Ane, left, and Mandy share a hug after her baptism

The process of winning someone to Christ in Europe is typically a long one. The soil is hard and plowing it takes time. Missionaries serving here cling to Galations 6:9, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” Ane, in Macedonia, is proof of that.

Ane likes coffee and music so when the Christian coffee house run by IMB missionaries hosted a concert four years ago, she came. She saw a tract sitting on a table and asked missionary Mandy Davis about it. Mandy was able to share the entire Gospel presentation with her. It was the first time she had ever heard the truth about Jesus. When Mandy asked if she’d like to study the Bible with her she said she would.

“It is very rare to meet someone for the first time and get all the way from ’nice to meet you’ to ‘yes, I would love to study the Bible with you’ so I was thrilled,” Mandy said.

But the rest of the process wouldn’t be so speedy. Melanie and Karen, Mandy’s teammates, began studying with her. Even though they both met with her a couple of times a week, she was hungry for even more.

These three women shared their lives with her over the next four years—sharing traditional recipes, cooking together, going to coffee, introducing her to the true Jesus of the Bible, feeding her insatiable hunger for the Word and rejoicing with her as she adopted her first child.

Ane continued to say, “I believe. I believe,” but she remained steeped in superstitions taught by the Orthodox Church including taking food to dead loved ones, sprinkling her new baby with holy water every night so she wouldn’t get sick and making sure she did good things to out-weigh the bad.

Mandy and the other girls continued to press the issue of being saved by faith through the grace of God, but it was a hard thing for Ane to comprehend.

“God’s grace was a completely new concept to her, knowing God on an intimate personal level was a new concept to her, being saved and forgiven once for always was a whole new concept for her,” Mandy said.

As these missionary women shared scripture and life with her, she began to question everything from her past. Eventually, after studying the book of Mark she asked if she could be baptized, a huge step for an Orthodox person who is baptized as a baby. She had come to understand that her salvation was through Jesus, not the Orthodox Church.

One day, sitting in her mom’s house, she looked at Mandy with tears in her eyes and said, “Before you, Karen and Melanie came here, I was like a lost sheep.  My whole life, I wanted to know God. I believed He was there, but I was just wandering around looking in all of the wrong places trying to find Him. Then you came and told me the truth. You showed me He is my shepherd and my savior.”

Last May, she was baptized along with her husband. They are both growing, and she is praying for more and more people to know Jesus in her city of Ohrid. Recently she took Mandy with her to a friend’s home to help her share the Gospel. They spent four hours sharing with her friend and her family.  On the way home, Ane looked at Mandy and said, “I just want more people to know. We have to pray for more and more people to be saved.”

It took four years for Ane to understand her need and Jesus’ provision. But thanks to Mandy and her teammates being patient and willing to persevere, now Ane will know an eternity with Him.

“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:9

To learn more about ministry opportunities in Ohrid, e-mail Brian Davis at brianandmandy@gmail.com.

Vysoke Myto summer camp volunteers

When Harold Johnson recently flew to the States to speak to a church about his ministry in the Czech Republic, he was asked to whom, specifically, did he want to speak. His response? The widows and the third graders.  Sound like an odd response? Not the cutting edge crowd of 20-somethings, or the successful and influential 40-somethings? Not even the excited and edgy students?

No, said Harold. What he needs is prayer, and widows and children pray.

“I’m in a battle,” said Harold.  “I need prayer 24/7”

Harold and his family have learned the importance of prayer from living in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic for the past eight years. Czech is one of the most secular countries in Europe, with sixty percent of its population claiming no religion at all.

Anyone who has been exposed to church has heard about it in a negative context.

Once when in the states, he visited nursing homes and asked to see the widows. He enlisted 3 of them as his prayer warriors.  Harold now has 24 people who are praying for his family and their ministry every single day.

“I know there’s nothing magical about having people pray every day, but I think it honors God.” Harold says. “I think the simple prayer of a child–‘God bless the Johnsons and help people in Czech come to know Jesus,’ is effective and pleasing to God.”

The Johnsons have partnered with a Czech Baptist Church, Vysoke Myto. Together they are trying to reach families for Christ. They are seeking to create “Gospel communities” where the Gospel is lived out and the context of their culture. For Czechs, being a believer in Christ is weird. It is a deviation from the norm of their culture, so it is important to avoid erecting even more barriers to the message of Christ.

