Children on the Mission Field
This drawing was made during a service by one of the covenant children of our church plant. I am not sure if I look exactly like that , but receiving this after the service was a great joy for me. It reminded me that our church planting work is not only for the present but also for the future. We pray that what we are doing now in Bucharest will be used by the Lord to bless future generations. The experience children have in a Reformed church is very different from the experience they would get in other churches in Bucharest.
I remember my childhood trips to the Eastern Orthodox church service, where as a child you cannot see anything. Eastern Orthodox churches have no pews so everyone is standing during the whole service. But if you are short (as all children are) you might not see anything else than other people standing in front of you. That is why I was asking my mother to take me to the front of the crowded church so I could see the priest. Meanwhile, the few Evangelical congregations we have around have the custom of sending the children to the ”children church” where they do a lot of children activities but become separated from the life of the church.
It is great to keep the children in the church and I rejoice when I see them starting to participate in the liturgy as they learn to sing the psalms, hymns, the Doxology and the Gloria Patri, as they learn to say the prayer of confession, the creed and the Lord’s prayer. We are thankful for this formative setting.
However, the covenant children growing up in Bucharest face many challenges. Although 97% of people in Bucharest are nominally Eastern Orthodox, the city is hostile towards the Christian faith, with less than 5% of the population attending any kind of church. Those who do hold to some kind of Christian convictions are hostile towards the Reformation.
This means that our children are growing up in an extremely hostile environment. This is not unlike the church has experienced in its first centuries of existence, but it is something we need to take into account when training the young generation. As the children grow up and become teenagers and then young adults, they face the challenges of finding a believing spouse in a city with so few believers.
These challenges are not unique to Bucharest, but Christian life in European cities like Bucharest is in some sense burdened with difficulties particular to living on the frontier of a kingdom. This helps us understand that we are pilgrims and foreigners, living for a time in a foreign country.
As you pray for the mission work in Bucharest, please pray also for the children and young people of our church plant:
that they would grow in knowledge and faith
that they would be able to withstand the pressure of the unbelieving world around us
that they would become mature believers and form Christian families