Be prepared, in season and out of season

I was at class this morning (increasingly rare due to other pressures, not least uterine) and at last had the opportunity to greet a chap who's joined since the beginning of the year. His Greek sounds perfect (he's half Greek) but his spelling is atrocious, as I could see from the amount of red ink on his spelling test. That's not important. What is important is that through a simple introduction, and his (to be expected) surprise at our being here, I was able to explain what we do in simple terms.

His immediate response? 'I've never read the Bible but I'd like to! Something about it interests me.'

What exactly interests him I don't know, and maybe it's purely intellectual curiosity, but I'll be giving him a Greek NT on Friday and have asked if he'd like to read it it with me. I think one thing that roused his curiosity was when I said that we meet with students wherever they are - at uni, in homes, in town centres - because there are no restrictions to reading the Bible!

We'll see what comes of it, but I was reminded of Paul to Timothy in 2 Tim 4 - be prepared.

For our encouragement

I just read this post from the Gospel Coalition blog as it had been 'liked' by our team member Tim. As you'll see from the title, it's all about ways to encourage missionaries (though we don't like that word very much!), hence the title of this post.

It's not that we're feeling particularly discouraged at the moment, but almost all of the advice strikes a chord with me (as long as you read UK for USA) so, for our encouragement, which we need and value, have a read of it!

A new year, a new effort to blog

It's now an embarrassingly long time since we wrote anything on here. However, it's a new year, I'm writing a new prayer letter, and it suddenly became crystal clear that this would be a useful and easy thing to do.

In the letter I'm currently writing is the above family photo. We're inside a church which is inside a tree!

Here is the only webpage we've found about it, and be warned: the blog from which this is taken is an enormous archive of all sorts of articles about Greek Orthodoxy. We are not responsible for the content of other websites!

However, I thought I'd put this up as a useful insight into the wonderful (sic) world of Eastern Orthodoxy at a folk level. The information on these pages is not 'official' teaching, but may as well be in that it is all accepted as part of the fabric of the faith. Have a look if you're curious!

Ah yes, we have a blog

What can we say? We are so sorry for having written zip in recent months. It's not like it's difficult, or like we've had nothing to write about: there's no real excuse.

So here's a little one to get it going again.

We have our good friends the Callows from Oxford with us for three days. They're here to try and find an apartment ahead of their move to Athens in September to join us in our work with the Greek student movement. In the last few days we've spent many hours looking around our neighbourhood for possible places for them. At the same time we have had on our minds the thing we've been toying with for a few months: whether we ought to move ourselves. You may remember reading about this if you receive our prayer letters.

Today we set foot in a few places with Joel and Bekah to help them, but it has stimulated much thought (in me - Jonathan - at least).

We love our place: it's big, it's perfectly located (not least in relation to our favourite fast food outlet aka the World's Best Kebab ShopTM), it has all the flexibility we need for family and student work and it's home. However, it's increasingly expensive.

So, as we've looked in on these apartments, two or three of which are viable for both us and the Callows, I've been wondering exactly how to prioritise where to live (not that we have to move - just that moving would make it easier financially). What do we lose by moving? What do we gain?

Just thinking aloud.

The great thing is that the Callows have good options and we are a big step closer to our team being in place in September, as we have also sorted out accommodation for the two volunteers (almost for Nicky, totally for Tim) nearby.

Ioannina: the city

I’ve visited this north western regional centre (Greece’s fifth or sixth city I think) twice now, and we’re planning another trip (this time with the whole family) in May, via Patras on the way there and Meteora (the scene of some James Bond filming years ago) on the way back. I digress.

The reason for these visits, apart from a general desire to encourage students in living and speaking for Jesus, is a specific request from the pastor of the evangelical church there to support the six or so Christian students. For the previous several years there had only been one or two at the most, so this is a veritable flood. None are from the city – Cyprus, Patras, Crete and northern Greece are their homelands. This is significant as the normal pattern is to study in one’s home city. This has implications for church life, social life, priorities, timetables and so on.

