Missionary Report

Bethlehem Bible Church iconBethlehem Bible Church

0 views

0 comments

00:01
Good morning again. So I have a few pictures.
00:08
There's not much in here, and we're going to skip some of those.
00:13
So this is a presentation I did for another time in the past. But I'll show you some things, because I think it might be interesting.
00:23
So we live, me and my wife, we've been married for 11 years now. And we live in the northern, western part of Poland, not far from the
00:36
Baltic Sea, and not far from the German border. Poland has 40 million people.
00:44
The land -wise, it's the size of the state of Arizona. It's about the same size.
00:50
But people -wise, 40 million people. And yes, I was young when
00:55
I got into ministry. And I would have to say that if there is anything wrong that you can do well when you are getting into ministry, then we did it.
01:14
OK? We were young. We were unexperienced. We were pretty much alone.
01:23
We were newly married. Actually, my wife was still in high school when we married.
01:29
And when I started ministry in Borno -Sulinovo, she was 19, by the way, because you're out of high school when you were 20.
01:37
At least back then, you were 20 when you got out of high school. So yes,
01:42
I came back from a Bible school in Sweden. I came back to Poland. I knew two things have to happen in my life.
01:49
I need to marry this wonderful girl before she's going to change her mind. And another thing,
01:57
I wanted to get involved in ministry, some kind of ministry. And I had my own idea.
02:03
I, with my friends, we already designed a project. We had a vision for what our ministry should look like.
02:11
We wanted to create an art and drama and music group that would travel from town to town and share the gospel through drama on streets.
02:20
And that's kind of what we wanted. And work with the youth, maybe do some camps.
02:27
And one thing, and seriously, I'm serious about it. There was one thing I did not want to do in ministry.
02:33
I did not want to become a pastor. And as we got married in 2003, and we were praying and trying to see if there is door open for us for ministry, nothing was coming up.
02:49
And well, we realized with my wife that our attitude was kind of wrong.
02:56
We were trying to bring our plans and our ambitions before our ambitions before God.
03:02
And kind of our approach was like, God, this is what we want to do. You better sign underneath this and you let us do what we want to do for your glory.
03:13
That was our attitude really. And you know, by the way, what is the difference between a constitutional monarchy and what's the other monarchy in English?
03:30
Absolute, thank you, absolute. You know what's the difference, right? The constitutional monarchy, there's a king, but really his role is just there to sign papers.
03:43
The king has his parliament, his prime minister, like for example, in England, and the prime minister with his ministers, they make decisions, they make plans.
03:55
They just send it to the king or to the queen. She signs it and there you go. That's constitutional monarchy.
04:01
And that's, I'm afraid, that's often our attitude in Christian life. It can be like this. It's like, okay,
04:07
God, Jesus, you're the king, but I'm your prime minister. I have my ideas of what things should look like, what should it be, what my attitude should be, and et cetera, et cetera.
04:21
You just sign it, you just sign it. That's what our attitude was. We realized it's an absolute monarchy.
04:29
He's the king. And you know, in Psalm 37, verse four, it says, delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
04:37
Well, we delighted in the desires of our heart more than in the Lord. And that's unfortunately often the case.
04:44
So we realized it, so we started praying and saying, Lord, we're sorry.
04:50
We really want to delight in you, not in the desires of our hearts. And we want to serve you the best we can by delighting in you, whatever you're gonna bring in our life.
05:01
And I was in 2003 still. And what happened soon after that, probably a week after we realized all those things, a friend of mine comes to me, and he says,
05:14
Tomek, there's an opportunity for you. Go plant a church. And I said, no, no, there's no way
05:22
I'm gonna do that. What does it even mean to plant a church? So of course, talking to my wife, realized that we said we're gonna take the first opportunity that comes in.
05:35
If it's good, if it's glorifying to God, we're gonna do our best, we're gonna see how it develops.
05:42
So I said, yes, started working with the Bible League, Bible League on their church planting program in Poland, and picked this little town in Bornysulinovo.
