Pavle Kostadinov_C.E.F. Macedonia_10 May 26

Pavle Kostadinov, mission representative for Child Evangelism Fellowship in Macedonia presents a report to the congregation at Coleraine Congregational Church.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Uh good evening. I'm getting worried because I cannot see a watch, a clock. Perfect. Thank you. I thought somebody forgot that when I was trying this. Good evening. It's a joy for me to be back in this church. I was talking to some of you. The first time we were here when my wife and I joined Child Evangelism Fellowship in 1990. I had twenty I was 25 years old at that time. All right, thank you. So we've been faithfully coming here every three years, and faithfully, this church was praying for us all this time. So you have a big investment in the kingdom of God in Macedonia for the last 35 years, especially with Child Evangelism Fellowship, but also wittingly or unwittingly with the congregational church. There are four congregational churches in Macedonia. I happen to be the president at the moment of the four churches that they are there. So we are very small compared to you here. Our normal gathering would be about this size, about 40 plus people, maybe Christmas Easter, we get a few more. But that makes us basically a church which is almost the same as every other church in Macedonia. The churches are very small. Less than half percent would be evangelical believers. The dominant religion is Orthodoxy. We have about 70% Orthodox in the country. About 20 odd percent would be Muslims, Roman Catholics, even less than we are, Protestants. So pray. It's a very needy country for the gospel. And if you can come, you're welcome. I invited your pastor to come and minister to us so you never know what happens. We're living in a world which is really in a turmoil. It's a fact. First, we thought the war in Ukraine, when it started, it's going to be finished maybe within six months, a year. Now it's going into its fourth year. And that is longer, actually, than the World War II. You know, more almost longer. And then, as we thought that Ukraine is the only problem, you remember it was Israel. After Israel, it's now Iran. And as I was coming here, they told me I can buy the ticket, but they were not sure they can take me back because they said there is a possibility of canceling flights. You know, this is what they are talking all the time. So the question is, what can we do? And the way I see it, we have two options. And option one is to worry, and then the option two is to pray. And I think option two would be more Christian, right? To to take it and use it. During the COVID time, there was a king that was very often mentioned in many of the services all around the world, a king that no one mentioned before, probably, but until that time, because he prayed a wonderful prayer. And I would like to share this with you. 2 Chronicles chapter 20, verses 5 to 12. This is a king, and I'll have a problem pronouncing it. I think it was called Yehosaphat. How do you call it here? Yehoshaphat, good. I'll be confident and be confident, yes. And I believe this is a good one for us because it says here in 2 Chronicles 25 to 12. Then Yehosaphat stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem in the house of the Lord before the new court and said, O Lord God of our fathers, are you not God in heaven? And do you not rule over all the kingdoms of the nations? And in your hand is there not power and might, so that no one is able to withstand you. Are you not our God who drove out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel and gave it to the descendants of Abraham, your friend, forever? Notice these are all rhetorical questions. The answer is yes, obviously. And then he continues, says, and they dwell in it, and have built you a sanctuary in it for your name, saying, If disaster comes upon us, sword, judgment, pestilence, or famine, we will stand before this temple and in your presence, for your name is in this temple, and cry out to you in our affliction, and you will hear and save. And now here are the people of Amnon, Moab, and Mount Seir, whom you would not let Israel invade when they came out of the land of Egypt, but they turned from them and did not destroy them. Here they are, rewarding us by coming to thrust out of your possession which you have given us to inherit. O our God, will you not judge them? For we have no power against this great multitude that is coming against us, nor do we know what to do, but our eyes are upon you. And this is a really shocking text for me. I was reading this months before I came over here, but it speaks about disasters. And we all hear about natural disasters, problems, challenges that are facing, but also it talks about the sword. It talks about war. Yes, Macedonia is far from Ukraine. We are not close, very close. And we didn't really feel the war in Ukraine except the prices went up, and we didn't even get refugees from, you know, migrants from from Ukraine to Macedonia. But then that doesn't mean that something cannot happen anywhere in the world. And then it speaks judgment, pestilence, famine. Praise the Lord, we have not been judged in this way. But it could happen. We never know what is the next thing that comes. And when it says, you know, when we when we pray about our daily bread, give us today our daily bread, this is a follow-up of this prayer. Because it says, when there is a problem of food shortage, whatever it is, we look to you, God, because you are the one that supplies. It's not us that we are getting it there. And then he says, we will stand before this, before in this temple and in your presence, and you will hear and save. And just very few things before I go through the slides and show you about our ministry. The first thing here that he does is he trusts God with his fears. And I think we should be honest and do the same thing with us. All of us have some fears. Let's face it. We all fear about something. What if this happened? What if that happens? What if something happens? And it