Youth Retreat 2015

A couple of weekends ago we had our annual youth retreat! The topic for the weekend was spiritual warfare and we had a local pastor there as our speaker. Although we talked about lots of different things within that topic, we also thought about what it practically means to put on the armour of God. It was a great topic to dive into! 

There's actually a really sweet story behind the cottage - one of the older men in my church, years ago, saw that there was nowhere for young people to meet and have these kinds of youth retreats. So he built this place! It was a joy to be there during the weekend.

On Saturday we hiked up the mountain we were staying on - it really wasn't a long hike - and had lunch up there. Sadly the visibility from the top was practically zero, but the food was very good! 

During the weekend it was so fun to spend time with our young people, in small groups and over meals. I'm so thankful for our youth group here and that I get to be a part of it!

Some more photos below.

All good retreats have silly games! 

Our main speaker for the weekend in blue.

Late night worship.

The beautiful view out the window!

2 degrees, the perfect temperature for a hike!

The "view" from the top!

But the food from the top was worth it! Fried cheese and chips!

The way down.

I love old windows.

The room I shared with some of the other girls!

A retreat, a birthday party, Thanksgiving, and a broken boiler

How is it Monday again? And once that question has been answered can someone tell me how we got to the last Monday in November? Although that does mean I have just four sleeps until my Christmas tree is going up.

Once again this Monday morning finds me in McDonalds before 7am with a cup of coffee and a little space to write. So here are some thoughts at the start of my week.

This past week has been a full one!

On Wednesday I headed to Selah. When people ask me why I picked Josiah Venture as my missions organisation one of the reasons I give is their pastoral care for their missionaries.

And Selah is one such example of their commitment to provide access to care to their missionaries. We have a cabin on the other side of the valley from our offices and hotel/conference centre. I booked the cabin for two nights last week.

It was so good to have a couple of days to rest and get quiet enough to listen to that still, small voice. God was so gracious to meet with me there and refresh me. I feel like I’ll be processing what I learnt for a while and I’m so thankful I was able to take a couple of days out, without looking at email or even touching my phone, to be refreshed.

Saturday was quite a full day – the daughter of teammates, the Thomasons, had a birthday party to celebrate turning three! So that was a lot of fun with a lot of little people running around.

I had to leave the party a little early to head to youth group where we had our Thanksgiving party. This is a special event that we use to invite students from camp to again.

Landen, an American missionary who moved here a couple of months ago, talked about Thanksgiving and how we can and should incorporate thanksgiving into our daily lives. It was good to be reminded of the many blessings we have! His lovely wife Jenny, a Czech, translated for him.

After they shared we had a feast! A lot of the girls had baked, we ordered turkey from a family in our church, and I brought a big pot of mashed potato. It was so good! And good to have extended time to hang out afterwards.

On my way home from youth group I stopped at Tesco for a couple of things and arrived back to a flat in need of a clean! I hadn’t really unpacked from my time at Selah, and it had been a full Saturday complete with making four pounds of potatoes and sewing a birthday gift.

Well, I started cleaning after putting my heating on because it was fairly cold. And then… my pilot light went out! This happened when I was gone in Latvia so the Thomasons, who had been staying here, had had to deal with it – a quick call to them helped me know what I needed to press.

And I got the flame relit! Until I turned the hot water on. Casey came round to have a look at it but couldn’t get the flame to stay lit. So we turned off the gas supply.

Washing a lot of dishes without hot water wasn’t super fun.

Yesterday before church I texted my landlord asking what I should do. They gave me the number for the man who had been at my flat a month and a half ago to fix my boiler before.

I called him after church and he wasn’t able to come that day but he’s coming today at 5pm. Still, the phonecall seemed a success because I was able to communicate! I’m thankful that some “every day” situations are becoming less scary in Czech.

Getting out of bed at 5.30am is never easy but this morning it was especially painful. It’s a wee bit cold. So I’m praying that it all gets fixed today! Thankfully I was able to shower at Casey and Kristin’s and I have a wee hot water bottle.

So, that was my full week.

This week involves three days of work and our Josiah Venture Thanksgiving celebration. I still need to decide what I’m going to make! I’m excited to see lots of lovely people and celebrate Thanksgiving for the second time.

Girls' Retreat

In the autumn our youth group usually do a girls' retreat (and a separate guys' retreat). I remember last year's - it was in October and I really felt like I was just starting to learn names. So this year it was really good to know almost all the girls there! There were twenty or so of us gathered from Friday dinner until mid-afternoon on Saturday.

We started off with a fun icebreaker and name game to help everyone know who everyone is! 

Martina led our time together really well. Our teaching sessions were on the women named in the genealogy of Christ found in Matthew and what we can learn from their stories as we seek to live as godly women. 

Martina talked about Mary and shepherded our time together really well. Jenny spoke on Tamar and Bathsheba and the beauty of the Gospel. I spoke on Rahab and Ruth and their faith and faithfulness.

We stayed at a church building thirty minutes away (erm.. it may have taken me more like an hour to get there because although I put the address in my GPS it took us to a very wrong place and then when I phoned someone for directions they gave me directions from a bridge and we found the wrong bridge. This is my general experience with church retreats. I did count.less. u-turns on Friday night in middle of nowhere Czech.)

The church renovated or built a beautiful new building - I wish I knew more of the story! It's six stories and has their main church gathering place, meeting rooms, kitchens, guest accommodation as well as several self contained flats where the pastor lives and others. It is not unusual in Czech for pastors to have a flat contained within the church building.

I slept in a bed nestled under a sloping roof with skylights built into it. So, when I say this is the view I woke up to I do literally mean I opened my eyes and saw this. Beautiful.