05:54
Few reasons. One, it was close enough to our hometown so my wife could still finish high school.
06:04
Secondly, there was no gospel there ever before. It's one of the youngest towns in Poland.
06:11
It's a very unique town. It exists as a Polish town since 1992.
06:18
Before that, it was a secret military base, Russian military base. It was actually biggest
06:24
Soviet military base outside of Soviet Union. It was right there in this town. When communism fell,
06:32
Iron Curtain fell, Russians were forced to abandon this place, leave this place, and they started selling the apartments to Polish people and inhabiting the town with Polish people.
06:42
So there was never gospel there. And because this town is unique, it's a mix of people from all kinds of places in Poland.
06:51
A lot of people who came here, they came because they were looking for a new beginning. It was a chance for them to have a new beginning.
06:58
And a lot of people, they were actually trying to run away from something. So a lot of people who ended up in this town, they have pretty,
07:08
I don't know how to say it nicely, messed up backgrounds. So you end up with this mix of people who are really bitter and who are really, they're trying to hide something.
07:22
No one trusts anyone. So that was the third reason. Because we knew this town a little bit, so we thought, well, this is a good place for the gospel of Jesus Christ.
07:30
Because, I mean, where else there's hope for people in this town? So we chose this town.
07:37
We moved in eventually in 2004 and we started ministry. And, well,
07:45
I think there are some pictures of this town. Yeah, so it looks like this.
07:56
It's similar area to this. It reminds me this area of home. Probably our area is more flat than here, but lots of lakes, forests.
08:06
We can move on. Okay, I picked those pictures on purpose.
08:13
It's not really how the town looks like. Not all of it, right? It looks better in many places.
08:19
But there are still places like this in our town. And you can move on.
08:28
So I picked those pictures because they resemble the spiritual condition of people who live there.
08:35
Another one. So this happened when the Russians, when they moved out.
08:42
There was a period of time when no one was in the town. The town was abandoned. So a lot of people would come in and they would steal what they can from the buildings.
08:51
They would tear them apart, steal the tiles from the roofs and metal things from inside of the buildings.
08:57
So some of the buildings still look like this. And when we read in Ephesians chapter two, I'll read it to you.
09:15
In Ephesians two, when Paul describes what these people, these believers, what they were before they became believers, he says in verse 12, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in this world.
09:41
And so I think these pictures, they resemble the state of, spiritual state of people who live there.
09:49
That's what happens, I think. I don't know if it's the same here. I think it's the same everywhere. People without Christ alienated from the promises of covenants.
09:59
They're without hope in the world. And so the atmosphere of the town is hopelessness.
10:05
You meet young people who don't know what they're supposed to do with their lives. They have no ambition. They have no idea of what they like to do in life.
10:17
Really just wasting their lives on the specific places in town.
10:24
So hopelessness, that's the mark of people there. And so as we read
10:29
Ephesians, it continues that, I mean, Christ reconciled through the blood of Christ.
10:36
That's where everything changes. That's, there's no more hopelessness.
10:41
It's life in Christ. We were dead in our trespasses and sins in the beginning of chapter two of Ephesians.
10:49
We were children of wrath. The wrath of God was upon us.
10:54
And then we have this wonderful biblical little word, but, but God, rich in mercy.
11:04
He made us alive by grace in Christ. So that's been one of the most wonderful things in last 10 years of ministry.
11:15
So by the way, going back, so like I told you, everything, the way we started was probably wrong in many ways.
11:23
We were too young, not ready, not equipped pretty much by ourselves, but we didn't know.
11:31
We were, we just didn't know. So today I would not do it again like this, but back then
11:37
I thought, you know, it's right to do it because I didn't know otherwise.
11:42
I was not trained and with sincere hearts where we went into ministry and God was gracious enough to keep us in there.
11:50
And he was gracious enough to use us for his kingdom. And we are really happy because of that.
11:58
And there's nothing else I want to do for the rest of my life. So, so that's, that's pretty neat that when you delight in the
12:05
Lord, he does give you the desires of your heart because I found out that this is the best thing
12:12
I could spend my life on is preaching the word and proclaiming the gospel to people, gospel of hope.
