Baptism Today (Joni)

I had the privilege of being able to witness a baptism at church today! Well, actually, it was 41 baptisms! I really wish I had brought my camera! It was a sight unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'll do my best to describe it for you.
This is a previous picture of the stage of my church, and I've cropped it to zoom in on where the baptistry is. Until today, I didn't even know there was a baptistry there! The floor comes up from that part behind the choir loft where the plants are sitting in the picture, and the bottom window of the cross is actually a door! So the baptisees lined up along the front of the church, then filed up along the left side of the stage beside the choir and down into the baptistry. The baptisees (about 15 men and 25 women - They don't baptize children.) were dressed in all white and were a neat sight to behold! Two pastors in blue robes led the procession and preceded them into the baptistry. Then they went in two-by-two, and each were dunked by a pastor after affirming their faith. There was a guy standing in front of the choir loft holding a microphone on a stick to the mouths of the pastors and baptisees, so we could all hear what was going on. After being dunked, the newly baptized then proceeded out the rear door where the cross had opened, so they were actually getting out of the water behind the wall, and it worked so smoothly that way! Each time the ones who had just been baptized were getting out and the new ones were getting in, the choir sang a little "Praise the Lord, Alleluia" song - even though they sang it 21 times, I never got tired of it! It was so neat! And I was shocked that they were able to baptize all 41 people in just 20 minutes!

Especially moving were the man and wife that were baptized together - what a change in that family! There were also two sisters who were baptized together, and I know that was meaningful and special for them. Most moving for me, though, was this really old lady who clearly was physically ailing. But you could see the determination on her face even from where I was sitting in the balcony. She had to have an usher on each side of her helping her up the stairs of the choir loft, and it took about 5 men to get her down into the baptistry. Then she was baptized by herself so she could have a pastor on each arm helping her back out of the water. But what a victorious moment when it was accomplished! Praise the Lord!

And then the most entertaining part of the day was after the baptisms were completed and we were waiting for the baptisees to get dressed and come back out to their seats. The choir sang, and then a lady got up and was doing a solo. I noticed that the women who had been baptized were slowly coming back out to their seats one by one, and I was surprised that their hair was dry! I thought, Are all 25 of those women really back there using hairdryers? Can the electric system hold that? And surely enough, right in the middle of the poor soloist's song, boom, the power went out. A few of us in the audience snickered because we knew what had happened. All the hairdryers had overloaded the circuits and popped the breaker! We sat there in silence before about 30 seconds before someone finally decided to take action. We for some reason had a live brass band playing that day, so they struck up a tune while they tried to get the power back on. They got it back on before the band had finished their song, and not too much longer all of the baptisees came out, most with perfectly dry hair.

It was a neat, fun, and moving experience, and I'm so glad that I was able to witness it before leaving Moldova!

A follow-up about church (Justin)

As you saw in the previous post, many of the churches here are big and nice. The pictures didn't do it justice, if I had to compare it to a church I'd compare it to First Baptist in whatever small town you might live in Kentucky (it looked very much like the one in Princeton). Very nice stage, expensive modern sound system, security system, baptismal, nice pews and carpet. This in a country where the average salary is $180 month, unemployment might be 10-20%, and most people in the church are quite old and live on small government pensions.
So, how can the poorest country in Europe afford such nice churches?

I posed this question to Ghena after church. We had a great conversation and I got to hear some of his vision for Invest-Credit and how it relates to building the Church.

Joni alluded to the answer when she mentioned the Americans that were here. The churches of Eastern Europe are almost completely dependent on Western donations. The entire Baptist Union of countries like Moldova spend a great deal of resources raising funds. "Our congregation can't afford to pay us a salary," the pastors say. The suffer from the same free-riding effects that big American churches do, where 90% of the people just sit in a pew and don't do or give anything. Those that do give don't have much income.

There are several different tangents where I can go with this. For now, I'll just ask a question:
What are the effects of getting your funding from an outside source who doesn't speak your language or even see what you do except for maybe 10 days out of the year?

Well, in my previous experiences in Russia I learned a few answers to this question:
1. Resources of leadership are devoted to raising funds rather than to the Great Commission.
2. Lack of accountability to the local church means pastors don't care as much about the needs of the church.
3. Lack of true accountability to the distant and rarely-seen donor means that the money might be spent in ways the donor didn't approve of (an invitation for corruption).
4. Like the churches we saw, the Western money goes to things that the Western donor understands: sound systems, paved parking lots, and church decorations. If you judge a church solely by how it looks (which is how the local Orthodox do it), then these are very healthy churches.

So, I talked to Ghena about these things and he agrees that dependency on outside sources is what keeps many churches from growing. He says that only a few "charismatic" (Pentecostal) churches here are completely self-sufficient. They're healthy and reproducing quickly.

Ghena's vision for Invest-Credit is to help Christians create jobs and earn money that they can then tithe to their churches. As the income base of the church grows, the church can become much less dependent on the West. Pastors can again become accountable to their congregation, and devote their time and energy to pastoring rather than fund-raising.

So, that's what we're learning about here. My current question for all you mission-minded folks is: How can microfinance help foster a church planting movement?

