Yes, I do realize that my blogging skills are very poor and
I am very sorry if you have been waiting for some type of an update. David and
Maggie have done a much better job at posting on
their blog so please check out
their posts to see what we have been up to recently.
Rather than giving you a very long and boring list of what
has consumed all of our time in the past few weeks I thought I would focus on
what an evening of ministry generally looks like. I don’t know if I’ve ever
explained what village ministry looks like??
Typically our team will gather at Jim’s apartment 30 minutes
to an hour before we plan to leave for a village. We use this time to plan out
our children’s activities and communicate to everyone on the team what their
role will be for the evening. It is very important that each team member knows
what the general plan is so everyone can be involved and help out wherever
needed. We also use this preparation time to spend some time in prayer, make
sandwiches for our team, and load all of the equipment into the van.
Once we arrive in the village we hit the ground running.
Depending on if there are children waiting for us or not we may walk through
the village and invite people to our activities. If our ministry location allows(sometimes
we use a park or a school yard) the boys will gather to play Soccer while the
children’s activities take place. Our children’s activities consist of a
combination of songs, games, face painting, simple balloon animals, and the
wordless book bracelet Gospel story. These children’s activities usually take
place for about 1.5-2 hours. As it starts to get dark enough to project a
picture onto the screen we show a few music videos for children. Just before the
film begins our ministry team sings a couple songs in English and Romanian, and
presents a skit. Following the film Jim will conclude the evening by laying out
the plan of salvation.
When the evening is finished we pack everything and everyone
back into the van and make the drive back to Craiova. Once back at Jim’s
apartment the van has to be unloaded, and everyone is dropped off at their
homes. Typically we get back to our apartment about 12:30am. For some silly
reason I get a ‘second wind’ when we get home so I usually am able to
communicate with home for a little bit before heading to bed by 1:30 or 2am.
Ministry evening are busy and fun(sometimes stressful and chaotic
too)! A lot takes place in an evening and it is an absolute blessing to be a
part of.
