Slovakia, formerly a part of Czechoslovakia until 1993, and under the Soviet Union until 1989, is a beautiful country right in the heart of Europe.
Our move to Slovakia is a return home for me (Dawson.) For Laurel it will be a new home, but one she has come to love dearly, and Slovakia in turn has fallen in love with her (who wouldn’t?)
I moved to Slovakia when I was five and lived there for fifteen years with my family as missionaries before coming back to the States and meeting my best-friend-would-be-wife in Arkansas.
My parents never really allowed me to adopt the title of missionary kid. They helped me see that I was a missionary, not because I was the son of missionary parents, but because I was the son of a missionary God. He’s the one who makes us missionaries. The story of the Bible is his missionary story of his pursuit of his people, a story that climaxed with Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. He’s still a missionary God. And he is pursuing the people of Slovakia and of Central and Eastern Europe.
A few years ago, I was sitting with a 70 year old pastor named Janko. I was talking with him about our call to come and serve the church in Slovakia.
Janko had been a pastor for almost 4 decades in Slovakia, most of which was throughout the era of the Soviet Union, when freedom of religion was suppressed by the Communists, when they had secret church meetings in basements with pillows stuffed in the windows.
Then in 1989 when the iron curtain fell, when the Soviet Union fell apart, there was understandably a lot of excitement amongst the few believers there and a lot of anticipation about what this could mean for reaching this country with the gospel.
Janko leaned over his old desk said to me,
“I still haven’t seen the movement I’ve been praying for yet and something is going to have to shift if we are going to reach our country.
After communism, the Western World opened up to us. Some of it was good, some of it was bad. We imported capitalism, and we imported McDonalds. We also imported the way we thought about church. And that might not have been a good idea.”
And then he said this. And this has been echoing with me ever since:
“After communism, we moved church from our secret basements up to the main floor,
but then we never got out of the building.”
Now you might say, if you’re an American, that that’s the reality of the church in America as well, aside from the secret basement meetings and hiding from the KGB. The church, the people of God need to be mobilized to live out the mission of God in every part of their life, and not segregate the following Jesus stuff to one day a week in a building. Yes, absolutely.
But there’s a unique situation in Slovakia and in and Eastern Europe. Here are some numbers about Jesus followers in Slovakia which are basically comparable across all of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
Slovakia’s population is 5.4 million. This is illustrated below with 54 little men – each little man representing 100,000 people. The nominal Catholic and Lutheran population is around 3.7 million and 300,000 people, respectfully. For most, this is an affiliation that they were born into and has little impact on their day to day life.
When you look at Jesus followers in Evangelical denominations, it’s likely less than 25,000 people in the whole country (based on a 2012 survey). We’re not counting little people anymore.
Illustrated that looks like this: two little feet.
Since drawing these feet Laurel and I have been praying through Isaiah 52:7 over this region of the world that we love so dearly.
That’s our calling, to serve these little feet, to equip the existing church to live out its missionary calling and to see new churches planted in the region as a result.
Remember Janko’s comment about the need to get out of the building.
There’s a huge need to serve and equip these feet so that everyday Christians can become everyday missionaries in the normal stuff of life throughout the week.
God called us to this task by experience. When I came to college in Conway, Arkansas, as a nineteen year old, I met Laurel in her living room, throwing parties. Every Thursday night she invited all of her friends and neighbors to a packed university apartment and fed pancakes; inviting them to experience the hospitality of the family of God with the hope that these friends might one desire to know God himself.
God called us to a missionary lifestyle long before he called us to the mission field of Slovakia.
This is what Eastern Europe needs – ordinary people living intentionally; ordinary people enjoying life reunited with God once again, ordinary people equipped to be the church to their neighbors.
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SLOVAKIA CHURCH PLANTING VISION CAST | SOMA TACOMA, OCT 5, 2016
DAWSON AND LAUREL JONES 