12:19
So otherwise I'd be probably on the street trying to perform dramas to people and it would be a big drama.
12:26
So anyway, one of the amazing things, oh yeah, this, it happens in our town every year.
12:35
It's an international reunion of military vehicles. Around 5 ,000 to 7 ,000 people come with tanks, helicopters and military equipment.
12:45
And the town turns into one huge military compound. And well, there, there is a war taking place there as everywhere, it's, there's a spiritual war, warfare.
12:57
Well, anyway, so pretty much everyone, pretty much everyone in our town is a first generation
13:04
Christians. Like I told you, there has never been a gospel there before we came and people did not know the gospel.
13:13
So pretty much everyone is a first generation Christian. And it's just, it's just wonderful, amazing to see how
13:20
God transforms people's lives because we know these people from the very beginning. We know who they were before and who they are now.
13:28
And seeing people who pretty much hated the church, they hated the gospel. There is a man in our church whose wife became a believer and he was so angry with her.
13:38
He did not want to hear anything about the Bible, about Jesus, about the church. Literally, she would say that when she tried to bring up a topic of the church, of the gospel, of anything spiritual,
13:51
I mean, he would get so red on his face, veins would pop out on his neck. I mean, his mouth almost started foaming.
13:58
She was afraid to mention anything. So she just, she just started praying. She did not even want to talk with him.
14:05
He was so angry. And then he did some things that were, were about to destroy their marriage.
14:14
And he became so desperate because he did not want to lose her. And she wasn't going to divorce him, but she wanted to move away for some time from him.
14:25
And he was so desperate. He knocked on the door of one of the elders in our church and he said, help me, help me.
14:32
And he became a believer. He understood the gospel. He was in a perfect place. He did not have to be proved that he's a sinner.
14:41
He knew it right away. He just, his question was, what shall I do?
14:47
Like an ax, what shall I do? So he got the gospel like this and he just became, they're like newly married now.
14:56
He became a believer about two years ago and he's growing rapidly. He's really hungry for the word.
15:04
So things like this, there's a lot of dysfunctional homes in Borne Sulinovo. A lot of alcohol, a lot of unemployment, probably around 35 to 40 % right now because the only company that was hiring people went bankrupt.
15:21
So a lot of unemployment, a lot of alcohol. Men especially are alcoholic.
15:26
They're abusing their children, abusing their wives, or they just pretty much, they are absent from their homes.
15:32
So you have young people who grew up being threatened by their fathers, being abused in various ways and totally being broken, hopeless, and then they get the gospel.
15:48
And it's just amazing to see what happens with their lives, what God does with their lives.
15:55
So how God heals the wounds from the past and takes them out of the sinful context that they grew up in and puts them and it gives them a bright future in a way.
16:08
He changes their values and perspectives and everything, it's really, really neat.
16:15
That's what the gospel does. Okay, well, we can skip, we can go through this, go to another point as some of the things we've been doing.
16:26
If you're wondering how we started the church, well, in Poland, in Poland, it takes a long time to gain any credibility with community because the smaller the town is, the stronger the
16:43
Catholic church is, okay? So like in a town like ours of 4 ,500 people, the president, the king of the town is the priest.
16:57
He controls pretty much everything and everyone submits to him. Whatever he wants, it has to be.
17:03
So especially in places like this, when you come with a church that is different than the
17:11
Catholic church, it's perceived as a sect, as a cult, okay?
17:17
And people will not accept any invitations. They will not come to any meetings.
17:24
They will not come to a church service. If you advertise it, if you announce it, no one will show up.
17:29
People are afraid. You really have to take time to get to know the people, to build trust.
17:36
So we started pretty much with just doing all kinds of events, kayaking trips, and just letting people get to know us.
17:44
And we would share the gospel with them in those contexts. If you go, if you move on, doing some concerts where the preaching of the gospel would take place at the end and we can move on.
17:58
It's kayaking, another kayaking trip. Some other event, basketball camps, sports camps.
