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?

Romanian Church (Joni)

I have so many pictures to share with you all of the many things we have done in the past few days! But I don't want to overwhelm you all at once, so I'll split it into several posts over the next couple of days. I'll do them in chronological order, so first I'll tell you about the church we visited Sunday morning. We went to our first Romanian-speaking church with our boss and his wife, Ghena and Alina. This is also the church Kelly goes to, and Valentina from our office attends here too. So there was a pretty big representation from CAMED this week at Jesus Savior Church in Chisinau!

This is the biggest church we've been to so far - it was a huge building and the place was packed! We sat up in the balcony, so we had a full view of all that was going on both on stage and in the audience. It was so neat!

Ghena kindly agreed to translate the sermons for us. (Note that I said "sermonS." In all the churches we've been to so far, there have been more than one sermon - some of them even had three! The worship services all last at least 2 hours. Much different from American churches that are tied to the clock!) So we sang a lot of songs in Romanian, the choir performed some lovely pieces, and Ghena translated the first short sermon. Then we sang some more and it came time for the second sermon. Ghena prepared to translate for us again, but then we noticed that two men stood up at the pulpit - one of them to translate for the other! Then, the preacher began to speak - IN ENGLISH! He was a visiting pastor from Indiana, and so we got to hear a sermon in American English! Very cool and it blessed us immensely. Another good thing about it for me was that it actually helped my language some, because I heard a sentence in English, then got to hear it translated into Romanian. I was excited about how many words I could pick out in the Romanian, even though he was speaking very fast.

So it was a neat experience for us to be attending church with friends and to get to hear a sermon in English! We'll definitely visit there again.

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!

Home Sweet Home

Here is a slideshow tour of our new home! The pictures are in order moving from the front to the back of our house. If you put your mouse over the slideshow, you'll see controls at the bottom left that will allow you to stop and show and look at the pictures one at a time. You can also click on the slideshow to go to the photobucket page where the pictures are if you'd rather see the larger originals. Enjoy!

The Promised Photos

Here are the pictures I promised! First of all, this is Justin and I with our anniversary dinner. We are in our dining room at home, the flowers Justin bought me are on the left, and you can even see my infamous pot roast on our plates! Happy two years, my dear!

And this one is a tube of ice cream like I was describing. This is actually a kilogram (2.2 pounds), and it cost $2.25. What a yummy deal!

And this is just a random picture of Justin with a wax figure of Leonardo da Vinci. (You can see that Justin was taking meeting this great man very seriously...) Sunday afternoon we went downtown because we had heard that there were some wax figures that had been brought in from St. Petersburg on display at the Museum of History and Ethnography. I'm a little creeped out by wax figures, but it was just $1 each to get in, and this display was pretty cool. It was a pretty random collection of figures, including several Russian czars, Rasputin, Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space), Ghengis Kahn, King Tut, and Shrek, among others. We would've had to pay another $1 to take photos, so we just took the picture of da Vinci, who they had standing outside. It was definitely a fun experience and well worth the $2.

Two Wonderful Years (Joni)

My sweet husband of two years bought me some lovely flowers yesterday for our anniversary. I cooked him dinner (I attempted to make my first pot roast in the oven... Not so good. Thankfully, he is understanding and kind and ate it anyway - just another reason I'm glad I married him!), and then we went out for dessert. We're learning that ice cream is our dessert of choice here in Moldova. We've been out twice now for other desserts - they sell cakey-type confections that look really good, but just don't taste quite right. For example, one of the things we tried last night had prunes in it! Um, ok. The other place we went, we're pretty certain that the confections we bought had been sitting in the display case for at least 3 years... The other thing that has us convinced that buying ice cream from the store and just eating it at home is the way to go is that the ice cream is SO GOOD here! You can buy Moldovan-made ice cream in these plastic tubes for just about $1.50 a liter. The ice cream here is nothing like the ice cream in the States - here it's really light and fluffy, almost like frozen whipped cream! My favorite so far is the chocolate chip!

I'll post a picture of the ice cream tubes soon, as well as a picture of our anniversary dinner! I just forgot to bring my camera cord to the office with me today, and we don't have internet access at home yet. Check back tomorrow, and hopefully I'll have some pictures posted for you!

Happy Anniversary!

Joni and I got married 2 years ago today. Has it really only been 2 years? I think back to how stressed, nervous, and hot I was two years ago (August outdoor wedding in KY).
If someone had told me then: "Justin, two years from now you'll have completed your Masters and will be working in Moldova," I'd have said: "Sign me up!"
God is good. I'm thankful all has turned out like it has. We both like being here with each other, and she's the best partner anyone could have here.

I love you, babe!
Here's an old one of us from February, 2005. This was before we even got engaged.