“Let’s meet twice a month, just once a month is not enough”
That’s what Razvan, the youngest member of our Advance group here in Romania, said as we were coming to the end of our second meeting!
The proposal was unanimously accepted by the others in the group! Even though the meetings were quite early in the day and all the members in the group were busy men, running a business or having a job and family, there was a very strong desire amongst us to meet and expectantly spend time together learning, praying and studying together!
Our group consisted of evangelists from 5 different churches; people of different ages, with each of us being at a different level of experience or spiritual maturity. Some were strong and experienced evangelists, leaders of a local church, some were young and burning with desire to get to know God more and even more than that, to make Him known! Many times, the 90 minutes we allocated to our meeting was not enough and we would stay longer, sometimes trying to understand the teaching better, sometimes just praying for each other and sometimes just enjoying fellowship and a good coffee! Time went by so fast, and when we came to the penultimate session, we were sad, realising that the next session would be the Retreat time and after that we wouldn’t need to meet anymore!
But that was not the case! We decided to continue to meet even after we finished the Mentoring guide! We meet and continue to pray and study together and we decided to form an evangelistic team! Together as a group, with our wives and kids we carried out 2 missions in the following months, reaching out with the gospel to ten villages, sharing with people one-on-one, in open door meetings or in local churches! We were so encouraged to see Andrei, one of the youngest in the group, a very smart and passionate evangelist, sharing the Gospel for the first time, in front of a large crowd! Andrei was new to speaking in front of large groups but the way he grew during our time together was so encouraging!
Since the war in Ukraine started, as a group we have been involved in helping refugees in various ways, carrying out fifteen humanitarian transports into Ukraine and just sharing God’s love in any way we could!
Recently, one of the members of the group started an evangelistic campaign, preaching the Gospel in the local park every Friday evening! Many people are coming to Christ after they have listened to the Gospel presentation!
I would encourage everyone who has the opportunity to be part of an Advance Group, to take it or to start one themselves! You will be blessed, and others would be trained and be a blessing for even more people!
Written by Daniel Rus.
Daniel Rus is the Associate Director of Eastern Europe for the Luis Palau Association and works as our Advance Ambassador for Romania.
