Romania (MNN) — In the almost 16 years since communism fell, a church in the capital city of Bucharest has been a light in the darkness of a country emerging from communism.
Holy Trinity Baptist Church has been a missions-sending force throughout Romania and the surrounding countries. They’ve planted 20 churches with 15 more churches in the process. God is doing great things as Holy Trinity has understood and been faithful to its missionary calling.
A few years ago, Association of Baptists for World Evangelism missionaries Doug and Sharon Martin came alongside church leaders to help develop programs for young adults. As the church keeps expanding into other areas of ministry, ABWE continues to deepen that relationship by bringing in additional team members to provide support, training and resources for leadership training, curriculum translation, music and youth programs, church planting, evangelistic outreaches, camp ministry and others.
Cristi Ciuca leads the 150 young adults at Holy Trinity Baptist Church. He says ABWE’s role has been a great help, especially to the young adults program and the raising up of more leaders. “This has helped us to understand our vision, clarify our vision, but also to communicate the vision that we have. So through this partnership we already developed partnership(s) with other churches, but it’s also investing on a personal level in different leaders of our church.”
The partnership between ABWE and Holy Trinity continues to have an impact, not only within Bucharest, but across Romania through outreach, church planting and challenging the Romanian churches to become more active in missions.
Ciuca says Holy Trinity is making the most of of the freedoms now available in Romania, and he hopes that more believers will recognize the open door God has given for sharing the Gospel: “A church needs to understand the time and the calling that it has, for example on the community. And a lot of churches didn’t understand right after the revolution, the fall of communism, what it means to go out and use the freedom that we have. It is true we have freedom, but it seems that it’s so much easier to stay in church behind the walls. That was probably useful and common before the revolution, but right now a church can do a lot of things.”
With 3 million people, Bucharest is one of the largest cities in Europe. Ciuca says that Bucharest is a difficult place to reach, but Holy Trinity is active in reaching out through personal evangelism and other projects to meet the needs of the community.
“Romania is going through difficult times. The period of transition hasn’t ended, so the church needs to be relevant to the needs of the people. A lot of Romanians are still living under the level of poverty and they face all kinds of problems. The situation changed (from) before the revolution. We had a certain situation. And now we’re trying to reach out (to) people that are busier and busier because they don’t have enough money to make it so they have different jobs.”
Pray for the ministries of Holy Trinity Baptist Church and ABWE as they work together to bring the light of Christ to Romania. Pray they can be relevant in their work and that God will continue to bless and grow His church in Romania.