“The pull of lostness is huge,” Harold said. “But we find that Czechs have less of a problem with Jesus than they do with the Church.”

So Harold and the Vysoke Myto team have tried to find ways to engage people outside of the church. They have picnics, go on hikes, have cook-outs—“We want to get into their culture instead of inviting them into ours,” Harold says.

One pivotal week, annually, is summer camp, when these families get away from everyday life and live side-by-side with believers. The Johnsons and Vysoke Myto are careful to keep the camp in balance, with an even ratio of believing families to non-believing families. The non-believing families get to see what would it look like if they took a chance and trusted Christ.

Because of the nature of the work and the influence Satan exerts over this unbelieving culture, prayer is necessary and vital.

“Since being on the field, we have been given many resources, but our primary resources as God’s people continue to be prayer and promises,” Harold says. “So we have tried to put one weapon in each hand as we work. We invite others to do the same.”

Harold says that God has a particularly sensitive ear for children and widows and he values that.

‘On one hand, we see that God is delighted by simple and sincere prayer and on the other hand, we see that God is moved by persistent prayer,” he says. “Children and widows seem to be our best partners in the work.”

To find out how you can partner with the Johnson family in the Czech Republic, contact them at haroldandginger@gmail.com.

Yura (left) and Chris discuss ongoing ministry in Moldova

When Yura Deli was just 21 years old he began leading his church. Soon afterward, with a vision to begin a sports ministry, he led his church to buy and renovate a building—paying for half of it through gathering, hulling and cleaning walnuts.  God’s call on Yura’s life has blessed so many. He is just one of the ways God is at work in Moldova.

Yura’s church, called “the station,” is in the village of Budzhak , Gagauzia—an autonomous region of Moldova. IMB missionaries Chris and Nancy Russell have lived in Moldova for many years, working with the Gagauz people. They have been encouraged by God’s call on Yura’s life and have, in turn, encouraged and supported him with their presence, hands-on help and coordination of volunteers.

“We lived in the city of Comrat just south of this village and frequently attended the church services there to encourage the young church,” Chris said.

Volunteer teams that have come through Chris have held many one-day children’s programs, several youth events and week-long clinics for American football.  They have helped with weight training groups and bi-weekly ESL(English as a Second Language) classes, remodeled the sports center and donated weight training equipment to help with Yura’s ministry. Yura has helped Chris with sports and youth outreach projects in the neighboring village of Dezghinzea (Dez-geen-ZHA) where there is no church and has assisted with ongoing discipleship of several youth from this village.

As a result of Yura’s obedience, he and his assistant and fellow church member, Andrei, have seen over 40 boys and young men involved with them over the past four years.

“They seem to come and go because of the requirement of Bible study along with the sports training, but Yura remains committed to this requirement,” Chris said.

Yura is presently working with ten young men, aged 14-27.

“The goal of our ministry is to draw people into Bible study through sports.   For this reason we established some rules without which we couldn’t meet our goal,” Yura said. “ We want to make disciples, not only in sports, but in Bible study, who will be involved in church.”

Yura, who is now married and a father, was saved as a teen.  Though he had begun to take part in leadership of the church as a young man, he did not realize that God had such a big job in store for him.

“I had started to preach and sometimes stand in the pastor, but I didn’t understand that God was preparing me as a minister,” he said.

When circumstances in 2006 left the church with no one to lead, Yura said yes.

“Sadly, there wasn’t anyone else to step in, and I was only 21 years old, but someone had to lead, he said.  “Not knowing a lot about leading services, I turned to God and His Word to guide me. “

And God has accomplished so much through this young man.

To find out more about helping reach the lost of Moldova, contact Chris Russell.

SKOPJE, Macedonia — A few months after Gef Smock was born in Michigan in 1933, she spoke her first words — in the Macedonian language.

But it would be more than 70 years before she would see God use the language she learned from birth to share the Gospel with Macedonian people.

“Sometimes I wonder why He waited until I was in my 70s to call me here, but it’s His timing, not mine,” she said.

Smock, one of the oldest International Mission Board missionaries at age 78, was born to a Macedonian couple living in the United States. Though she grew up fluent in both Macedonian and English, she was ashamed of her Macedonian heritage.

“Sometimes we would be out shopping, and my mother would slip into Macedonian, and I would get so embarrassed. I just wanted her to speak English,” she said.

