Kimber Linkletter 7

It's a little late to wish you Happy New Year, and St Valentine's Day has come and gone - so this comes with our very best wishes for a Happy and Joyful Easter!

'May we who receive Christ's risen light, give light to others'.

Just to remind you: we are developing the work of the Cross of Nails centre, building relationships at informal levels between the denominations and looking at ways to increase Anglican-Orthodox understanding. We are doing this by creating an English theological reading room, by teaching English to church leaders and members, and by encouraging discussion, openness and the building of trust. We are also encouraging a small team in their abortion education work, and we work closely with Corpus Christi, an interdenominational group of students and graduates committed to greater mutual understanding.

Answers to your prayers

We had a great Dedication Service of our new Cross of Nails centre in December. We have been able to move the original Cross of Nails from Cisnadiora to Sibiu, and it is the first thing people see when they enter our Reading Room. Timothy Okroev and Phil Simpson duly arrived as part of their Romania visit, and were able to meet both the Lutheran and the Orthodox Bishops and to give lectures in the Orthodox Faculty too.

About 35 people attended the Dedication, of all denominations, which included Jane Williams, who had come specially from Coventry to represent the Cathedral and the Cross of Nails Community. (Thanks again, Jane!) After the service we gave a short presentation, in Romanian, of the Cross of Nails story: Jane, Phil and Timothy spoke briefly, then we had a buffet and got chatting. It felt like a birthday party!

The following week we were delighted that the first-ever English service of Nine Lessons and Carols, which we held in the large Sacristy of the Lutheran cathedral, was attended by about 60 people. The Corpus Christi group of students had formed a choir and had practised the carols, and the icing on the cake was when the Lutheran Bishop turned up unannounced, and afterwards said he had found it very moving. So we hope it will become a fixture. Anglican events are 'neutral territory' for people and are a way of bringing the denominations together.

Our first family-free Christmas was spent with the delightful Samarghitsan family, where both father and son are Orthodox priests. The only fly in the ointment was that Geoff contracted a bad form of flu just before Christmas, and took some time to recover.

Relationships
with the Orthodox church seem to happen on two levels.

the formal level. This can be tricky, as per our last linkletter, when we can be treated with suspicion as western Protestants who have come to proselytize secretly.
the informal level. This almost always means friendship, welcome and generosity. Geoff is respected for his priesthood and is usually invited to join the Orthodox priests behind the iconostasis screen during their services. It is a great privilege.

The wisest advice we have been given is 'to work with those who will work with us'. In this we practise Jesus' principle of the man of peace - see Matthew and Luke, chapter 10 in both cases.

One of these people is the Lutheran Bishop, Christoph Klein. Respected by all for his scholarship and humility, we are blessed indeed to have his support. He has recently agreed to become our Supervisor, and we praise God for this as we know we will learn a great deal from him.

Where our work will lead is subject entirely to God's grace and wisdom. It is almost impossible for us to plan anything in the Romanian context. Things change all the time, the unexpected happens, people forget and fail to turn up, and few people use diaries. For example, we have built up a good relationship with the Dean of the Orthodox Faculty. However, it is an elected post, and he has very recently been replaced. We know his successor, Fr Dorin Oancea, who is open, widely-travelled and experienced and with excellent English. But we don't know how the responsibilities of his new situation will constrain him. Please pray for him and also that this relationship will prove fruitful in God's time and way - and that we will have the sense to see what God is doing.

Our work is also subject to the vagaries of the Romanian education system, as so many of our contacts are professors and students. Gill is slowly getting to grips with this as she teaches at the university. It means that the autumn term did not really get going until November:

- Then there was a break for Christmas and New Year.
- Then there was only about a week of teaching before the students were preparing for exams.
- Then there were the exams, followed by a week's holiday.
- The term resumes this week, but will take another break for Easter.
- Then more teaching before everything stops for revision and exams again …

So how does this affect our work at the Cross of Nails centre?

