Today I had the devotional and made a presentation on the importance of having an evangelism cycle at the pastors meeting in Budapest. I presented there last year as well, so I recognized some of the faces. We talked about the importance of developing an evangelism cycle where churches are intentionall building relationships and planting seeds in their community all year long. This requires a long term commitment of 1-2 years before a church can expect to have a successful evangelistic meeting. I shared with them some statistics about the St Louis metro area. Only 18% of the people in St Louis know someone who is a Seventh day Adventist, and only 45% ever heard of “Seventh-day Adventist.” I stressed he importance of building positive relationships so people know who we are.
It turns out that the statistics are similar for Budapest (a city of about 1.5 million). Not many are familiar with the Seventh-day Adventist church and many are not interested in Christianity at all. In fact, the president mentioned that he would be happy if 18% of Budapest residents knew someone who is a Seventh-day Adventist. He would be thrilled if 45% had heard of the church. I guess this gives us some perspective here in North America. There are some mission fields that are evening more challenging than ours in North American.
Many countries in Europe face an extremely secular culture that is resistant to the gospel. So even though North America faces challenges, we must remember that there are many other places with even greater challenges. And there are other countries who would love to have our statistics.
This evening we also shared a meal with Tamas (my translatlor) and his wife Edith and their family. They made a wonderful meal of fruit soup with spiced apples, cabbage and onions, French salad with hard boiled eggs, brown rice, potatoes, carrots, and a tofu and mushroom sauce, with some cookies and cakes for dessert. Melaney and Emiley went upstairs and played with his two youngest kids. It is amazing how they can play together when they don’t even know each other’s language. I guess kids have a universal language. But we shared many things about life together and it is clear that we all face the same challenges and difficulties in this world, not matter what country we live in or what language we speak. Perhaps this meal we shared with them was a little foretaste of Heaven and what it will be like to be united with believers from all over the world and share our testimonies with each other.
Tomorrow we cover the second part of the topic of Revelation’s Remnant and we will use the final decision card. So we ask for your prayers.
This is a clip of my preaching…… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIYhSf7GQWw
as always the beem team is thankful that you share your adventures through this blog. Nice to see pictures of the family as well, are the girls getting home sick yet. i guess because they are with mom and dad that maybe not. we had foreign exchange students from China stay with us when we lived in Loma Linda CA and the group leader told us to make them eat our style of food. that did not go so well and we ended up taking them to a Chinese market and they were like kids in candy store. as a grown up i can really eat anything but hard to imagine that as a kid.
Actually, I could go for some Chinese food myself. I think that’s a good lesson Warren of meeting people where they are. You were adapting to their culture and I think we have to keep that in mind when we are witnessing to people. We don’t want to water down the message, but we do have to take note of culture. That’s why I have to handle decision cards differently here.
Thanks so much for praying for us. It is always appreciated.