So when her mother suggested they take a trip to Macedonia when she was 30, she was less than thrilled. “Paris. London. Shakespeare country. I had all these places in Western Europe I wanted to go. Why would I want to visit Macedonia?”

But she did — and she fell in love with it. “God completely changed my heart. They were so warm, they greeted me with flowers, and I loved their culture. Suddenly I was proud to be Macedonian,” she said.

It would still be long time before she made it back there to stay.

She married Donald Smock, a U.S. diplomat, and they lived all over the place — everywhere but Macedonia, it seemed. They adopted two children — one, a daughter from Macedonia — but they never lived there with her. Smock was content in where the Lord took her family, but she always had a fondness for the country that God had led her to love.

Then in 2001, on their 33rd wedding anniversary, Don passed away.

“My kids called thinking they were wishing us a happy anniversary, and I had to say, ‘Your dad died,’” Smock said.

Smock still celebrates their anniversary every year. “I go out with friends, do something special,” she said.

She’s not one to stop loving — or living.

Within a year of his passing, Smock had already answered the tug she’d known had been there for a long time — the call to do missions work overseas.

“Someone told me to go to a missions conference, that it would make me feel better,” she said. “I listened to the missionaries tell stories, and I knew I needed to go. So when they gave the invitation, I walked down.”

She was 70.

People asked, “Are you running away?”

“No,” she said. “No, I wasn’t. I knew this was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. All those years of traveling with my husband had prepared me for this, for what God was going to do with me at this age. I was going to go wherever the Lord led.”

At first, that wasn’t Macedonia. Smock spent three years serving as a high school English teacher for missionary kids in Thailand. And then, through what she said was “the obvious work of God’s hand,” she ended up in Macedonia.

Now she spends her days teaching literacy courses for the Roma people of Skopje, a gypsy people who live in poverty and sift through trash for recyclable materials to sell.

At night, Smock walks the dusty streets of their neighborhoods and talks with Roma families — families like Susana’s.

Susana and her family, like most Macedonian Roma, are nominally Muslim. Also like many Roma, Susana lacks basic education. She is not even able to read or write. As Gef sits and chats with Susana in her meager, cinder-block home, Susana confesses that she considers Gef a mother to her.

“And she’s a daughter to me,” Gef says.

Susana’s teenage son walks in and sits down on the floor, half listening to the conversation.

“How’s the fasting going?” Gef asks him in Macedonian. She knew he had begun fasting for the Muslim month of Ramadan.

“I quit already,” he said with a grin. It was only five days into the fast.

He doesn’t really adhere to Islam, as most of them don’t, but he’s not previously been willing to listen to Smock talk about Jesus, either. That night, he sat and listened as she explained the Gospel in perfect Macedonian for him and for Susana.

“They’re very open now,” Smock said. “We’re going to start in the book of John, and I’m going to read the Bible to her and talk more about how to be saved. I think they are ready to hear.”

It’s these types of relationships Smock is going to have a hard time leaving when she retires in March.

“It has been six great years living among friends and relatives here,” said Smock, who served the first three years serving the Macedonian people and the last three serving the Roma.

She will be resettling in Florida at 79, “starting all over,” she said.

“I don’t want to leave, but I know God is leading me back. He used me here in His timing. Macedonians are my heart.”

“In an extended prayer time a few months ago, the Lord convicted me of the need for “desperate praying” for our affinity,” Mark said. “I know that some are already in this mode but fear that many are simply “praying prayers” and going about business as usual.”

To assuage this desire for consistency, Mark has planned several special emphases throughout this year. The first is a three-day period of prayer and fasting, January 13-15. He is asking all EPAG personnel to participate as well as stateside and prayer partners.

Please consider interceding with EPAG in the following ways:

• Ask for spiritual protection against attacks of the enemy, as well as spiritual fatigue and discouragement that come from living in secular, atheistic environments.
• Pray that missionaries will have courage to boldly proclaim the Gospel among Europeans. Ask the Father to give him or her the right words to say to each individual they encounter.
• Petition that the words they share will penetrate the hearts of the lost and bring new life that will in turn bear more fruit.
• Pray specifically for people groups and cities by using the Unreached Unengaged People Groups (UUPG) and EURO prayer guides.

There will be another time for prayer and fasting in October as an International Day of Prayer on October 21.

International Board President Tom Elliff is also beseeching missionaries and their stateside partners to take seriously the work of praying and has recorded a message to encourage the prayer emphasis this year. Click here to view.

