13 December|Belgrade, Serbia [David Neal]
A glance at the Belgrade tramline map shows the multiple routes the trams take and the stops they make along the way. For ‘New Belgrade’ many stops read: ‘Blok 21’, ‘Blok 23’, ‘Blok 42’, Blok 45’ – there are 72 blokovi (blocks) in all, home to approximately 250,000 citizens. Built on former swampland, and surrounded by water positioned in a bend of the Sava River where it meets the Danube, the 1938 settlement was to be the foundation, the jewel in the crown of how a planned modernist economy works well for its people.
‘New Belgrade’ is not unfamiliar to many tedNEWS readers because in the summer of 2018, over 1,200 Trans-European Division (TED) pastors met together in the New Belgrade Sava Centre. But also, and more recently, during the 2nd quarter of 2020, one of the designated 13th Sabbath Offering projects was to support the establishment of a new church.
‘SO WHAT’
Of all the walls the artist could have chosen to leave his mark, little did he or she know that less than 50 metres away a new community is soon to be launched for worship, ministry and mission, committed to helping support and offer solutions to the ‘SO WHAT’ crisis. The message scrawled in English caught my attention on my visit to this new 13th Sabbath offering funded building.
And it is the context of this new and exciting ministry that the ‘SO WHAT’ message continues to bug me, as if left ‘serving notice’ to the leaders and members of the new church plant. Because like many other great European cities, the post war urban dream and of building vast high rise concrete blocks of planned housing, turned into urban jungles in which citizens got lost. It is this reality that the ‘SO WHAT’ message so powerfully shares. The common expereince for so many was and still is ‘alienation’, as much as in Birmingham (UK) as in Belgrade, Serbia.
But that message is also a reminder of a critical reflective questions we are collectively compelled to ask: “If our church was no longer in this town, would anyone from the community notice we’d gone?” Is not the ‘SO WHAT’ message a visual reminder that worship without mission is incomplete?
Hope for Troubled Times
I am in Belgrade to observe and support a mini-series of meetings led by Mark and Teenie Finley, their third mission in the Trans-European Division (TED) this year. At the invitation of Pastor Dragan Grujicic, president of the South-East European Union Conference (SEEUC) and his team, the Finleys are in Serbia to share a series of messages with the theme of “To Hope Again”. The purpose is to bring a message of spiritual hope, grounded in scripture, to bring comfort to faithful members and the community, with the invitation to live purposeful and happy lives regardless of ‘permacrisis’ events. At the same time the permacrisis raises legitimate, challenging and perplexing questions; “Where is God in all this? Is he responsible for the problems the challenges of our times raise, whether personal, the result of natural events, or wars created by humankind?
No stranger to Serbia, Finley first held an evangelistic series here in 1988 while serving as the Ministerial Director for the TED. More recently the Finley’s made a further visit to Belgrade in June 2012.
Unlike the ‘emergency’ Europe faced earlier this year from February to April, with the unexpected exodus of migrants from Ukraine to neighbouring countries such as Poland, Hungary, and beyond, the atmosphere at this end of the year is different. While appearing to be calmer, the war continues daily with a continent still coming to terms with conflict once again on its own soil. Positioned along a strategic geo-political fault-line between east and west, along with other European nations, Serbia faces some incredibly tough day to day economic challenges – a housing crisis directly compounded by the war, and an October inflation rate of 15%.
Hope for Difficult Times…
The mini-series ran from Friday to Monday, 2-5 December in the Belgrade Central Church, commencing each evening with a health presentation by Teenie Finley, teaching and affirming the principal that physical, emotional and spiritual healthcare are inextricably linked.
The series ended with an explanation of the biblical belief in the Second Coming, a sermon Finley has preached many hundreds of times. But in this context and at this time, it seemed that his presentation contained more power, passion, and deeply personal conviction than usual. Youth and young adults responded by making a commitment for future baptism.
All the lectures and presentations from the series are posted on YouTube courtesy of the SEEUC media team, Tome Nascov (director) and Pavle Jovanović (producer). Each programme in the series consists of a health lecture with Teenie Finley, interspersed with inspiring music performed in the main by Belgrade Central young adults. The lectures are simultaneously translated from English to Serbian for most of the presentations. [Photos: David Neal]