Eg: we started a weekly interdenominational discussion group last month, which met with a lot of enthusiasm. But then we found students and teachers too busy with exams etc to come … so we have suspended it until the end of February and the new semester.

Geoff's teaching in the Orthodox Faculty is also on hold, partly because everybody is busy and partly because of the elections for the new Dean.

Our calling as mission partners is to learn how to be flexible and creative in this situation. Please pray that our western desire to get organized doesn't give us too much frustration!

Books

An ongoing story. We are delighted to have received 3 boxes of books from IVP, for our theological Reading Room, sent at a quarter of the normal retail price. We are eagerly awaiting 13 boxes of second-hand books from BookAid, which are still on the road - somewhere! We are grateful that SPCK, through their 'Feed the Minds' organization, is giving us a grant towards books: and we also thank Sobornost, an Anglican-Orthodox society, for giving us another grant. This means we can order up-to-date theological books in English for the students, who otherwise find it very hard to get hold of them. It also broadens their understanding of theology and helps them to be more open to Christians of other denominations. All these things are long-term aims for our project.

Darul Vietii (the Gift of Life)

The team gave a good presentation to our advisory group of friends and contacts, and as a result have been invited to take their seminars to other places and different denominations. They have just completed two sessions at the Lutheran Hostel in the city.

This weekend the Director of Primul Pas, a Christian abortion and sexual health education and counselling programme in the city of Iasi, is coming to Sibiu with a colleague to give some training to our team and also to other interested people. Gill and Irina are in the throes of preparing for this at the moment. By the time you get the letter it will be over: but please pray that it would be fruitful and that we would wisely develop the work. There are some big decisions to be made.

Future plans

This week too, we hope to meet Silviu and Ileana Rogobete again. They run an excellent centre called Areopagus in the city of Timisoara, holding language and culture classes and working ecumenically at a high academic level. We met them when we attended their culture course, and we have invited them to see our centre, pray with us and discuss ways in which we can develop our work and maybe link more formally with their own.
We also hope to start a series of occasional lectures on an introduction to Orthodox Christianity, and have contacted several professors who have agreed to be the speakers. We will invite our neo-Protestant friends to these: but such lectures will need a lot of prayer, as suspicion and anger always simmer just below the surface and we will need much wisdom in conducting such sessions. We also need fluency in Romanian! - we are working on it but it's a long haul.
We have been asked to think about another English course, to help students who are going to study or work in an English-speaking country and need an introduction to theological language.
We have invited the head of the social work of the Orthodox Church, Fr Christian Popa, to come from Bucharest and speak to our contacts about his work. Fr Christian's excellent work with street children and battered wives has been supported for many years by CMS. Social care is largely absent from the Orthodox church's ministry in Sibiu, and we hope he will inspire some of the priests and students and encourage them to think of ways in which they can develop such work. With poverty, child and wife-abuse, high abortion rates and alcoholism rife in Romanian society, much needs to be done and it should be the concern of the churches, not left to non-government organizations.

Lots of other ideas are bubbling away as well - please pray that the right ones will happen with the right people at the right time! - and that we will trust God for the ones that don't work out.

Little grey cell time:

The Orthodox believe that people mainly go to the Protestant churches because they will receive material things there - eg social care. The Protestants get upset because the Orthodox build ever-more churches but do little social care.
Discuss!

SO PRAISE!

for a blessed Dedication service and an encouraging visit by Phil and Timothy
for them in their very busy work
for Geoff's recovery
for the book grants
for the resolution of various bureaucratic tangles

AND PRAYER

for the safe arrival of the books
for patience with frustrations and set-backs
for wisdom in the development of the Cross of Nails ministry
for guidance about future plans, including the direction of Darul Vietii
for the new Orthodox Dean
and, as always, that God's peace will prevail in relationships between denominations.

With our love in the Lord

Gill and Geoff

this page was last modified on 7 March 2004
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