{"id":1070,"date":"2015-04-28T14:25:11","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T14:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/sitenews\/2015\/04\/28\/mission-to-the-cities-in-trans-european-division\/"},"modified":"2015-04-28T14:25:11","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T14:25:11","slug":"mission-to-the-cities-in-trans-european-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/mission-to-the-cities-in-trans-european-division\/","title":{"rendered":"Mission to the Cities in the Trans-European Division"},"content":{"rendered":"

28 April 2015 St Albans, United Kingdom [Ivan Milanov, Laszlo Gallusz, Deana Stojkovi\u0107\/ted<\/em>NEWS] At the Trans-European Division (TED), Mission is our top priority. Making God Known in Europe characterises almost all of the activities of our Division. Outreach is governed by the Adventist Mission and Evangelism Committee (AMEC), and monitors the Mission activities within our territories. In close consultation with the General Conference we endeavour to promote and implement the initiatives of the World Church and to foster new patterns and methods of outreach which are relevant to the European culture and mind-set. All TED Departments are joining together to help our Unions and Fields make a positive difference in their territory of influence.<\/p>\n

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Janos Kovacs-Biro, TED Evangelism Director [photo taken by tedMEDIA]<\/figcaption><\/figure>Mission to the Cities \u2013 urban outreach is an initiative to reach out to people where they are. Since more than 50% of the world\u2019s population live in big cities, we endeavour to make a positive influence on their lives and establish an Adventist presence which is felt in the big cities across the TED. Each Union, Conference and Field has selected their city of outreach. \u2018These cities belong to God,\u2019 says Janos Kovacs-Biro, \u2018and we are joining God where He is at work making a difference in people\u2019s life, and inviting them into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.\u2019 A good example of what is happening in the TED regarding Mission to the Cities is the South-East European Union (SEEUC).
Mission to the Cities is on a dynamic move in the South-East European Union. The central point of attention is Belgrade, where the integrative approach to the mission utilises five streams of outreach: (1) biblical-evangelical, (2) health, (3) family, (4) youth-humanitarian, and (5) artistic ministries. After two years of working, the peak was reached in the first quarter of 2015, in which public series of different profiles were held on four locations in the city.<\/p>\n

New Belgrade, the largest residential city area on the Balkans with more than 350, 000 residents, has been the focus of the Mission to the Cities project in the SEEUC. The main goal of the project is to establish Seventh-day Adventist presence in New Belgrade by planting a new church. The intensive planning activities started in the second part of 2013 and their practical implementation began in March 2014. So far, several evangelistic projects, such as the Bible Open University, public lectures on Ancient Near East archaeology and large number of Bible studies have been realised.<\/p>\n

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Evangelistic series in New Belgrade, Serbia<\/figcaption><\/figure>The major project was the evangelistic series in New Belgrade held by Pastor Janos Kovacs-Biro, evangelistic director of the Trans-European Division, from 21-19 March 2015. The series attracted number of influential persons in the city, some of them were well-known media figures. Every night about 120 people were in attendance, among which nearly 70 were non-Adventist visitors. The evening before the last meeting the visitors were given the newly released book by pastor Janos Kovacs-Biro, written on the basis of the Jesus 7<\/em><\/a> series, which was read by number of visitors within the next 24 hours. The South Conference of SEEUC has a vision to plant a new church in New Belgrade and this series was a major step towards the realisation of this goal. The major challenge the church is facing currently is finding an appropriate facility and helping the interested people to move towards a mature discipleship in following Jesus.<\/p>\n

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‘The Indescribable Gift’ by J. Kovacs-Biro<\/figcaption><\/figure>A local pastor Ivan Milanov and his team were pleasantly surprised by the high level of spirituality some of the visitors demonstrated in the personal communication after every presentation. The most interesting phenomenon was that some of the visitors experienced positive changes in their lives during and after the series. Since then they have been strongly convinced that attending the evangelistic series and us praying for them have been the main reasons for their deeper experience of God\u2019s love and goodness. A good number of these visitors had attended our previous programmes and gradually they have been started considering our community as their natural environment for spiritual growth. The church planting team have been hugely encouraged by this and they have started to make even greater efforts to help these visitors experience God further. Radenko Melovi\u0107, an elder of the New Belgrade church, commented, \u2018In last year, since I became actively involved in the Mission to the Cities initiative, my spiritual life has taken a new dimension. I have rediscovered what it means to be a disciple of Christ\u2019.<\/p>\n

The church plant team have created many follow-up activities such as practical help for the visitors with material needs, Bible study meetings, prayer meetings, home visits, weekend public lectures focused on family issues and public presentations of topics proposed by the visitors themselves. The church planting team are not planning to stop at planning only one new church; their vision is \u2018one Adventist in every home in New Belgrade\u2019. In order to achieve this extremely ambitious goal, the church plant team know that they must remain a local Adventist movement that will constantly be in a process of planting new churches until the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

As part of the Mission to the Cities initiative in the SEEUC another series of evangelism programme was organised in Senta, in a beautiful museum located in the town centre. To our surprise, the director of the museum granted the main hall free of charge for the series, as well as for the follow-ups. The local radio also advertised freely the event, while the local TV station charged a symbolic 1,25GBP for an advertisement broadcast for five days. The working of the Lord\u2019s hand was evident which blessed the Senta Adventist church with 90 visitors. While this church is not among the largest churches in the SEEUC, all its members are determined to help this group of visitors grow in their interest in the gospel and following Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

The pastors and church members involved in these two evangelistic projects were convinced that God\u2019s Spirit worked intensively during these series. Slav\u010de Miladinov, an elder of the Senta church said, \u2018We worked a lot to prepare the series. The Lord has opened a great door for the gospel in our town and our church is determined to do its best to use this opportunity to glorify His name\u2019. [ted<\/em>NEWS]<\/p>\n

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ted<\/em>NEWS Staff: Miroslav Pujic, director; Deana Stojkovic, editor
119 St Peter’s Street, St Albans, Herts, AL1 3EY, England
E-mail: tednews@ted-adventist.org<\/a>
Website: www.ted-adventist.org<\/p>\n

ted<\/em>NEWS is an information bulletin issued by the communication department of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Trans-European Division.
You are free to re-print any portion of the bulletin without need for special permission. However, we kindly request that you identify ted<\/em>NEWS whenever you publish these materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 April 2015 St Albans, United Kingdom [Ivan Milanov, Laszlo Gallusz, Deana Stojkovi\u0107\/ted<\/em>NEWS] At the Trans-European Division (TED), Mission is our top priority. Making God Known in Europe characterises almost all of the activities of our Division. Outreach is governed by the Adventist Mission and Evangelism Committee (AMEC), and monitors the Mission activities within our territories. In close consultation with the General Conference we endeavour to promote and implement the initiatives of the World Church and to foster new patterns and methods of outreach which are relevant to the European culture and mind-set. All TED Departments are joining together to help our Unions and Fields make a positive difference in their territory of influence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1572,1588,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelism-mission","category-ireland-united-kingdom","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}