My collegue and I stepped in the lobby area of the Law Faculty of Eötvös Lóránd University with the intentions of taking pictures and shoot video of an event that happens every year in the life of the Hungarian ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, Timóteus Társaság (Timothy Society - TT). Long hours of envisioning, planning, prayer and preparation of dedicated staff and students, goes into making this a life changing event every year. It is an outreach that reflects the heart of CCC's passion in ministry: Reaching College and University students with the message of truth.
I have never been to one of these, so called, "Survival Kit" distributions before, but I have heard that God uses these events to "fuel" a year - or more - of ministry for TT. It is a time when many christian students emerge from various universities and denominations to help out with the distribution to reach their peers for Christ. It is a time when first year students meet TT and get a chance to get in contact with christians, get involved in weekly meetings, Bible studies, even meet staff in personal appointments.
It is when Campus Ministry goes fishing with the largest of fishnets!
Despite my greatest intensions, the guard walked up to me and my american collegue Jim and said "You cannot come in here with cameras. You are not allowed to take pictures! For that you need permission. Do you have permission?" We did not. I asked him where we could get them from and he was kind enough to tell me. With one of the law school student's help we had permission to take all the pictures and video we wanted in a matter of 5 minutes. I was a bit surprised by the fact that we still needed to get permission to document our own event, but praised God we were able to minister to TT with pictures and video. Please pray for the TT staff and students for wisdom and strength in reaching out as well as the many lost students, who are interested in hearing more about God.
Some statistics:
About 8,000 Survival Kits were handed out with about 1,350 positive responses from students who are interested about God.
You can see some of the photos I took on The Forge picture site.
My main area in our Media effort is Print, though am also the "virtual" Internet guy as well at the moment. The reason why I say that, is because one of the largest projects I am currently working on is developing a multi lingual Staff Resource website for our whole area. I have to admit, I have a lot to learn for I have never developed a site before. I do have a good understanding of how the web works and thank God I am a fast learner. :)
The purpose of this site is to create an online "home" for our staff to come to for anything we can make available on the Internet so that their life and ministry as smooth as possible. It is also called to make communication faster and more accurate between the staff of all the different countries. To give you an example, It will include elements like: message board, forum, address and phone database, tips from evangelisation to support raising, as well as a multitude of downloadable materials (written, audio, etc). Staff will also be able to upload images and stories and share other files. As you can tell, it will have many functions, and will take quite a while to get it up and fully running. Although most of the site content will be for internal purposes, thus protected by authentication, there will be public pages as well. The webaddress is: www.eeccc.org. If you visit it, you will not see much yet, because only the ineternal part is being developed at this point. Hopefully you will be able enjoy the public part of the site soon.
Well here we go. I will try to give you a brief summary of the big picture of why I do what I do. It is far from exhaustive, but gets the point through. I work with a Media Team in Hungary that is called to serve 18 countries in our area: Eastern Europe and Russia.
We use and try to master Audio/Video, Print and the Internet.
Our long term goal is to start up Multimedia Centers in each of our countries so that they would be able to serve their own ministries' multimedia needs to further the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.
We believe that communication is vital to evangelization, teaching, decipleship and recruiting. No need to explain that, right? :) Well, communication has different elements, and we see visual communication (I'll just call it VC from now on) as one of the most important ways, conduits of communication. As a matter of fact I see our generation clearly becoming more responsive to VC than any other way of communication. It is becoming more effective than any other. Thus, we have to (learn to) communicate visually the most important message in the world worth communicating - the Gospel - in a way that they will understand and be able to respond to it. From raising spiritual awareness through film through printed Bible study/teaching materials to online downloadable sermons, we want to be creative and effective for God's glory!
In other words, we want to MAKE HIM LOOK GOOD!