Project Update (Justin)

Happy Moldovan Independence Day, everyone! As a "maintenance update," on the right you'll see Moldovan Links. Those are links to Moldovan English-language news sources that I check every day. You can also see that it's been around 105-110 degrees here the past few days. I also added a link to Dan and Beth Stafford's blog. Dan was the original BPN intern in Moldova. They're attempting to pursue business-as-missions full-time here in Moldova while currently living/working in Holland.

So, the past week has seen some progress on the aforementioned website project. The domain name is registered, the server has just been configured to what we need, and we've got a programmer who has volunteered to be the point man. He's going to play around with some software and our design specifications and let us know by Sept. 1 how much time he thinks it will take. So, praise God, we've got a Christian programmer working on it and a few more who are interested in the project.

Just last week, Ghenna talked to someone needing to hire several unskilled laborers, and greatly wanting to hire Christians. However, there was no way to connect him to believers except by word-of-mouth.

Keep in mind, many of these churches don't even have a "Barter Board" hanging up in their church foyer, and it's seen as inappropriate to announce job openings and such from the pulpit. But, everyone is eagerly anticipating a website like to link people together. Pretty much everyone I've talked to about it has said "You know, I've always wished for a website like this, but just never knew how to get it started. "

One day soon, I'll post an update with our programmer and with what else I'm busy with here. Joni will also post some fun pictures of our weekend adventures. We're making progress all-around!

Our Project (Justin)

Some of you know that we were brought here to specifically work on one project. We've now been given our marching orders.

The Moldovan Christian community is large with many churches all over the country. However, there is a lack of communication between believers and churches, no one seems to know what the other ones are doing. CAMED wants to change that (refreshing idea, eh?). Our job is to facilitate the creation of a website that will act as a sort of bulletin board system for the Christian community, particularly those in business.

The idea is simple: Suppose you want to find a plumber for your apartment, but you would prefer an honest Christian, and don't know who you can trust. You can call around and ask friends at church, but it would be faster just to go to a Christian website and see if there are any listed (like a "Shepherd's Guide" in the US). You see the plumbers's profile, and if anyone has used his services before and commented. Christians connecting with other Christians.

Suppose you're a Christian student wanting to rent a room in Chisinau but you'd like to find a Christian host family. This site will allow room seekers and renters to connect with each other.

The site will also be a place for churches to advertise events, post sermons, prayer requests, etc. so the whole community knows what everyone is doing.

I have very little web design or programming experience, so I won't be doing any of that. My task here is simply to help design the template, and to find local Christian programmers willing to help build such a site (for free). We've already lined up a company in Waco that has volunteered to host the site.

I had a great conversation today with a local programmer who thinks we can find some open-source modules using Joomla to do exactly what we need.

So, please pray for our project. Pray that we'll find willing Christian programmers familiar with PHP to help. Pray that the site will facilitate communication between believers here.

Our first assignment (Justin)

On Thursday, we were given our first work assignment. We went with Kelly and Roman (employee of Invest-Credit) to interview a client who was wanting to take out another loan. Invest-Credit is the official name CAMED in Moldova, who we're working for. Interns for Invest-Credit write up "case studies," which are profiles of clients and their businesses to give donors an idea of how the ministry affects people's faith as well as their businesses.

I was told "So, you'll ask this guy questions in Russian and then you can write the case study." Given a list of questions and some help from Roman on the tough ones, I began to learn about the business of Vladimir, a local cobbler.

Dream fulfilled: "Go converse with this guy in Russian about how his business affects his life, church, and community."
Sure thing! I think I did pretty well, by God's grace of course (Phil. 4:13).

Vladimir started making shoes around 2002, about the same time he started attending a local church. He got radically saved and left his life of sin while realizing that a relationship with Christ and honest work was the way to go in life. With no other professional training and few funds, Vladimir and a friend began learning how to make shoes just as Vladimir was beginning to study Scripture. Working in his at-home workshop, Vladimir learned about styles and sizes and trying new methods. After about a month, Vladimir began to sell his shoes at the central outdoor market. However, this was difficult because a customer's size has to match exactly what you've already made and brought to the market.

Vladimir realized that there was a market in his own neighborhood for his shoes. He began to take custom orders from people, realizing that people with special needs and requests couldn't find what they needed at the local bazaar. As he became more experienced, he branched out into new styles.

He is currently active in the local church as an usher. He tithes faithfully and gives money to missionaries and others who need it. God provided him a believing wife about a year ago, and his mother also lives with him. His business helps feed his family (his wife sells cosmetics, like Avon).1 year ago, "Vova" (as friends call him) took out a $400 loan from Invest-Credit, which he'd heard about at church. This helped him buy enough material for 4 pairs of shoes, and allowed him to make extra profit during a lean time of his business, which sees seasonal fluctuations. He paid off the loan in the course of a year, and is now eligible for an $800 loan.

Vladimir hopes to expand his business to include purses, wallets, and Bible covers (which he showed us prototypes of, quite nice). He also hopes to earn more money to start a ministry to needy children and hungry people. As he expands his business, he'll hopefully be able to bring on employees and create income for more people.
"My friends that I was once in sin with see my life now and want what I have. They come to church with me, and one even accepted Christ. Microcredit is important because it helps grow my business to feed my family and support my church."