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New-Old Church Location

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Friends , I have some exciting news to share with you! And although this is more about our English speaking congregation, it will also affect the life of our RAE fellowship. Starting from April 1, The Community Centre will be closed down and our dear Frederick and Abigail Griffith will be going for a furlough for an undefined period of time. We are being offered to take over the space and make it our church’s home. The ways this space could be beneficial for us and how it can be used for ministry are countless. The very thought of it, makes us feel excited. We could finally have all ministry activities and groups we reach out to under the same roof. This also includes some of the Roma congregation meetings. The truth is that the space in the Roma part of town has lost the benefits that it used to give us. Our church members have already become outcasts, but they have been wearing their stigma almost like a badge of honor. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difficult to bring new
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NAME CHANGE: The New Vision

One of the most known and so frequently quotes parts of the Bible are the verses from Galatians 3:28 where apostle Paul says that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. I am happy to say that, in the last several months, these words have come to life in our church.  From the moment it started, back in 2008, and with the first church meetings being initiated in September 2010, our ministry has been conformed to the culture and overall, the reality of the Roma and Ashkali/Egyptians to the best of our knowledge and capacities. The examples of that were and still are numerous:  from taking our shoes off when entering the place of worship (the place of worship should be physically clean on the top of being spiritually pure) seating in a rectangle shape and/or on the floor intensive time of worship and prayer during every service in (at least) three languages and, somet
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Summertime, part two: Tutoring Re-Started

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Improvised school board placed on makeshift wood-burning stove This month we have more exciting news to share with you: we were able to restart the tutoring program. Thanks to the sacrificial undertaking of a few of our new members (all non-Roma) we were able to begin providing tutoring classes for church children again!  As some of you may remember, we held these classes for a semester and a half in 2021/22 and then had to stop because some of the volunteers/teachers were unable to continue due to the changes in their schedules. Ever since, it has been a prayer of ours to continue with it, as we truly enjoyed each moment from the last classes!  Tutoring is something we’ve been planning to do for years. The idea was born after realizing how much the Roma-RAE pupils fall behind their non-Roma classmates in regards to knowledge they acquire and success they make in school.  I'd shared this in the past already, but I’ll repeat it once again: over the course of the last 20 years govern
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Summertime, part one: Swimming school 2023

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This summer has certainly given us a lot of fond memories, since we were able to repeat some of the old activities and start with some new. Unlike the previous years, this summer we did not have to interrupt with any of our activities. On the contrary, we were able to do all of our activists as planned and even increase their volume. One of the old things that we’ve been doing for the last few summers was to organize a swimming school for the children from the church. As always, that was SO MUCH FUN! It was so gratifying to see how many have progressed, including some of those who learned to swim last year. Only a year later they were performing maneuvers while jumping into the pool, doing somersaults, swimming tirelessly… Even with the new ones, who were too young last year, are improving. There are only a handful of those who may still need some help the next year. I say gratifying because I do take pride in the fact that the kids have reached such an important milestone in growing u
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“Job Creation” Training, HUB, Serbia, April 27-29

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​ Everyone,  Just a quick update on something that happened at the end of last month. On April 27-29, our church took part in the 2nd ”Job Creation” conference that was held in the historical Belgrade Christian Association. The event was organized by Roma Networks - a network of Roma churches and ministries from all over Europe (and it becomes global!) that we’ve been a part of since 2014.  This event was a follow up of the last year’s event on the similar topic, as job creation, poverty alleviation, partial/full sustainability has become an important conversation among the Roma churches and ministries all over Eastern Europe. The awareness of necessity for Roma churches/ministries to become less dependent on the support from e.g. the USA and/or Western Europe is becoming greater and so there are many independent initiatives popping up from different corners of “Roma ministries universe”. Some of you may remember that we are being active in this field for a couple of years now. Unfortu
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BALLET MAGNIFICAT!

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Friends, Two nights ago, our church had a rare opportunity to attend a live ballet performance. In Montenegro, ballet is popular among the young girls, but aside from that, there is very little going on that is ballet related. So, it came as a real surprise when we heard that an American, Christian, ballet troop - Ballet Magnificat! - was coming to Niksic, Montenegro, to perform.  To us locals, there is little that connect Niksic, a city of “steel and beer” (its two major industries) and ballet, which made it even more exciting and somewhat surreal 🙂 The ballet troop was touring Eastern Europe, and, thanks to our friends from Montenegrin IFES branch - they made their way to Montenegro.  There  are a couple of reasons why I thought it would be a good idea to take our church to see the performance, even if we had o sacrifice one of our mid-week church meetings for it. Since the early days of our ministry, one of the greatest challenges we were facing were both the exclusion and self-exc
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Visit to Italy

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Originally published on our ministry's Facebook group's wall on May 3, 2022:  Dear friends,  It’s been too long since you’ve last heard from me and it is somewhat hard to pick up where I left it, as it feels like too many things happened too quickly and it is impossible to report on every single one of them. This time, I would like to turn your attention to my trip to Italy that took place in the beginning of April and the mission journey that followed.  Firstly, I ended up in Italy following the invitation of friends from Missione Rem with whom we’ve been partnering with for a few years now. Unfortunately, due to Covid travel restrictions, it was only now that I was able to visit them in Milano, Italy.  The words are not enough to express my gratitude for everything these guys did for me in the 10 days that followed. I was given an opportunity preach in 8 different churches/home groups and have had chance to learn about the heart and soul of the evangelical church in (north
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