18:07
Just doing anything we could. Picnics to get to know people and working with the retirement house in the town.
18:18
That's what we did for probably eight months before someone, people started coming to our church services.
18:29
Like when we would announce that there's a church service of a Baptist church in Buenos Aires. Probably after eight months, people started showing up.
18:38
So it takes a long time to build trust and get to know the people and show them that we are here to wish you well and wish you best.
18:46
And we bring a message of hope and salvation. We can move on. Just move on.
18:53
There's some of the Bible study groups. Yeah, move on. Yeah, this is our church, part of it.
19:08
Okay. Now we're gonna zoom out and look at Poland a little bit.
19:13
I want you to see something about Poland. A question before we talk about Poland. Which country has more unsaved than all these countries together, combined?
19:24
Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. I guess. Poland, yes.
19:33
Which country has less missionaries than just Afghanistan alone? Poland.
19:41
Has the greatest need for church planting missionaries? Well, you know, these questions are from, I think, pioneers, this material comes.
19:51
You know, how we understand that was the greatest need. It's, yeah, we would have to define it, but their answer is
19:59
Poland. Let's move on. But this is true. Which country is 0 .1
20:06
% evangelical Christian? Poland is. Which country was chosen over all countries as having the greatest need for church planting missionaries?
20:16
That's according to a certain research that was done. If we move on, I'll show you this research.
20:21
So let's just move on. Well, this is Poland. That's Europe. This is where Poland is. Okay, the research was called
20:27
N -Formula. It was done in 2004 by Martin Weiser from, and it comes from Evangelical Missions Quarterly.
20:36
You can argue with his research. I argue with his research. There are things that I would not agree with, but still it paints a certain picture, a spiritual reality that takes place in Poland.
20:48
So I still think it's worth seeing this, okay? So he calls it
20:53
N -Formula. He, what he does, he took all countries of the world. What's the population of the country?
21:00
How many people live in the country? And then how many out of the population are evangelical believers?
21:06
He took that number. Then he would, again, look at the population, and then he would look at the number of active church planting missionaries in specific country.
21:18
So he would take those numbers. He would multiply it. He would come up with what he called
21:23
N -Formula, which normally tells you nothing unless you compare it with the
21:28
N -Formula of other countries. So the lower the N number is, well, there's a whole explanation of how he did it.
21:37
The lower the number is, that means the more Christians are there in the specific country, and the more missionaries are there in the country, and the less population is in the country, the smaller population, which means there's a less need for church planting missionaries there, okay?
21:56
The bigger the number, that means more people in the country, less believers, less missionaries, et cetera, et cetera.
22:04
Okay, we get it. Let's move on. So this is his chart.
22:13
If we can move on. So countries like Ukraine, the need for missionaries is 3 .10
22:20
according to his research, which means there's not such a big, huge need because Ukraine now is probably the fastest growing, has the fastest growing church in all of Europe.
22:31
So here's the population, 50 million. There's evangelicals, 1 ,300 ,000.
22:40
We can move on. You have Czech Republic, which has a population of 10 million, 100 ,000 evangelicals.
22:48
There are 236 foreign missionaries trying to plant churches. So you have a little bigger need than Ukraine.
22:56
Let's move on. Okay, so here you have the top of the chart.
23:08
So you have Russia. Russia has a higher need. You know, it's 146 million people.
23:15
Here on top, you have Pakistan with a really large population, very small population of evangelicals.
23:23
Okay, and I don't know, not too many missionaries. And then on top is
23:30
Poland with 39 million people. He even says 0 .2
23:36
% evangelicals, 77 ,000. I think the number is high, but probably number is high everywhere.
23:43
So, and then you have 160 missionaries only in Poland. So the number that comes up, he comes up with is 115.
23:54
Again, you can argue with this in many ways, but I think it shows the reality, spiritual reality of Poland.
24:02
There is a huge need. And is there a need for more churches in Poland?
24:10
Yeah, I believe so. Is there a need for more Christians in Poland? Yeah, but as I look at Poland and what's taking place in Poland, I think the major need in Poland is for the preaching of the word.