Reaching Europeans is a God-sized task – we desperately need His help and this help comes, when we pray. In the book Purpose in Prayer, E.M. Bounds says, “Prayer is the greatest of all forces…there can be no substitute… its results lie outside the range of human possibilities – they are limited only by the omnipotence of God. Few Christians have anything but a vague idea of the power of prayer; fewer still have any experience with that power.”

Please join EPAG in praying this year for God to do something outside their range of possibility in Europe.

If you would like to know more specifics about EPAG’s prayer focus for 2012, contact Celeste Brubaker.

SKOPJE, Macedonia — A thin horse waits patiently strapped to a cart just off a busy thoroughfare in Skopje, Macedonia’s capital city. As he stands with the imprint of his ribs showing through his skin, his owner pokes through a dumpster looking for plastic bottles, cardboard, metal — anything he can sell.

It’s what you do when you’re poor and hungry.

Roma gypsies — about 200,000 strong in Macedonia — live in dusty neighborhoods of small, cinder-block houses and sell trash for income. As a larger people group scattered across Europe, they are viewed as a cast-off people in every nation they make their home in.

It’s hard for them to see a way out.

But Betty Easter is working to change that, a little at a time, with some food, education and the Gospel.

“Poverty is their life. Seeing human needs on a daily basis can be very trying — we can only do so much. But we are working to meet their immediate needs and share the Gospel with them,” said Easter, an International Mission Board missionary to the Roma people of south Europe. “It is hard ground, but there has to be an era when the beginning work takes place.”

That beginning work, for starters, has included things like a box of food every week to every family in one Roma village, thanks to Baptist Global Response. It has also included ongoing education at Sumnal, a community center situated in Topana, a Roma neighborhood.

“For the most part, the Roma haven’t had any education, so they can’t read. But they also aren’t oral learners, because they don’t know their own history and haven’t had stories to pass down through an oral tradition,” Easter said. “They have not learned how to learn. When new information comes their way … they don’t have an easy means to store and analyze that information. This has a huge impact when sharing the Gospel with people who have never considered Jesus Christ.”

And that’s one reason relationship building is so important, she said — they have to trust the messenger so they have a chance to hear the message over and over.

“We’re trying to help with the hopes of getting in,” said Karen Blackburn, an IMB missionary to the Roma.

Through the help of BGR and the work of Easter and Blackburn — a nurse by profession — the Roma have had the opportunity for dental care, clinics, health seminars and medicine. In the past, a BGR grant also fed Roma children two meals a day for a year at Sumnal. IMB missionary Abbey Hammond works several days a week at the center writing grant requests, and Gef Smock helps with English classes.

“What we are doing at Sumnal has worked,” Easter said. “With every action, we are sowing seeds that can have a spiritual impact.”

Blackburn agreed. “Slowly people are becoming more open to the Gospel.”

The Roma people of Macedonia are “sort of” religious — nominally Muslim, Easter said. In other nations of Europe, the Roma also hold loosely to whatever religion belongs to the area they inhabit — often Catholic or Orthodox.

“We have a series of eight Bible story DVDs we are distributing,” Easter said. “Please pray that each person who receives the (first) DVD will play it over and over and request the second DVD in the series.”

This, she said, will give her team an opportunity to follow up with those who are interested in hearing more.

“These are all strategies with house churches as the end goal,” Easter said. “If we spread the Word, God has promised the harvest — we know it will come.”

Easter also asked for Christians to pray:

• For those working among the impoverished to remain sensitive to needs and not grow weary of helping.
• For barriers that darken the hearts and minds of the people (like a lack of education) to be lifted so the Gospel can take root.
• For the broad Gospel seed sowing the team is doing through the DVD series, that hearts and minds will be open to the Word of God.

PRE-GAME BIBLE STUDY - Football gives IMB missionary Brady Nurse and Hands On volunteer Grand Shields an opportunity to share the Gospel with their team.

LISBON, Portugal (BP)–The bright Portuguese sun illuminated the makeshift football field. In the distance, Atlantic waves beat the shore. Players for the Lisbon Crusaders took the field for their pre-game routines, which include, among other things, marking the field’s yard lines with sand.

The football field was only a converted soccer pitch, and the crowd only consisted of a few friends and family members. But for Emanuel and his Crusader teammates, the excitement reached NFL proportions in the moments before kickoff against the Galiza Black Towers.

