know. They want the property."
But decline is not inevitable. Small evangelical and Pentecostal denominations here have seen steady growth even as belief in God has plummeted. The biggest traditional Protestant church—the Protestant Church of the Czech Brethren—lost nearly half its members in the 1990s, but the Apostolic Church (Pentecostal) tripled its number in that same time, as did the evangelical Brethren Church. The renewal movements within Catholicism are growing as well.

According to the Czech Evangelical Alliance, in 2000 there were 545 evangelical congregations in the Czech Republic. The number of Czechs who claimed affiliation with an evangelical church in the 2001 census is 31,299. Though small, these churches have a sense of excitement about the future. Jiri Unger heads the Czech Evangelical Alliance, a group established at the encouragement of John Stott in 1991, and he calls it a privilege to serve in such an atheistic society. "You can influence so much," he says. "So many things are beginning."

Though believers had hoped for greater results in the heady days of 1989, the low numbers have proven to be a strange kind of blessing. The church, so damaged by 40 years of communist oppression, had turned inward and was incapable of receiving an influx of new Christians.

"We were a ghetto that had to preserve Christianity," Unger says. "But we lost a vision for society, how to equip Christians outside the congregation or its meetings. A major goal is to enlarge the vision of the church, because the church is still suspicious of everything public."

After communism collapsed, the upheavals in society produced great personal and political stress. This led to increased reports of depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, marital problems, and burnout. But when people with problems came to local churches, the churches had almost no resources in place to deal with them.

The 1990s therefore became a decade of experimentation and development as the church expanded its mission and structures. One of the first lessons Christians learned was that Czechs are not open to being preached at—but they are open to relational evangelism, they love camps, and they want to speak English like a native. The result? A massive proliferation of English camps run by Christians.

Bradley Kaspar has helped run such a camp full-time for the last two years with the U.S. missionary organization Josiah Venture. "It's common for students to come to camp two or three years before they accept Christ as their Savior," he says. Many of them have never thought much about God or even know the Christian story, so it takes time both to teach and to build vital relationships. "In the end, solid arguments or convincing apologetics do some good, but the overwhelming factor that brings students to Christ is the love they say they see and experience at camp that they've never seen before."

Young believers now fill the pews of the evangelical churches. This new generation of Christians, the first to grow up without a memory of communism, wants to reach out to their peers in a fresh way, but sometimes this leads to conflict.

Not all the news about Czech society is bad: The same E.U. survey that pegged belief in God at 19 percent also shows a great spiritual hunger among the Czechs. Half the respondents said they believe in "some sort of spirit or life force." Disillusioned with traditional religious practice, many Czechs are open to a new way forward, and a new generation is finally ready to show it to them.

The last 15 years weren't supposed to be this hard—but maybe they had to be for the church to move forward. A new generation now fills the pews and is ready to make its voice heard in Europe, a voice that will sing its old song in a new way. Let's hope it will be heard.

Project CR

Trinec is on the eastern border of Czech Republic

We are excited about our upcoming trip to Trinec, Czech Republic as part of a short-term missions team from our church. We will be gone from October 18-26 and will be travel with Ed and Christine Luebe.

The purpose of our trip is to meet with the Elder Board and leadership of the Brethern Church in Trinec. New Covenant has been sending teams for the past five years to assist this church with English/Business Camps. Through the past several years we have explored ways that our two churches could work more closely together. In February 2005 Kim, Ed and two others traveled to Trinec to discuss a formal partnership with them. The result is that our two churches have now entered into a partnership called Project CR. As part of this partnership, New Covenant is committed to send several teams a year to assist the Brethren Church with English Business Camps, Children’s Camps, and leadership development.

This trip will focus on Leadership Development and Strategic Planning. Kim and Ed will be leading training sessions on Friday and Saturday with church leaders from the area. Over the years, the training that the leadership of New Covenant has received has helped us to identify our mission, vision and values. The church in Trinec is very interested in this kind of training in order to learn how to more strategically reach their city for Christ. This type of training is completely foreign to them. Under communism there was no reason for strategic planning. People were told what to do and when to do it.

As an added bonus, we will get to spend time with Cindy Howard who is a missionary from New Covenant and a long-time friend of ours. Sharon is especially looking forward to being with Cindy in various ministry settings, praying with her, and experiencing the Czech culture first-hand.

The Church of Trinec has a bountiful harvest field in front of them. Many of the Czech people have lived through years of forced atheism. What they know of Christianity is inaccurate and irrelevant. A recent global survey published in the Evangelical Missions Quarterly named the Czech Republic as holding the “dubious distinction of being one of the most secular nations on the planet. Most Czechs are either atheists or agnostics. The Jesus Christ of Scripture is almost unheard of, or at best considered a foolish fable of the past. Evangelical Christians would barely account for half of one percent of the population.” Much prayer is needed and God’s power is required in preparing their hearts to receive the Good News and respond in faith.

Please pray for our trip and all the details surrounding it. We are excited about being part of what God is doing in Trinec. You can learn more about the city of Trinec at this link. I hope to post during our trip so check back for trip updates.

And the things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, these entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. 2 Timothy 2:2

Our Czech Team Returns

Sean and Lisa

The Czech Team returned tonight. We are looking forward to hearing what God has done in and through their lives.

Cindy Howard, our missionary who is now living in Trinec, Czech Republic, wrote this report on Sunday: WOW. I don't want to steal the thunder of my teammates... but God truly did exceedingly abundant above all we ask or think. If the people's spiritual level started at 0 degrees (centigrade) or possibly negative... almost everyone moved 30 or 40 degrees warmer to spiritual things. I have no idea how many, but many people are seriously considering the claims of Christ, and what their next step should be. We had a short debriefing yesterday and Bronek said that this was the most successful camp spiritually he had ever seen.

God is so good to allow us to be part of His work in the lives of people, even people half way around the world!

The Most High God

Today our team left for the Czech Republic. They will be leading an English Business Camp while they are there, teaching English, leading Bible reading discussions groups and business seminars. We are excited about this outreach and trust that the Lord will minister through each team member over the course of the next two weeks.

One of the things the team is taking with them is a DVD of the movie Most. Most means "bridge" in Czech. Click on the "Most" link in the previous sentence to see a trailer of the movie. The movie was shot on location in Czech Republic and Poland and is in the Czech language with English sub-titles. The movie shares the powerful message of redemption through a very moving story of a relationship between a father and his son. This is a "must see" movie. It received a 2003 Academy Award nomination for a live action short film. Erin and I saw a screening of the movie at the Origins Conference in May followed by a Q and A time with the two directors, William Zabka and Bobby Garabedian. I believe that God has prepared this movie to help communicate the gospel to the Czech people.

Our team will be showing this moving during the English Business Camp followed by a time of discussion in small groups. Pray that God would use this movie in a unique and powerful way, and that many spiritual discussions would follow. And pray that the Czech people would come to understand the meaning of the "most" important commandment ~ that they would love the Lord their God with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their mind, and with all their strength.