24:26
Because with the church that already is in Poland, I think there's enough believers in Poland that something could be done to make a difference, but it's not gonna make a difference until God raises godly leaders who can preach the word faithfully.
24:47
You know, in 2 Timothy, you know this very well, yes? When Paul writes to Timothy about the difficult times that are going to come, and people will just gather teachers who will teach what tickles their ears.
25:03
And then in all of that, in the midst of all that difficulty that's gonna come and the times that are near,
25:09
Paul says there's only one remedy, and it's just preach the word. Preach the word.
25:16
Preach the word. So I believe, yes, we need more believers in Poland, we need more churches, but we need godly leaders.
25:24
We need leaders who will be committed to preaching the word. I believe that's what Poland needs. And unfortunately, preaching of the word is not very good in a way.
25:38
It's, people are not even trained what it means to preach the Bible. Let's move on.
26:00
Yeah, let's move on.
26:14
I wanna show you a map. I think it's interesting. This is a map of Poland. These little spots are municipalities, that's how you pronounce it?
26:26
Municipalities? Okay. So the ones that are red have anywhere from four to 20 churches in them, okay?
26:35
This is Warsaw municipality. The brighter ones have three churches in the whole municipality, then these ones have two churches, and then there are some that you can't even see on this projector that have one church, and then whatever is white, there are no churches there.
26:58
No churches. What I mean churches, evangelical churches. I don't believe a Catholic church is a
27:04
Christian gospel centric, Christ centric church. I don't believe that. Anyone disagrees,
27:11
I'll be willing to talk afterwards. Okay, let's move on.
27:21
How long do we go? I forgot. 10 .50. Okay.
27:27
Okay. So, you can click one more time. So this is what we are about to do, what the vision that God puts on our hearts is for the future of Poland.
27:42
Realizing that lack of good, godly leaders is the biggest problem of Poland right now.
27:53
Because if we had godly leaders who know how to preach the gospel and preach the word,
28:00
I think it would make a difference. So thinking about all that, in our near future, this is what we want to focus on in our ministry.
28:08
We call it Faithful to the Word. It's a name of the initiative that we're trying to take and build in Poland with some other leaders and some other churches.
28:18
And we wanted to focus on three things. We want to create a database of good, sound theological resources in Poland.
28:27
We want to translate books, write things, publish sermons online, just anything, so that anyone who's trying to find answers to what
28:41
Bible is teaching, who's looking for good biblical resources, he knows where to go. He knows where to go.
28:47
So this is one of the purposes we have. It's what we want to build. Another one, we would like to start training.
28:54
We've been already doing it in a more informal way, training some guys from our church, some men for ministry.
29:01
And we already have two guys that are sent from our church who are doing internship in other churches in Poland and getting ready to be pastors.
29:15
So while we want to do it in a more formal way, we would like to see something similar to the
29:20
EBTC in Berlin of what Christian Andreessen is doing. In Berlin, we would like to see something similar take place in Poland when men are being trained.
29:30
Especially now, we want to, in the beginning, we want to focus on training for expository preaching and possibly biblical counseling because these two things are absent in Poland.
29:41
There's really nothing that trains for expository preaching.
29:47
Maybe some small informal things in some of the churches, but all the seminars we have, if they teach anything about preaching, it's just kind of an overview, a general overview of homiletics.
29:58
So there's nothing for expository preaching and there's nothing for biblical counseling.
30:04
There's lots of psychology in Poland, but not biblical counseling. A lot of psychology creeping into the church and undermining the authority of the
30:14
Bible and the Holy Spirit, and let's try to find answers in the world for people's problems.
30:22
So these two things we would like to start with. And then the third purpose, we want to organize a conference every year, a conference that gathers people, like -minded people together and promotes sound biblical teaching.
30:36
So we've done two conferences. One of them, Pastor Mike was preaching at last year.
30:44
So this is what our focus is for the future. This is what you can be praying for, that as we move on to those things, that God leads our steps and he provides whatever is needed for these things to take place.