The city itself has the feel of a gentle regional centre rather than a bustling capital, making it a pleasant change from Athens. There are hardly any tourists (although I’ve only been in the winter, so I’d better withhold judgement on that) despite it being a good place to wander around.






























It has a nice old quarter, loads of cafes, restaurants and bars and a medieval walled city with a couple of Ottoman mosques. It's built on the shores of a lake and is surrounded by imposing mountain ranges, which is good enough on its own, but behind some of these mountains lie some of the most spectacular and rugged moutain scenery in the country. (It seems to be true that the British are unusual in our desire to slug our way up these mountains for 'leisure', but I couldn't stop thinking about how long it would take to get to some of the snow-covered peaks I was gazing at...)

I took this photo of the plane I was about to board - at a very small airport - moments after a shiny black car whisked away the very frail-looking Archbishop of Greece. I didn't have the presence of mind or paparazzi instinct to snap him.

To drive from Athens takes 6 hours by car, 8 by bus, and there are three flights a day. It’s not the sort of place you pop to for a day, but once there it's good to stay longer and really get to know it.

Ioannina has a reputation (apparently) for being somewhat more refined than Athens or Patras, with a long history of learning and cultural achievement. The university is said to be one of the best in the country (which doesn't say much for the quality of the signposting elsewhere - see below). But, of course, it is desperately needy as far as the good news is concerned.

This signboard on campus shows, in the middle, the Centre for the Study of Greek Language and Culture. I wanted to find this to make enquiries about a hypothetical IFES worker based in Ioannina, to see if this would be a good option for language learning. I think it will be, but it took me AGES to find it. After this sign, there are no more...and it's another kilometre to the building, which no one else on campus seems to know about.

This photo is the view from just outside the student union, looking southeast towards Athens, a mere 460km by road beyond those peaks.



















There's one evangelical church, made up of roughly 10 mostly elderly believers, plus the students, not all of whom ‘attend’ regularly, and no families with school age children. I understand, from Pastor Leonidas, that there is also a pentecostal church, consisting mostly of immigrant African workers. This is in a city of ~100000 people. Can you imagine, first, living as a Christian there? And then, can you imagine how to set about the task of reaching that city – not to mention the hundreds of surrounding towns and villages?

That is Ioannina, in brief. I thought I’d blog about it as a small illustration of the progress of the gospel in Greece. Apparently, 30 years ago or more, the church there was full, with many families – between 80-100 people. Then, fairly rapidly, she dwindled to what we see today. Some people left the city, some abandoned the faith, many died and were not followed in the faith by their children. It’s tough in places like that, it really is.

I was struck by this verse in my reading this morning: ‘All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing…’ (Colossians 1). It is, but in some places there is much more planting to be done before significant growth and fruit is seen. You know what is needed for this to happen? Nothing complex, nothing sophisticated, nothing impressive: just people to go there and get about the business of living and speaking for Jesus.

The wider picture

We’ve been posted to Athens to help develop a sustainable and effective witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ among students here, but with an eye to the rest of Greece. If you’re interested (and why wouldn’t you be? It’s a map!), you could take a look at this take a look at this which shows the locations of all the universities in Greece. Not included (yet, at least) are the technical colleges, of which there are a further 20 or so. These institutions represent a student population of something like 400000 students (give or take several thousand – it’s a fluid picture in a fluid nation!).

Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of the scene, as far as we understand it, at present, from the perspective of the gospel. (You may already have read or heard a version of this in other contexts.)

In Athens there are roughly 250000 students. Among this huge population, there are somewhere in the region of 50 who are involved in one way or another with the IFES movement. For many of them that involvement is limited to attending the annual conference. Perhaps 20 regularly-ish attend a weekly Bible study, and most of those 20 come along to monthly central gatherings.