I bet many of you have been wondering what I actually do on a day to day basis. Well, that is a great question I've been dying to answer for some time, but it seems time always runs ahead of me and I try to catch up. Once, many years ago I read a great little devotion. I want to share with you what I remember from it. God keeps bringing it back to my mind, when I get annoyed with time. I mean, honestly, we never seem to get used to time and are most of the time frustrated by it. Precisely, how little time we seem to have, how fast time always goes, and how much we enjoy the seemingly timless moments, when we can just rest and not "do" much. Why is that? Why do we take great joy and pleasure when we have some "free" time to sit down and spend time with our loved ones, read our favourite book or magazine, listen to some music, engage in our hobby, or watch a movie we like? We never seem to get used to time, but feel so much at home in its seeming absence (or its abundance?). Well, all of this may not be an evidence, but may be a strong suggestion that we were not created for time, but for the timeless, meaning eternal. It is good for me to remember that as I go about my days...
Well, I spent some of today setting up this Blog and a personal photo site at www.flickr.com.Please check out some of my pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/theforge.Oh, and if you want to, tell me what you think about them.
Zsolt and I walked out of the castle to the garden. It was dark and the air was dry, but the weather was cool. He just approached me 5 minutes before. He wanted to talk to me. This was Zsolt’s fifth IM camp. This Evangelistic English Language camp is a yearly partnership with my E-free church and a ministry I used to work with, International Messengers. I met Zsolt when he was 15 and I’d known him for 4 years. I had shared the Gospel with him many times over the past years. „I have not been ready and I see that now” were his words as we sat down on a wooden bench under a lamppost. „I have been living without God, but I don’t want to live without Him anymore. I tried to change myself, but the more I tried, the more I failed. I asked Him to change me, to show me what my life could be like with Him. He did. He made me capable of things I had never been capable of. Like loving those I did not and becoming inexplicably selfless with anyone. He did all I asked for. I have no more excuses or questions left. I am ready to ask Him to come into my life.” I sat there and witnessed the Lord bringing a lost sheep home before my eyes. That is the greatest miracle of all and it was all His work. It always is. I am just privileged to be close enough to witness it.
Getting back from the US, I was excited to get started working with the forming Media Team at Campus Crusade's Eastern European Headquarters. I have had the privilage of working part time with Jim Southard - media pioneer - for the past 2 years and I knew we make a great team, but the thought of having Grant Olson and his family come and join this effort of God, made me even more excited and was a huge answer to prayer! I had just spent close to a month and a half with them raising support in Bloomington, Indiana and quickly grew as close to them as it could only be explained by God's special grace. While I was gone many meetings and prayer went into forming a Media Canopy, that is, a vision and model to reach Eastern Europe and Russia with the creative and relevant use of all areas of media. When I got home I was ready to start in my new ministry role.
Flying back from Indiana I had to stop for almost two days in Zurich, Switzerland. It is a city built by a bay and is extremely beautiful, for no wars of the past 80 years have torn its grounds. Spent about a day walking around, sitting, reading, writing...God was so awesome to me. Following a lady’s instructions I got on the train when it was time to go back to the airport, only to find out that I got on the wrong one. I immediately asked another person sitting close to me wether it goes to the airport or not. She said, it does not and I need to get off at the next stop and turn back. I got up and walked out to the door of the train to wait. I prayed, that God would allow me to get to the airport in time to catch my plane. 10 seconds later a man came after me and told me to get off 2 stops from now and in about 6 minutes a train will come that will go straight to the airport. I got off, but did not have the coins to get a ticket. A lady helped me out by giving me enough coins for a ticket. She said "Don't worry about it, I know how it is. Just take it." WOW! Needless to say, I made it in time, perfectly. God answered my prayer in an amazing way.
Well, finally. I turned to blogging as a means of communicating with my friends and supporters as up-to-date news and information as possible. We'll see if it works or not. :)
Welcome to my blog, please read, comment and enjoy the mighty works of the Lord Jesus in Eastern Europe.
I will by posting information as often as possible, so please come back any visit anytime.
