12 April 2017 | St Albans [Victor Hulbert] Ten pastoral staff from the New Zealand Pacific Union Conference (NZPUC) visited with Trans-European Division staff on Tuesday, 11 April with the aim of gaining an insight into how mission can be achieved within the secularised and diverse cultures of Europe.
During an intense morning of presentation and discussion, Daniel Duda, TED Education and Adventist Mission director, highlighted the challenges that are faced by the 11 Unions and 3 attached fields within the TED, regarding sharing the Gospel – whether in highly secularised countries like the Netherlands and Finland, or more religiously mono-cultural countries like Greece, Poland or Serbia where, despite a monopoly religion, secularism is making serious inroads.
“While 19th century methods are still having some success in a few areas, we have to be innovative and change our mindset in order to reach out to people groups who have radically changed their world-view either post-communism or post-Christianity,” Duda said.
Part of that learning was a review of some of the success stories and mission experiments that have taken place in the TED over the past 12 months. Victor Hulbert, TED Communication director, took the group on a whirlwind tour of a variety of projects including Messy Church success in Croatia and Greece, a pizza church linked closely to an Adventist school and church in Finland, health clubs in South East Europe, a motor-bike club, and creative youth and pathfinder initiatives.
He also emphasised that while the church is good at developing and running its own programmes, being outward looking and seeing what the world is actually looking at may help us develop initiatives that touch more lives. As examples he showed how the church in the UK was highlighted for the work it did around the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WWI – and the courageous Adventist story of Conscientious Objectors. More recently he showed how Hungary and Poland (among others), were able to make significant community impacts by focusing on the Desmond Doss story during the release of the Hacksaw Ridge film.
The fourth presenter was Patrick Johnson, Ministerial Association Secretary. He took the group on a different journey showing how good mentoring and discipleship can not only benefit the pastor and his family, but will, ultimately help the church grow as a positive discipleship track leads to a significant improvement, not only in building relationships, but in an increased and natural process of total member involvement.
Following an evening debriefing, Kulakov expressed his gratefulness for the time together, noting “strong similarities in thinking and direction between TED and the South Pacific Division. We truly praise God.” He concluded, “We have been hugely blessed and learnt a number of very valuable things that we have committed to apply/try in our ministry.” [tedNEWS]
tedNEWS Staff: Victor Hulbert, editor; Esti Pujic, associate editor
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tedNEWS is an information bulletin issued by the communication department of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Trans-European Division.
