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.”

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.

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.

Ginna (left) and Hannah take a breather between customers in the coffee house

OHRID, Macedonia — It didn’t take much to sell Ginna Caldwell and Hannah Gilstrap on their current jobs.

Make coffee. Drink coffee. Talk to people. Get up the next day and do it again.

Perfect.

The two were already working as baristas in Alabama when they said “yes” to spending a couple of years running a coffeehouse in Ohrid, Macedonia, as International Mission Board journeymen.

“A friend told me once, ‘You can’t spend your whole life in a coffeehouse, Ginna.’ I beg to differ,” Caldwell said with a grin. “I love the coffee culture — sitting, having conversations, getting to know people. Discipleship happens over a cup of coffee.”

In the summer, the little city of Ohrid is crawling with vacationers. Businesspeople in the Balkans flock there to eat fish and ajvar (a salad made of red bell peppers) next to a lake so calm and clear you can see clean to the bottom.

“I have peace in my heart there by the lake,” one tourist said.

But Gilstrap likes it best when the summer is over and all the tourists fade back into the urban grind they came from. That’s when the real peace comes, she said.

“The people of Ohrid come into the coffeehouse and hang out for hours playing chess, having conversations and talking about spiritual things,” Gilstrap said. “I love creating community, and something like this coffeehouse does that. That’s why I’m drawn to it.”

The coffeehouse, Ima Vreme — Macedonian for “there is time” — sits tucked in a side street just off city center, perfect positioning for locals to pass by often, drop in and stay.

“We have long talks and we listen with the intent of speaking the truth of Christ into their lives,” Caldwell said.

Brian Davis said that’s the heart of Ima Vreme.

On warm nights, as the girls make iced coffee and chat with regulars, Davis sits at a table just outside the open door of the coffeehouse, engaging a few men in deep conversations about faith and God.

“It’s not a business. We aren’t out to just make great coffee and have a lot of traffic. We want to plant house churches, and the coffeehouse gives us a reason to talk,” said Davis, who serves as an IMB church planter in Ohrid with his wife, Mandy. “We want to do everything we do with intentionality and have a constant trickle of people that’s going somewhere.”

And it is going somewhere. Three Bible studies have started out of conversations at Ima Vreme in the four years it’s existed, and the soon-to-be pastor of one of Davis’ house churches came to faith because he came through the coffeehouse.

“It’s just a coffeehouse — we don’t use it as a church meeting place or anything else. But people know it represents something bigger,” Davis said.

And the neutral location affords a lot of creativity in how to bring people through the doors and make friends who will come back for more conversations, he said. “Twice a month we try to have something special, from PlayStation tournaments and karaoke nights to art exhibits and cooking classes.”

A band from William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Miss., even came once to do a concert series, and other teams have helped distribute school supplies from the coffeehouse.

“If we try it and it flops, it’s OK,” he said. “We do what we can to bring people in, meet them and build relationships, and then we put a lot of effort into follow up.”

And Gilstrap and Caldwell — in addition to studying Macedonian language when they’re not at the coffeehouse talking in it — spend a lot of time preparing English lessons to teach at the coffeehouse. The intensive classes taught there are packed with people.

And Caldwell is investing time in translating a ladies’ Bible study on Ruth into Macedonian.

“When I was in college, I heard a lot of missionaries’ stories and began to realize that no matter what I do with my life, I needed to be doing it with the intent of building relationships and sharing the gospel,” Caldwell said. “And right now, this couldn’t be more perfect — for both of us.”

Gilstrap agreed, though she said it’s completely different from what she used to picture missionaries doing.

“Growing up in GAs, I heard about missionaries, and I never had any desire to be one or move out of Alabama,” she said. “But in college, I started learning more about missions — that it’s not extra-holy people out there being missionaries, it’s just normal believers in Christ who are getting out there doing what we are all called to do.”

To learn more about taking a volunteer team to help with the coffeehouse ministry in Ohrid, e-mail Brian Davis at brianandmandy@gmail.com. For information about the journeyman program and other ways to serve overseas, visit imb.org.