This morning I could say that I hadn’t driven in over a year. That’s now true anymore! I surprised Dawson this afternoon by making him hop out of the drivers seat! 🚙🙀
Special thanks to Lenka Horaniova for this fantastic idea, Nika Salajová for being my brave teacher and introducing me to the world of stick shift, and Nataliia for being with my girls while I was away!
This is a game changer.
Laurel
A very encouraging and fruitful 12 days in the PNW with Soma Tacoma and Doxa Church and in San Diego at the Soma family retreat.
Ready to be with my ladies and back in my city though. See you soon Nitra!
It’s pretty amazing to find that you have family all around the world. Our missional community, a group of 12ish people (plus ? kids), have become the closest circle of that. They have cared for us so well. They’ve also been able to connect us with all their friends who don’t yet follow Jesus.
Often small groups can fall into one of four types when it comes to their involvement in God’s mission. (This came out of some time Tomas and I spent with a guy named Steve Timmis two years ago.)
#1 | A community of friends. Nothing wrong with this per se. We need friends. But if those friends remain simply friends without ever looking beyond themselves, we do have a problem. If we are a group of followers of Jesus, we should be a group of friends that looks to serve others, not just a group that looks to meet our own needs. (Philipians 2:4) So the next group is…
Continue reading “A community of missionaries vs. a missionary community”
On July 3rd, a day after my 30th birthday, Tomas, my dear friend, and the pastor of our church that we have been serving with, said: “I know this is unexpected, but Sisa and I have begun considering the possibility of moving to go plant a church in Bratislava earlier than we’ve been talking about. I wanted to ask you to consider becoming the pastor here in the summer of 2018.”
Yes indeed, this was a pretty unexpected ask! Bold move, Tomas! That’s why I like him. But, like he said, that was indeed not the plan.
We had come to Nitra for a period of learning, listening, and language for approximately two years, with the open-handed plan of heading out to plant a church.
Two days before this big ask, a day before my 30th birthday, I had hiked up a mountain to an old castle ruin to spend the day in prayer reflecting on the last three decades and looking forward to the one ahead. I landed on a simple question that I meditated on as I considered the future: “Do I want to be famous or faithful?” In many ways that question encapsulated the journey of the last few years, especially our time in Tacoma. An easy question to answer, maybe, but hard to live out.
After Tomas asked the big question, I remember telling Laurel that yes, this was an unexpected ask, but that I wasn’t taken back or surprised by it, because of my walk a few days before that. Or maybe our walk for the last few years. We were in a place where we could pray for and consider this.
After four+ months of praying… and difficult and exciting elder meetings, and difficult and exciting meetings with our missional community leaders, and many late night Skype calls with Soma and Acts 29 friends and mentors, we announced this decision to our church on the last Sunday in October!
Continue reading “Big news about a big change: Pastoring in Nitra”
We love gathering with our local church.
Over the last few years, I began to realize that in my early 20s, in my hope to see a scattered church, I lost sight of the need for a gathered church. This was a key theme that I grew in during my time serving with our Tacoma Soma family.
My undervaluing of the gathering was in part connected to a rightful frustration, with a Sunday-centric understanding of who the Church is, but in an unhealthy form. It was in part connected to a desire for the church to be the church everywhere and everyday, not just the 1.5 hours we get together and sit in chairs. I still do believe that the gathering in some way should be a huddle after which we all break to get back on the field of mission. But to say that’s the only reason we gather, or even the main reason we gather, is simply not true. The gathering of the local church is so crucial, and so precious!
In Nitra, our three missional communities gather every Sunday morning to worship our King, to be edified by Christ-centered preaching, and to respond to the preaching of the word in prayer, giving, and communion. Much more could be said. But that’s reason enough. And it’s reason enough to repent of my former thinking. Which I have, together with Soma Tacoma, in fact.
Part of my repentance for me personally was tied to undervaluing of preaching of the word.
In Nitra, we have a rotation of four regular teachers and preachers plus two more that visit often. I preach about every three to four weeks, which is new fore me. My love for God’s word has grown. My desire to grow as a preacher has grown.
If you care to see where we’ve been and to listen to some preaching (in Slovak) then listen up HERE.
We gather in a cool space inside the old city, inside the castle walls, where the catholic bishop resides. More on that here.
After two other teachers who were helpful and nice but not a great fit, I have beginning studying under the wing of Profesorka Renata. She’s amazing, super nice but relentless, and has a PhD in teaching Slovak to speakers of other languages (that helps!) 😉
Monday through Friday I head out of the house after the girls are down from 12:30 and study until 4:30. Three of those days I’m with a teacher.
My brain hurts a lot. I wake up in the morning with a string of words that I want to look up. I wish I could speed up the progress, but I do love the process.
-Laurel
Started working out of Ponk Coworking space last week.
Lots of kind, creative, and collaborative people here that love Nitra.
Post-coffee break pic here, so everyone is in serious mode… for a few mins 
– Dawson
Just wrapped up a really significant weekend in Poland with teams from missional community churches from over 10 countries.
Saturate discovers and curates some of the best practices and learnings from the Soma family and other like-minded churches and repackages them for the church at large. It also provides training events like this one.
Our time in Poland was centered around four topics; gospel, mission, community, and prayer. Each team was given time for group processing, prayer, and action planning, with a lot of good foods and drinks to enjoy in between.
It was very encouraging to hear stories of people experiencing Jesus through the obedience of ordinary people on mission in their towns and cities. At the same time many of the leaders present are coaching and equipping tens of churches in their country that are learning from them.
We had three of the Slovakia churches of Missional Communities that we’ve been serving and equipping join us. It was awesome to see some relationships form between these churches and other churches in Europe as well as with Soma friends of ours who came. Pray that these partnerships would continue to be established and that they would be helpful and encouraging.
I got to lead this with Todd Morr (Saturate.) This is the third year in a row we’ve gathered churches from Central and Eastern Europe together for this kind of peer learning environment. A highlight for me was tag-teaming breakout discussions with Dan Hash. Dan has is a long time friend of mine, my family’s, and of Soma’s. He’s been in Poland working with Josiah Venture for 23 years and has spent the last 10 years focusing on church planting and starting MCs.
I spent the last weekend with 130 young people and leaders at our denomination’s (Evengelical Free Church in Slovakia / Cirkev Bratska) annual conference.
So much fun!
The topic was gospel identity in the book of Ephesians: “Who do you think you are?”
A good handful of youth group leadership teams took off from school or work and came in Thursday, for a 24 hour pre-conference intensive. Plant.sk, our church planting equipping team, coached different leadership teams through establishing Missional Communities among high-schoolers and college students.
Once the conference began, Tomas Henzel and I led a three part training: 1. What is the Gospel? 2. Gospel Identity 3. Speaking the gospel into our everyday lives
Pray that this next generation of Jesus followers would continue to truly place their identity in the finished work of Jesus. Pray that these youth groups would see themselves as sent to the schools and cities that they are in. Pray that as these young people step into adulthood they would believe that orienting their lives around the mission of God is worth it!
-Dawson
Really fun to spend the weekend with Janci and all my dear friends in ZA KOSTOLOM.
The picture to the left is us in 1998, and yesterday, almost 20 years later, we got to serve together in the church he is planting in my hometown. Stayed up way too late, remembering and dreaming.
DAWSON AND LAUREL JONES 