We are so thankful for a girl from our church who comes along to these retreats and carefully plans and prepares good food for us! 

Of course one of the best things about being away for a night retreat together is the community and down time that happens. Retreats allow you to have conversation/game/hang out time - and so much of it! It would take months to have this much time with the girls normally.

It was such an encouragement to me to be with these women as they seek to pursue their Heavenly Father and live out the identity He has given them. This is not an easy thing to do in today's society, wherever you live, but maybe especially not here. I'm praying that, like so many women in the Bible, they would do this with faith and faithfulness.

Cranes and Youth Ministry

Have you heard about a bird called the whooping crane?

Seventy years ago there were only sixteen whooping cranes left in the world. So biologists got to work and there are now over 600 whooping cranes.

The scientists wanted them to live as normally as possible. And part of the normal year for a whooping crane involves migrating from a colder northern state in America to sunny Florida.

The scientists tracked the birds as they migrated. They found that some groups of birds arrived at their destination perfectly and others veered 60 to 80 kilometers off course. Getting that lost is actually really dangerous - adding kilometres to an already long journey means it’s harder to survive.

The difference between the two groups was that the groups that flew straight to their destination had an older bird. The older bird knew the way to go and guided the others there.

At the Girls’ Retreat for my youth group I was asked to share about the importance of mentorship, discipleship, living in community and accountability. It was such a privilege to share with those beautiful ladies about the life God calls us to.

As part of the talk I shared about the whooping crane. And how we are a lot like whooping cranes. We need people around us, people who are wiser and who know what we’re going through to show us the way. We see this throughout the Bible, especially in chapters like Titus 2.

As I prepared for my talk I also found some interesting research from the Barna group. The Barna group conducted research among Millenials (the generation born between 1984 and 2002) and what differences existed between those who stay active in church and those who “drop out”. You can read their results here but there is one factor I want to highlight.

They found that 7 out of 10 Millennials who dropped out of church did not have a close friendship with an adult and nearly 9 out of 10 of those who dropped out never had a mentor at the church.

Compare that statistic to 28% of Millennials who stay had an adult mentor at the church other than their pastor. Meaningful relationships seem to be an important factor in whether or not young people stay active in the church.

Now, of course just because those are the statistics doesn’t mean those meaningful relationships completely caused the difference – it may be that because the young person is still in church they have meaningful relationships in that church (rather than because of those meaningful relationships those young people stay in church). Correlation does not mean causation (you can take the girl out of the psychology degree but you can’t take the psychology degree out of the girl).

But, regardless, there is something key about investing in those younger than us. Listening to them, giving them a voice, encouraging them, challenging them. I know that I am deeply indebted to amazing men and women of God who have done those things in my life over the years.

This is all especially true in Central and Eastern Europe where young people may not have Christian parents to model godly living and encourage them in this way. But it is also true all over – and we are commanded to teach those younger than us. 

“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” Deuteronomy 6 v 6-7

I pray that God will give us much grace and wisdom as we live this commandment out. 

Where the whooping crane story came from (NPR)

Joining the Movement of God (Article)

Time and time again this part of the world, and particularly Czech, is highlighted as a region where few are evangelical believers. Across the countries that JV works in less than 1% of the population fall into that category. 

Czech is actually top in the world in terms of percentage of the population "unaffiliated" to any religion with 76% declaring themselves in that category. Even China and North Korea have lower percentages than that. And the evangelical population of Czech is less than a third of one percent.

And yet this country has a glorious history of the Gospel and movements of God. Jan Hus called for reformation in the church and inspired Martin Luther. And in the early 1700s a revival broke out in this part of the world that rippled throughout the nations.

You can read about this revival in this article which even mentions the town I now live in as the nerve centre of the revival, which also went on to inspire the people who became known as the Moravians.

The Moravians were pioneers of the missions movement and prayed continuously for one hundred years. There are stories of Moravian missionaries who were willing to sell themselves into slavery in order to preach the Gospel to those enslaved through the Atlantic slave trade. They also deeply affected John Wesley, contributing to his conversion experience when he saw their deep faith during a storm on a boat crossing the Atlantic. 

God has been drawing people to Himself in this part of the world for centuries and from this region ripples have went out that have changed the world. 

It is our prayer that again we would see God's mighty work in this region, that He would call many to Himself and that it would transform not only this country but the world. 

Brodfest

Over the weekend I was at an event called Brodfest. Brod is part of the name of the town where it is held, Havlickuv Brod, a town I did camp with in the summer of 2012!

Going into the weekend I thought it was going to be a lot like the Northern Irish MAD weekend – a weekend of teaching for young people and encouraging them to make a difference. Not to mention sleeping on floors, or, rather, not sleeping.

In some ways those were accurate predictions – although I slept a lot more than I thought I would! It seems like Brodfest is targeted at a slightly older age group and there were a lot more seminars that looked at so many different aspects of life and living for God.

One of the great joys for me being there was not just the chance to get to know the students in my youth group better but to also be able to connect with people I’ve known for years through different English camps – it was a great to be able to connect with people from Prague, Hradec Kralove, Podebrady and Havlickuv Brod.

I went into the weekend with the expectation that I wouldn’t understand any Czech so even understanding the occasional word or phrase delighted me! I even understood a joke told in Czech during one of the talks! I was also able to have a conversation in Czech with a Czech pastor I did camp with last year who doesn’t speak English – it was so great to be able to communicate with him even though my Czech was really bad!

And it was such a joy to see over 1000 Czech young people worshipping God together and pursuing His Word. I’m praying that these young adults would live passionately for Jesus and that, as they are transformed, they would be agents of transformation in this country.