For Crusader player/coaches Brady Nurse and Grant Shields, the excitement was more than pre-game nerves. For them, the football team is both a competitive outlet and an incredible inroad for sharing the Gospel.

Lisbon, PT – Hands On/Team Promo from IMB | European Peoples on Vimeo.

“Football has been a great way for us to get into the lives of the Portuguese people,” said Nurse, an International Mission Board missionary who has been in Portugal for four years and has played with the Crusaders for three years.

“It is a spiritually hard state here in Portugal,” Nurse said, noting that less than 2 percent of Portuguese have any kind of relationship with Christ. “There is a big spiritual dryness.”

In spite of this, Nurse and Shields — a volunteer with the IMB’s short-term Hands On program for college students — have seen nearly 30 football players in Portugal come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

One of those players is Emanuel, 21, who has played center for the Crusaders for three years.

Like most Portuguese, he was raised in a Roman Catholic family. However, by the time Emanuel was a teenager, he had grown disillusioned. He saw the poverty around him and could not fathom why the priests kept asking for more money.

“They would [spend money on] cathedrals that were so pretty and well constructed and lined with gold,” Emanuel said, adding, “I realize now that it’s not about the place [of worship] but what you do while you are in it.”

Emanuel’s resentment toward religion grew during his college years as his life took a downward plunge. His mother battled cancer and his longtime girlfriend left him. Emanuel’s grades fell and depression set in.

“I had never talked to God during the good times [of my life], so I was ashamed to come to Him during the bad times,” Emanuel said. “I felt like I was being punished and was alone.”

One day Emanuel saw a flier advertising tryouts with the Lisbon Crusaders. He enjoyed watching American football games on TV so he decided to try out. He made the team and fell in love with the sport.

The Crusader team became family for Emanuel, and his friendships with Nurse and Shields grew as their ministry to the team deepened.

“I knew Coach Grant did a [regular] Bible study, and one day he asked me to be a part of it,” Emanuel said. “I remember being surprised. It was really different [from my Catholic upbringing]. The Catholics prayed to many different saints. The saints are not God, but in those [cathedrals] they were. One thing I realized with Grant was that it’s all about God and He is the only one who matters.”

Emanuel accepted Christ as his Savior and continues to meet with Shields and other members of the team for weekly Bible studies.

“He begs me to have more Bible studies,” Shields said. “He is hungry to learn.”

The Crusaders team has opened the door for Shields and Nurse to pour the Gospel message into these men, among whom competition and teamwork have forged a camaraderie that makes open and honest conversation possible.

“Football has had a big role in opening my eyes,” Emanuel said. “I don’t feel empty like I did a few years ago.”

American football is steadily gaining popularity in Europe. University and community teams are being formed in many larger Portuguese cities. Currently Portugal has six teams, and Nurse hopes four new teams will be added to the league in the next few seasons.

“I did not know about football in Portugal until I saw some guys practicing in a field … ,” Nurse said. “I asked if I could join them and a few months later ended up being asked to be the head coach.”

Since then, Nurse has brought some gridiron savvy not only to the Crusaders but also the entire Portuguese league by helping organize football training camps with ex-NFL and collegiate players.

“The camps have not only been a way to increase the sport’s visibility, they have also been the greatest way to share Christ with these guys,” Nurse said. “Christian football players and churches from the States come over and teach not only football but also the Gospel to these Portuguese guys.”

The Lisbon Crusaders team has been instrumental for Nurse and Shields to gain access into the lives of players who, otherwise, may have been closed to a friendship.

“Before practices [began], I spent a month here without being able to meet anybody,” Shields said. “If I could just get someone to say ‘hi’ to me, I would consider that day a success.”

Now success looks different — and not always a win on the football field, even when those come.

In the game against the Galiza Black Towers, the Crusaders quickly found themselves struggling to overcome a 14-0 deficit — a margin wider than any the Crusaders had come back from. But the Crusaders dug deep and fought back. They beat the Black Towers 38-34, keeping their hopes for the championship alive.

Nurse and Shields celebrated with the rest of the team after the game, but their hope — and now Emanuel’s too — is for something far greater than a gridiron championship.

“We want to cast a vision of how to reach London from across the sea,” Pelly said, “because every avenue to the world comes through this city.”