(There are, we are told, many more believing students in the city, but most are part of churches with whom we have little contact. The word ‘evangelical’ here is a slightly blurred term. It most clearly refers to two denominations which both have the word ‘evangelical’ in their title, but therefore leaves out perhaps a larger number of believers in Pentecostal churches. Some of those are quite isolationist and are suspicious of para-church work, but some others are more open to cooperation. More effort needs to be made to encourage students from those churches to stand together with ‘evangelical’ students on campuses, but that’s another story, for another year or decade!)

From these numbers alone you can get a sense of the task facing the students! In every IFES movement students who follow the Lord are of course in the minority, and we can expect that to be the case until the end of the age. When I was a student in Birmingham we had between 200-300 regularly involved students, there were probably another 100-200 believers who were NOT involved in the Christian Union, and this was out of a student population of around 20000. That’s still a tiny minority, but at least we knew there were faithful people in each hall of residence, in every faculty. The 20 or so we regularly count on here are spread among nine different institutions, and perhaps 20 different sites.

They share a significant sense of isolation as believers, which partly explains the readiness among young Christians in Greece to down tools and head off to the many conferences and youth gatherings that are held. But evangelistically it’s extremely challenging!

That’s just Athens. If you’ve seen the map you’ll see the other locations. I don’t know details about most of them, especially in the far north (Thessaloniki, for example, does historically have a larger believing population, though statistically not by much). We do know, however, that in Volos where there have been Christian students in the past, there are now apparently none. We also know that in Patras, which again historically has had a more active IFES group, has a group of around 10 students who long for more support and input (we’re thinking of ways that we can try to meet that need from here, but anything we can do from here is going to be a drop in the ocean of need). And then there’s Ioannina, about which more in another post.

Some conclusions – first, this is Europe! Most people who read this are in the British Isles, where (if you believe the press) the church is rapidly shrinking. I’m not aware that God’s faithful people are really decreasing in number that much – actually we are encouraged by what we hear from friends around the country who see progress and growth, albeit slow. Thousands may be leaving mainline Protestant churches each week, but that’s probably not a terrible thing to happen, seeing as the gospel departed decades ago!

But across mainland Europe, the evangelical church is in a different situation altogether from the UK. We used to speak about east Birmingham as a bit of a desert, with vast estates completely unreached with the good news. We were aware of large areas of rural East Midlands with little or no witness to Christ in the form of local churches growing there, and families living in those areas would travel in to Nottingham or Leicester or Lincoln to meet believers there. Here in Greece, and I believe in almost every southern European country one can travel for hundreds of kilometres, including large towns, and not find a single evangelical church. It’s this Greece, this Europe, that we’re encouraging students to learn to take the gospel to, starting with campuses but with ever-increasing horizons.

Second, as a young person growing up in such a climate, it is humanly-speaking extremely unsurprising that there are so few with robust confidence to live boldly, publicly, faithfully as an ambassador for Christ. The ‘social fringe’ of the evangelical community is significant here. Many if not most of our students are more willing to consider attending a conference in another country, spending hundreds of euros and several days, than to invest a couple of hours in serious Bible study in a student group. But this is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.

We hope and pray and work for a radical change among the young people here, from subsistence as Christians to true discipleship, serious devotion to the Word, joyful obedience, and a gritty, long-term commitment to sowing the seeds that alone will lead to a harvest in this barren nation, and thinking as widely as the gospel requires, to the ends of the earth.

As Damon Albarn (almost) said...

...Modern Greek life is rubbish

Here's another recent article with helpful insight into modern Greek life, this time sent to me by a Greek-Aussie (thanks Chris). It was written two weeks after the aforementioned killing of Alexi.

The tone is very pessimistic, though perhaps also true, but let me say clearly that we do not think modern Greek life is rubbish. There are many wonderful aspects to life here, and many redeeming features to counter the descriptions in this article. But it is a good illustration of the wide-reaching effect of sin, and the lack of a solution outside of the gospel. Have a read - it's very short:

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_columns_2_19/12/2008_103180