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Dr. Margit Chadwell, leader of the Crosspointe Christian Church medical team, examines a patient in Meksiko, North Macedonia.
Today, as I sit writing this letter in the MEK Hungary office in Hatvan, it is All Saints Day, a holiday here in Hungary. On this day, many Hungarians visit the graves of their family ancestors, festooning them with flowers and lighted candles in glass jars. Tonight, the graveyards of Hungary will be all lit up to honor the dead. The pagan theology on which this tradition is based has long been forgotten.
Meanwhile, I am looking back at an incredible month of God-blessed ministry to the living! Jeannie and I just returned from participating in a Community Health Evangelism (CHE) medical screening in the villages of Meksiko and TriBagremi outside Prilep, North Macedonia. There, we met up with an awesome short-term medical team of eight people from Crosspointe Christian Church (NAB) in Detroit, Michigan, led by Pastor Matt Swiatek and Dr. Margit Chadwell.
After the medical screening, CHE Macedonia leader Jimmy explains next steps at the community meeting in Meksiko.
Pastor Alit Halidoski, his wife Senela, and the CHE Macedonia team did an excellent job of preparing the people of both impoverished communities for the children’s health screening. We screened over 210 children, plus about 40 needy adults in just four days! The community meetings to go over the results were both dynamic. The CHE team will now discuss the results with the leadership committees in both villages to decide what health care needs and projects to prioritize. Each child who was screened, plus parents and adults, also participated in a “spiritual health” screening where the Gospel was presented to them using a beaded bracelet they received that was based on Child Evangelism’s wordless book. Thank you so much, Crosspointe team. You were awesome.
Pastor Matt and the translator explain the wordless bracelet to Zuzana.
At the same time as the medical screening, a very significant CHE event was taking place in the city of Leskovac, Serbia. Three trainers from the CHE Serbia team were presenting a CHE Vision Seminar to 50 members of one of the largest Roma churches in Central Europe and the Balkans. Our CHE lessons are very participatory, and the lead pastor of the church remarked that he was amazed at the enthusiasm, the mature answers, and wisdom coming from his people as they discussed how to transform their lives and their communities using CHE’s biblical strategies.
CHE trainers in blue shirts circulate among the discussion groups at the Vision Seminar in Leskovac, Serbia; 50 people attended.
The next step will be CHE Serbia master trainers training workers from the church so they can train others to do outreach and development in their neighborhoods and villages.
September 27 to October 1, our CHE teams and partners came together south of Durres, Albania, for our Annual CHE EuroNet Gathering. Praise God, the conference was everything we planned and prayed for! We were one hundred strong, plus children, from 12 different countries. This included newcomers from Bulgaria, Slovakia, and two churches in Serbia.
Terry Dalrymple, the Global CHE Network Coordinator, challenged our vision with CHE-oriented messages and reports from around the world.
Terry Dalrymple (black shirt, front row) prepares to speak to 100 CHE workers at the CHE EuroNet Gathering 2023 near Durres, Albania.
Expert CHE trainers came from the US, Finland, and Canada to facilitate highly applicable seminars (trauma, human trafficking, disabilities, support-raising, etc.) that will lead to future in-depth training of our workers. Those who came to learn more about CHE have scheduled vision seminars and trainings for their leaders back home. We all felt the Holy Spirit’s refreshing work in our lives during these four days.
MEK team member Sandi Temesvary stirs while Feri Olah adds ingredients to make some of the best gulyas in Hungary for the prayer group in Apc.
What about back home, here in Hungary? Two encouraging things to report. In Boldog, a Saturday church service that had been stopped due to Covid has been restarted. Attendance has been about 10 villagers. In Apc, up to 30 folks have been attending a weekly prayer meeting. Three weeks ago, 10 of those people stood to receive Christ as their Savior. A weekly Bible study and a monthly community meeting with about 50 people are also taking place. The Lord is using home visitation two days a week by the MEK team to stimulate these results.
Friday, November 3, we head to Serbia to meet Marijana Čizmanski to visit a possible new CHE project with a possible new partner. We will then present at the second annual CHE Serbia Conference on Saturday. Meanwhile, Kerry Bender will be spending a few days with our MEK Team in Hatvan.
The following weekend we travel to eastern Slovakia to do a vision seminar for a Slovakian and a Roma church. The pastor there has a vision to plant a church in every Roma community in Slovakia. We would love to help him!
On a personal note, aside from a weeklong light bout with Covid, Jeannie and I are doing well health wise. My AFib that I experienced in May–June has not returned. We thank the Lord. We will be returning home to Phoenix on November 17.
If you or your church want to get in on the action here in Hungary, Sovakia, and the Balkans, contact me at my email address.