‘Adopt London’ is an initiative created by London missionaries to saturate the city in prayer, sow the seed of the Gospel and help American partners become catalysts for new work. London is divided into 33 boroughs, something akin to an American county, and each of these city segments is available for adoption. The adopting church becomes an intern, working with missionaries in London to create a strategy for tearing down strongholds in the community and affecting change for Christ.

“We want people from the adopting church to be in the borough, understanding the lostness there, multiplying the missionaries’ presence in the city and giving them a catalytic contact,” said Matt Fontenot, a London city team member who is in charge of Borough Strategy Partners.

He points out that they are not looking for church-to-church partnerships, but church-to-community partnerships. The local churches are not reaching most Londoners. The idea is to start, not where the present church is, but where the people are—to find opportunities for natural life-changing conversations to take place.

“We are dreaming of volunteers making in-roads that enable the lost to hear the gospel and form into new churches relevant to the communities from which they came,” Fontenot said. “Partners can use their talents, hobbies and passions to share concentrated time with people, using a missional approach to witnessing through life-on-life situations.”

Small groups with similar interests can use their hobbies and interests to engage population segments in the boroughs—photography clubs, hiking excursions, cycling teams are just a few ideas of how to connect with a group of locals. The goal is to see grass roots groups formed and leaders trained.

The question most often asked is “Why one more church in a country famous for its churches?

“Just because there are three churches within a four block radius does not mean these churches are reaching the lost in their community,” Fontenot said, “proximity doesn’t mean connect-ability.” In fact, churches in London are actually being turned into high-priced flats or day care centers. “The days of ‘this is the church this is the steeple open the doors and see all the people’ are gone,” he said.

If London is going to hear the gospel it won’t be from the pulpit or mass invitations hung from sign posts, but from the lips of believers in relationship with those who have never heard.  “This is what the London team is asking borough strategy churches to do.  Come to London and join in relationship with those who have never heard,” Fontenot said.

There are eight borough strategist churches (BSC) already involved in ministry. One BSC has been coming for eight years and has prayer walked every one of the 2000 streets in their borough, which has a population of 300,000. The BSC churches rely on each other and recently had a conference in to pool ideas and conduct learning peer groups. There is also partnership and training from missionaries living on location, as well as material available for incoming volunteers.

“We take the churches through the whole process, like an internship,” Fontenot says.

He and Pelley have created material to help people do missions through life—for example, prayer walking guides for men and women traveling for business, contact information and opportunities for students doing a semester abroad and mission trip “kits” for a group that wants to come over and engage the lost.

The London team will walk volunteers through the process, beginning with training in London where the vision is presented and the adoption process is explained. A second training will prepare leaders—typically a strategist, a prayer advocate and a logistics coordinator. Conference dates in 2012 are May 9-12 2012, and September 12-15 2012.

For more information about adopting a London borough, visit Adoptlondon.com or contact Matt Fontenot.

The set of lungs belongs to a grandmother who sits in the bare, one-room house that only has one chair — the one in front of the computer.

She’s video Skyping with family members elsewhere. Romania. England. Could be anywhere — they move a lot. A neighbor is courting a girl in Germany over the Internet — he’s only met her via video, but it’s getting serious. She might move soon and marry him.

Welcome to gypsy life in the technology age.

Abbey Hammond and Jessica Burke sit on cushions in the floor of the grandmother’s house, sipping juice while she explains to the men on the video call why there are Americans in the background.

It’s intriguing to them. Puzzling, even.

Roma gypsies — about 200,000 strong in Macedonia — tend to be a cast-off people in every European country they alight in. They’re known here in the bustling capital city of Skopje for driving horse or pedal carts in traffic and rummaging through trash bins for plastic, metal and cardboard to sell.

But several times a week, Hammond, Burke and other International Mission Board missionaries walk the dirt roads of Dame Gruev and two other Roma neighborhoods in Skopje. They greet the people there by name, have coffee in their homes, talk about life and talk about Jesus.

“They are excited about having Americans in their home, so that’s a great way to get to know them initially. But as I get to know them, I want them to get to the point where they see Jesus instead of me,” Hammond said. “I think they know how much I love them, but I want them to see that it’s not my love. It’s God’s love for them that He lets me show them.”

It’s not easy — Roma in Macedonia are, for the most part, nominally Muslim. In other countries, the people group has sometimes lined up its identity with the predominant faith of the land — Catholicism and Orthodoxy to Islam and animism. But to be Roma in Macedonia is to be Muslim, even if their religion doesn’t impact their lives at all.

