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<\/a>\u2018New Belgrade\u2019 is not unfamiliar to many tedNEWS<\/em> readers because in the summer of 2018, over 1,200 Trans-European Division (TED) pastors met together in the New Belgrade Sava Centre.\u00a0 But also, and more recently, during the 2nd<\/sup> quarter of 2020, one of the designated 13th<\/sup> Sabbath Offering projects was to support the establishment of a new church.<\/p>\n \u2018SO WHAT\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u2018SO WHAT\u2019 crisis. The message scrawled in English caught my attention on my visit to this new 13th<\/sup> Sabbath offering funded building.<\/p>\n And it is the context of this new and exciting ministry that the \u2018SO WHAT\u2019 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 \u2018SO WHAT\u2019 message so powerfully shares. The common expereince for so many was and still is \u2018alienation\u2019,\u00a0 as much as in Birmingham (UK) as in Belgrade, Serbia.<\/p>\n But that message is also a reminder of a critical reflective questions we are collectively compelled to ask: \u201cIf our church was no longer in this town, would anyone from the community notice we\u2019d \u00a0gone?\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>Is not the \u2018SO WHAT\u2019 message a visual reminder that worship without mission is incomplete?<\/p>\n Hope for Troubled Times<\/strong><\/p>\n 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”.<\/strong> 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s made a further visit to Belgrade in June 2012.<\/p>\n Unlike the \u2018emergency\u2019 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%.<\/p>\n Hope for Difficult Times…<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>