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Mission Possible
By Bill Trimper
 

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Matthew 19:14

Planning a summer mission for the country of Moldova is a very difficult task. It involves recruiting a team through much prayer to the “Lord of the Harvest” to send those specific workers to Moldova. It takes several months of personal preparation, raising financial support, securing prayer partners that will really pray and most importantly, hearts that are focused on sharing the “good news” of Jesus Christ.

It takes a great deal of cultural understanding to work effectively with the national church leaders in planning our team strategies for the team.

For six months our team prayed for a chance to return this summer to the small communist village of Chircaiesti, Moldova. The population of this village is about 3,000 people, 600 are kindergarten age children. This was great for a Vacation Bible School program! However, bad news had been reported to us by the local church in Causeni. A new village mayor had been elected on a platform that stated, “If I get elected, no Baptist will ever set foot in our village during my term.” We were very concerned.

When we arrived in Causeni, Moldova this summer, we were told we had to have a meeting with this mayor to see if he would allow us to work in his village. Several of us went to meet this new mayor. We prayed before the meeting that the Lord would be in control and that our love for the village children would be seen. The meeting was very tense and the mayor kept holding up a state document that he loosely interpreted as his right to keep Christians out of his village. The country of Moldova supports only the Russian Orthodox Church and all others are considered cults, unless they are registered. Under this guideline the mayor chose to ignore us as part of the Baptist Union and wanted to censor our VBS program completely — no Jesus.

He wanted us to only provide “humanitarian aid” to his village and in no way talk about Jesus Christ, sing Christian songs or tell any stories from the Bible. Further more,

He would assign three women to be “watchers” to be sure we didn’t disobey his orders.

We began to pray, “Lord, how do we do a VBS program without presenting the Good News? How do we sing with joy without singing about you? How do we do a puppet show that is based upon Bible stories for children?”  The answer only took a few moments.

We agreed to obey his request. The Lord impressed on us to just “love” the 50–plus children that had come out to participate in our program. We decided that we would do the best we could under the guidelines required of us.

Our VBS team played games, sang camp songs and did a puppet show without mentioning the name of Jesus. The kids laughed and smiled the whole time. Oddly enough, so did the three women that had been assigned to “watch us” and report back to the mayor. The report was favorable and we were asked to return the next morning.

Just as we arrived the next day, Victor, one of the national church members pulled me aside and said “It’s ok, we can sing about Jesus!” I was certain he didn’t know about what the mayor was demanding of us and our agreement with him. However, a very interesting story was revealed. It turned out that Victor had found out that the mayor didn’t live in the village of Chircaiesti, he lived in Causeni instead. Victor knew that the police chief of Causeni was a relative of this mayor and called him to get the mayor to lighten up on us. It worked, the police chief reassured this mayor we were not cult members and because of this, the mayor allowed us the freedom to proclaim the Word of God through our VBS program the rest of the week! The little children were not hindered.

The last we saw of the mayor, he had a big smile on his face as he saw the joy of the children singing about Jesus! We believe God was loving this mayor through us.