“I’ll eventually figure it out. I’ll cover my head and go to the mosque and pray when I’m 40,” one Roma woman told Hammond and Burke as they talked with her in her home. She puffed on a cigarette and gave it a moment’s thought. “No, when I’m 50. Forty is too soon.”

They may not know much about their religion, but they do know Jesus Christ isn’t part of it. And they think that to turn to Jesus would make them Macedonian instead of Roma — Macedonian people are, for the most part, Eastern Orthodox.

But it happens sometimes.

In the summer when the small Roma homes get tight and sweltering, everyone congregates outside for a breeze, and Jessica’s husband B.T. said he can walk around and meet hundreds of people.

“Jesus is not something people are opposed to conversing about if you establish relationships with them, so I’ve tried to do that and have that conversation as much as I can,” he said.

He’s sat in their homes and visited them when family members were in the hospital, and once he labored alongside a Roma family to help build their house. “I tried to deepen and build relationships and gain respect in the community, and as soon as I found someone interested in studying the Bible, I started a Bible study,” he said.

Slowly it grew into a church of Roma believers in Jesus Christ.

“They are bold in sharing their faith, and now they can do the talking among their people,” B.T. Burke said.

It surprises the Roma when they meet Roma who are Christians — it doesn’t add up with what they know.

But sometimes God is surprising like that, Hammond said.

Recently while visiting with a Roma family in their home, she gave them a Bible, but the father of the family made the women give it back to her.

“He said it was a bad book, and they are Roma, so they can’t have it in their house,” she said.

But when a family member was sick soon after, Hammond wrote a card to the wife saying she was praying for them and penned Scripture verses on the card.

“She was so touched she cried — she said it meant a lot to her, and she kept it,” Hammond said. “God got His Word into their home anyway, in a different way than I expected.”

Tourists in this church in Paris are invited to light candles for the dead for five Euros

Conversation and creativity are creating platforms in Europe for young adults to share their faith. Last week in Rehe, Germany a group of IMB missionaries met to discuss strategy and method for evangelizing in their cities. A large number of participants were Journeymen—short-term missionaries who are single college graduates. Many focus on campus ministries, where they can mingle with young adults in Europe, but they have gotten involved in other ways in order to rub shoulders with the average guy.  Jeremy in Finland has joined a Reggae band, Hanna and Jenna in Macedonia run a coffee house, Kim in Paris works with artists, Alex in Marseille plays guitar for open mic nights and Lauren in Spain teaches English.

Jack, a speaker at the conference, lives in Copenhagan, Denmark, a city that serves as a cultural indicator of European trends.  “We are beyond post-modern,” he says. “Our culture is what I would call ‘post-God’.” What he means by this is that in Denmark, people aren’t even asking the pertinent questions anymore-about meaning and existence. “They just don’t care,” he says.

This assessment is supported by secular news sources, which report that in major European cities, religion is nearing extinction.

A disturbing trend is people who refer to themselves as secular Christians. They join churches because they see the positive aspects of being involved in programs with moral teaching, but they are not at all interested in pursuing spiritual conversations.  The church becomes more of a community center than a place of worship.

Jack said that in a country like Denmark, these “secular Christians” cannot be denied membership in the Lutheran church for any reason because it is a state church. Therefore, even if the pastor is a committed believer he is powerless to keep unbelievers from becoming members.

These facts don’t thwart this newest wave of missionaries though. At the conference, the group was upbeat and committed to trying new things.

“All of my friends know I am a Christian and have heard me discuss my faith,” says Ryan in France. “Many are kind and accepting, but are not willing to enter spiritual discussion or attend a Bible study, but I am exploring new ideas and tools to better reach these friends God has placed in my life.”

“I am working on networking through several avenues to build relationships with artists, studios, and galleries primarily on the left bank of the city,” said Kim in Paris. “This includes participating in art classes and exhibit openings.”

“People have not been receptive at all to the gospel, but I have been able to have some great conversations,” said Jeremy in Finland. ”It’s difficult just earning the right to be heard in this culture with strangers and so it does take time.”

The most secular European nations are Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In Czech, 60% of the population claims to be unaffiliated with any church.

Join us in praying for Europe as our Missionaries continue to faithfully share the message of Christ.