31:01
So yeah, I don't know what's next. We can move on. Here's some of the resources we are, you can just keep clicking.
31:17
This is the books, these two books that we are translating. You might know this one. Yeah, we still need to, officially by the time we finish, we need to figure out all the legal rights to publish them, but we're started working on those books.
31:35
Yeah, we can move on. I already talked about it. I just keep clicking some pictures from our conferences.
31:46
Tag McMasters, you might know. Yeah, that's from last year. That's Pastor Mike there.
31:54
Okay, okay.
32:02
So yeah, so we're in a transitional moment in our ministry.
32:08
It's been 10 years. The church is pretty much established. The church in Bourne -sur -Linovo. And we sense that to be good stewards of what
32:17
God is bringing our way and different opportunities he's given us and different desires that he's putting in our hearts that we realize about, that we would have never thought about.
32:28
It all seems like God is leading us towards the way of developing that ministry of influencing
32:34
Poland and training men in all of Poland and creating a database of sound theological resources for Poland.
32:42
So we're in a moment where we think it's necessary for us to leave Bourne -sur -Linovo, this small town, because it's not very strategically located.
32:52
It's not well located. It's kind of in a part of Poland where they're not, the closest airport is two hours away, three hours away.
33:01
So people, even when we had the conference, people from the Southern Poland, some people who wanted to come, they couldn't come because there was no good connection for them to actually come to our conference.
33:12
So, you know, like as Paul, when Paul was on his mission trips, I think, of course, the
33:19
Holy Spirit guided him, but there is some reasoning about the places he went to.
33:26
You know, I don't think it's not a coincidence that he spent the most time in cities like Ephesus, Corinth, Athens.
33:35
It's cities that are very strategically located that could influence the region. So we are about to move to a bigger city so you can be praying for us.
33:48
We are trying to finish well what we started in Borne. We're now, our focus is on finishing, training up the men that are in Borne Sulinovo so that they can take over the church.
34:01
It's going well, so hopefully that will happen. And by the time, as Pastor Mike mentioned, I'm back from the internship.
34:08
If I end up interning at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC, I'm gonna come back to Poland.
34:16
We're gonna wrap up things and probably move to one of the bigger cities, either Warsaw, which is the capital of Poland, centrally located, where there are some other people who would be willing to help.
34:26
They want to get involved. They have the same desires. Or Toruń. Toruń is another centrally located city of Poland.
34:34
It's where Nicolaus Copernicus comes from. I don't know if you heard about the man. So yes, one of these two cities, we're trying to figure out which one would be best.
34:46
So you can be praying. Again, you can be praying for us. And as this ministry develops, if you're thinking about the ways you could help, well, for example, publishing books is a big need for Poland.
34:59
Poland is usually probably one of the last languages of all the world that things end up being translated to.
35:06
Seriously, seriously. For many reasons, because evangelical church is so small in Poland that once you translate something, not many people are going to buy it and not many people are going to read it because there are not many people there who actually believe.
35:21
So another reason, Polish is such a difficult language. So I don't know.
35:27
So with translating resources, if you want to help, because so far everything that we've been doing, people have been doing it voluntarily.
35:37
But if people could actually get paid for translating, translating work would go much quicker.
35:45
If there was actually some money that could be given to people so that they would not have to work, they could translate a book.
35:51
A book could be finished in a month instead of nine months, eight months. So things like this would be very helpful.
35:58
If this is what you would think is important, it would be significant, helping with translating books.
36:07
Yeah, any questions about Poland, about our ministry, about us?
36:26
Yes. Well, we've had a little bit of opposition. It wasn't really persecution.
36:32
It was too weak to call it persecution, but some opposition. Like I told you, some came from the
36:41
Catholic church because the Catholic church didn't like that we were there. And we constantly have to switch places for meetings.
36:47
We don't own a building. We rent places. And we actually made a circle.
36:52
We were back to the place where we met first 10 years ago because sooner or later we are either kicked out from a place where we meet because of the pressure from the priest or from the government, or something else happens and we have to move.
