By Rajmund Dabrowski
My nearly two decades of engagement at the world church headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland taught me the important lesson that my mission in life is found where I am. I was blessed to discover that reaching out to people of different cultures is a showcase of imagination, creativity, boldness, and risk taking. I also discovered that “one [method] size does not fit all.” I learned that generosity can make things happen, and each of us is responsible for making mission happen.
During a visit to Bucharest, Romania, Beatrice Lospa taught me a lesson in faithfulness. For her, it was an experiment in mission that surprised even her church leadership with the national impact of one simple idea.
Along with a couple of young colleagues from a Bible correspondence school, she recommended an unusual idea— how about introducing the Bible to everyone in the country?
As in many lands with a religious majority, the Orthodox Christians in Romania hear Bible stories from priests. Beatrice and her friends proposed renting store-front rooms in different cities to be turned into religious reading clubs.
Naturally, they needed funding. But would it come, they wondered? And they prayed. With a limited budget, the Sola Scriptura clubs were established and turned into Bible-read- ing venues. A slogan on a single city billboard—that some thought of as being rather risky—stated: “If you know how to read, and you have not read the Bible, you have not read at all! Join a Sola Scriptura reading club.”
The story gets more exciting with the arrival of a check for 60,000 euros from an anonymous Bible reader. He wasn’t even a member of Beatrice’s faith community. It turned out that he owned 60 percent of the roadside billboards across the country. He made an offer to help with even more, and enabled a believing and creative group of young people to place hundreds of billboards across the country.
Surprisingly, people came—old and young, ordinary people, university professors, and a member of parliament or two. Soon they had to organize more efficiently because people were flooding their clubs. After completing the simple reading of Scriptures, discussions followed with participants who asked: Is there more we can study?
A Bible reading? Anything novel in it for you and me? Yet . . .
It made me reflect and conclude that our generosity turns the wheels of our Christian mission. Each of us is responsible for it, and the Spirit of God will add His power as He turns our imagination, creativity, boldness, and risk-taking into an individual story of faithfulness.
–Rajmund Dabrowski is RMC communication director.