On the 27th of May, 2018, I was installed as a pastor of this little church that we love so much in Nitra, Slovakia. (Yes, installed. There were a lot of hardware / software jokes that day.)
I never set out to be a pastor. Yes, for the last ten years I’ve been moving towards giving more and more of my time to serve the church, but I never set out to be a pastor.
Once a year, our city hosts an architectural event called “Night of churches.” All the churches are open to the public for a few hours. They promote it all over the city and the web for a couple of months prior.
People come to our little courtyard looking for crypts and cupolas and instead they find a people and a party.
We ate food, made some music, and talked about why we believe church is a family.
This is a great moment for our church family, and our presence in the city each year.
One year ago this was on no one’s radar. But today we got to see my parents in their new home back in Bratislava.
After over a decade of serving at the Summit Church, they’ve returned to Slovakia to pastor an influential Baptist church in the capital city. They live less than 15 miles from where they moved over 25 years ago.
Had the privilege of spending time with over 500 high school students at KPM, a conference put on anualy by TCKompas, Josiah Venture Slovakia.
Had an incredible few days in Belgrade with Acts 29.
We brought teams down from four Slovak churches.
It was encouraging to be in a room full of people with a heart for gospel saturation through church planting on the Old Continent. It was good for Laurel to worship in English. Good for her soul, she says.
Pray for Acts 29 Europe and Philip Moore who leads this network.
Because of Tomas Henzel’s assessment, our church is a part of this network. We would like to continue in this partnership even after we send out Tomas. I will begin to pursue the assessment process in the late summer.
We believe that partnerships with Soma, our church family, and the Acts 29 network in Europe can really serve the vision of church planting that we are pursuing with Cirkev Bratska in Slovakia.
Spent the last two days with our elders.
Love these guys.
We’ve been here ONE YEAR!
Spent the evening at our new favorite place reflecting and rejoicing and mourning and laughing.
We wrote a two page list of things we’re thankful for but I’ll only mention three:
Love this woman!
Our country has been vocalizing a long stifled frustration after the murder of a journalist and his girlfriend recently. You can read up on it here.
For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Slovaks have been going to the streets to protest corruption in the government. These protests have been the largest ones since the Velvet Revolution and the fall of Communism.
I was asked to speak to a few thousand gathered in our city, Nitra. It was an opportunity to voice our longing for a just nation and a just King and to tell the story of the King who laid down his life for those he served.
Pray for Slovakia and for the gospel to be proclaimed in every square.
You can google translate the whole speech posted here if you would like:
Just got back from a week with women from Soma churches all around the country. Hugged some necks that I needed to, cried a bunch, and came back very refreshed despite having a one year old with me.
So thankful to everyone who made this happen.
After the conference I stayed an extra 45 hours in Dallas to spend time with SIX dear friends from my college days – representing six different places (Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, California, Pennsylvania, and Slovakia) and SIX different time zones! It was such an amazing and refreshing time! So thankful we were able to be in the same room again!
In the meantime, Daws aparently stuck Viv up on a wall so he could play soccer.
-Laurel
This week, we took 25 couples interested in church-planting to a lodge to talk about four things:
I only snagged one picture, but it was probably my favorite moment anyway:
DAWSON AND LAUREL JONES 