37:09
So this one time we rented a place that was located on the ground floor of an apartment building. And above the church room, there was a man who lived right above it.
37:19
He didn't like the idea of us being there. And so what he would do, he would often turn the speakers down to the floor and play music really loud.
37:30
So the preaching of the word took place in the accompaniment of some disco music often.
37:39
And it didn't help him because we kept meeting there because we didn't have another place to meet at that time.
37:47
And we couldn't find anything. So we kept meeting. So he started looking for ways to get rid of us.
37:53
So what he would do as we would walk to church, he would throw potatoes at us, sometimes rocks, and he would call us names and he would be really angry.
38:03
And whomever he thought that was part of our church, he would try to pick on those people.
38:08
Like from his window, he would yell at them and he would call them names and he would try to throw things at them.
38:15
So this one time, there's a friend of mine who's like a really big guy.
38:21
He's not a really nice guy. I mean, he's nice to me, he's my friend, but he's not a really nice guy.
38:28
He's the guy that helps other people solve problems with other people. And he came, we did a basketball camp and in the evenings we would have meetings in the church room where we would do some teaching of the
38:44
Word. And he would come. So this man, he thought that this guy, he's part of our church.
38:51
So one time, this my friend, this big guy and strong guy and the guy who likes to beat others up, he's walking towards our church and this angry neighbor picks on him and he starts calling him names.
39:06
And my friend says, you want to come down to me? Yeah, yeah, I want to come down to you. So this neighbor comes down and he gets knocked out on the street.
39:18
So I don't know if that's a good testimony or not. I don't know. We didn't tell him to do that.
39:25
He did it himself. He's not from our church. He never became a believer yet.
39:30
That's providence, yes. But there's another great story connected with that neighbor.
39:38
So he would try to write articles to newspapers about us, accusing us that we serve drugs at our meetings, we drug people, that we actually kidnap children, we brainwash children and we take them to Germany and sell them to work on the streets.
39:58
He would come up with different weird, various weird things. And eventually, he wrote to the government department of protecting the children rights in Warsaw.
40:10
So the government had to react, contacted the mayor of our town and the mayor sent like the vice mayor to investigate on us.
40:22
So she came to meet us, to ask us questions about who we are, what we do.
40:28
She heard the gospel and she came to one of our camps, English camps, where she heard more gospel.
40:34
Then she became a believer. And then her son became a believer and then her husband became a believer.
40:42
And we thought about actually buying a good coffee or some candy and take it to this neighbor and tell him, thank you for doing what you did because there's another person that is safe now because of you trying to persecute the church.
41:01
So God is bigger, God is bigger. Not really, not now.
41:15
Now it's kind of, since there are quite a few people in the church, it happens automatically. I think evangelism is very simple.
41:25
If we take the biblical definition of evangelism and form,
41:30
I think it's very simple. It's pretty much in Colossians, Paul says, you pray, you are wise with the unbelievers, you take every opportunity and you speak the gospel clearly.
41:44
So, I mean, you use your words, you show your life and you pray. It's very simple.
41:50
And when it's understood that way and we do it well, I think it happens automatically. And that's what's been happening in our town now.
41:57
Now, after 10 years, it's just people who are in the church, they naturally have relationships with people from outside of the church and they pray for them and they invite them to church and people come to church and constantly someone new will get saved.
42:12
In the past, yes, we had some program. We had some strategy. We would do some events, open air preaching.
42:20
Sometimes we would also meet people on kayaking trips, like I told you. And then after making relationships with them, we would go to their homes, trying to encourage them if they would be interested in reading the
42:32
Bible. So we would end up at their homes trying to study the Bible with them. Eventually they would come to church and they would get saved.
42:39
So, yeah. No, no, not really.
42:54
Maybe on the positive side, Polish evangelicals have stepped out to the
42:59
Ukrainians offering refuge places. So like in some of the churches in our area who can afford it, who have buildings, there are some
43:11
Ukrainian believers who escaped Ukraine and live in Poland. That's the only way. It's been a good way for the
43:18
Polish Christians to be less selfish because we tend to be very selfish thinking about ourselves. We're poor.
43:24
We need help from the outside. That's not necessarily true. We can actually help others as well.
43:30
So that's what's been happening. Well, well, there is a
43:43
McDonald, not, what was his name? William, William McDonald, you know?
43:51
I don't know if you know the man, but there is a commentary. It's very, very concise, very concise commentary.
43:57
So that's the only one I, I don't know how good it is even, but there is none.
44:04
John MacArthur's commentary has just been finished now. It's going to be published probably, if everything goes well within a month, it should be published.
44:13
It's going to be a first Bible commentary in Polish. Yes. No, no, no.
44:30
I would love to, but to a German one. Yeah, to a German equivalent. The Hürzen Konferenz and something like that, that Christian Andreessen does.
44:40
So yeah, but not to the Shepherds Conference here and not to the Master's Seminary. I did study at the
44:47
EBTC where Mike came and taught preaching class. That's where I studied theology.
44:54
And before that in Poland, three years, and then the E3 Seminary, and then one year in Bible school in Sweden.
45:02
Yeah. It's 10 .50.
45:17
It's 10 .50. Thank you. Yes. No, my father -in -law is, and my brother -in -law is on my wife's side family, yes.
45:33
But not my family. I have a younger sister. She's only 17. And well, they are all open to the gospel.
45:44
They are willing to hear me preach to them and talk to them about the gospel.
45:50
So that's good. Hopefully, eventually it will soften their hearts.
46:09
Yeah, I think it's working well. It's not easy because a lot of men in our church, they travel outside of the city to work in other places.
46:21
So sometimes they're gone for three weeks. So you cannot, it's hard to do something on a regular basis with them.
46:26
It makes it difficult. And some men we trained in the past, they had to leave, especially young men.
46:32
They had to leave the town because they couldn't live in Borna. They had to find a job somewhere.
46:39
So they ended up in other cities and strengthening other churches for the gospel, but they left our church.
46:47
So sometimes you train someone and they have to leave. And then other times you want to train someone on a regular basis, but he works outside of the city.
46:54
So it's hard to work with him on a regular basis. So there are some difficulties, but it's been going well. We are now working with four men, four men and who are really eager to learn and they are stepping out in ministry.
47:07
They're learning things. And so we, yeah, teach them.
47:14
We're now actually, when I get back, we're going to do a weekend on just preaching, a whole weekend on sermon preparation.
47:25
Yes. It did exist.
47:38
Reformation was never strong in Poland. It was strong among some
47:43
Polish people, but some significant Polish people who were in the
47:48
Reformation time, they actually left Poland and influenced Holland or even
47:54
Scotland. So Reformation was never strong in Poland itself, but the church was there from the time of Reformation.
48:02
There were some German missionaries that came to Poland. In the 17th century, the church started to become stronger in Poland and it existed until the war.
48:13
And then during the war, it got really weak. And after the war, it's been trying to be rebuilt.
48:22
Yeah. But it was actually stronger before the war than it is now. Well, that's actually amazing how
48:44
God provided. We don't have time, but it's really amazing. When we went into ministry, we actually, all we had were the remains of the gifts we had from our wedding because people give money for the wedding in Poland.
48:59
I don't know if here as well. So we had some money from the wedding and we decided to spend that money on our ministry and see what happens.
49:05
If the money is gone and we cannot do it anymore, it will mean we have to come back. So, well, things happened.
49:12
God provided in various ways, first through the Bible League, then through some friends and connections we made with churches in the
49:21
States. And some churches in the States have been supporting us and some friends from the
49:26
States. And then our church is supporting us partially. They cannot support us fully, but they support us partially.
49:35
So yeah, at this moment, I am partially supported by my church and partially by the support that comes from churches in the
49:43
States. Okay.
49:50
Well, thank you. Thank you for your patience. And yeah, may
49:56
God bless you and be strong in the Lord. And I'm really excited to be here and see what
50:02
God is doing in this area. Oh, the States. And I am very encouraged by you.