says, And Yehosephat feared and set himself to seek the Lord and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. This is in verse 3. The first thing he did was he shared his fears with the others. So if you ever receive a prayer letter from us saying, Look, we are fearful about this, please pray about this thing. Please take part in it. Share it. Let's share the burden together and then hope in our God. We have to admit our weakness. We cannot do it ourselves. Unless God helps us, nothing is going to happen later on. And then the point is that Jehoshaphat chooses to trust God Himself. And the second thing there, in the verse 4, we are going a little bit further upwards, it says, So Judah gathered together to ask help from the Lord, and from all the cities of Judah they came to seek the Lord. The king knew where the true help comes from, and he wanted to share this knowledge with the others. And I heard here you're planning a few evangelistic outreaches here in these coming days. Think about this. Let's encourage each other to trust the Lord. We do the ministry, but he is the one that gives results. It's not us. If he wills do our work, he will make a huge change in the countries. It's up to him. Our responsibility is to share the gospel. His responsibility is to bless it. We cannot do it instead of him. And then he called out to God in the verses 5 to 12 as we read. I'm going very, very quickly through this thing. But he reminds the people of who God is. He speaks about his goodness in the past. He speaks about the good things that God has done for them, taking them out of the slavery, we can say out of slavery of sin, for example, of all of us. He took them out of there, brought them into the promised land, gave them everything he promised to them. Do we remember that in our lives? Do we look back and say, God, if it weren't for you, this was not going to happen. God, if you didn't help me at that time, this is not what this was not going to happen. We have a sovereign God and He's taking care of us. And we have to let Him do the ministry. Let Him do the work in a sense not for us sitting down and doing nothing. But unless He is into it, nothing is going to happen. Philippians 4, 6 and 7 basically speaks about the same thing. The peace of God that surpasses all understanding will be upon us because we trust in God. And then this is why he could go and talk to the people. He said, Remember what happened in the past. And this is easy. I mean, all of us can look back and say, God help me at that point. Difficulty is to look forward. Difficulty is to say, God, I have no idea what to do. My eyes are upon you. And then you do whatever you want. And then he talks about God's salvation. And I love verse 15 because here God responds and says, Listen, all of Judah and you inhabitants of Jerusalem, and you King Yehosaphat. Thus says the Lord to you, do not be afraid nor dismayed because of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God's. And he even goes further down and he says, Position yourselves, stand still, stand still, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord who is with you, O Judah and Jerusalem. Do not fear or be dismayed tomorrow. Go out against them, for the Lord is with you. This is an Old Testament reminder: the battle is not ours. We take part, but He's the one ultimately who will give the success and who will win. And this is what happened to the Israelites. But before even that happens, in 21 and 22, he called the people to worship. God has not provided what he asked for, but he's worshiping the Lord and basically saying, God, we know you're going to do this thing. Or you're going to do it according to your will, and we will accept it whichever way it goes. And I think this should be the encouragement for us. We don't know what to do, but our eyes are upon God. And we are waiting for him to do his part in the ministry. And 30 years ago, 35 years ago to be exact, when Susanna and I came into the ministry of CEF, we were really encouraged to see the importance of reaching children for the Lord. And Deuteronomy 31, 12 and 13 is a verse that you all know when it speaks about us taking the gospel to the children, and then the next generation taking the gospel to their children. And we thank the Lord that in this 35 years now we see a second generation, even third generation in the Roma communities of children that are hearing the word of God because someone told something to their parents. And it is amazing. But this is looking backwards. I mean, Susanna, myself, and I are part of the team. Anna, our daughter, you know, she's a person with special needs. This was taken in actually in Port Stewart last year. I couldn't believe this was the first time in my 36 years in Ireland that I had wore short sleeves. Honest, this is true. Vesna in our second worker, and Done is our third worker. We are only four people in CF in a country of 1.8 million people. About 34, 35 functional churches. And we thank the Lord that we can share the gospel with all of them. In our CF culture, we say that we want to do everything with excellence for the glory of God. We want to do it in a way that will honor God. We want to do it in a way that our workers will be safe. They'll be doing everything according to the plan we are going to put to them. And we also believe in prayer. And this is what I want to speak to you about throughout this. We do a lot of things. With COVID, we had to start doing a lot of audio and video production. And if you go online now, you'll have many, many materials that we have at the moment. And for a country like Macedonia, we were counting the last quarter, January, February, March. Well, it was Christmas, obviously. A lot of people were checking our Christmas materials and things. But we had nearly 11,000 visits. That was five times more than the believers in the whole country. So we thank the Lord that we can share the gospel even through internet. Last year we did something. Do you know about Luma production? Have you heard of this? These are the four Gospels in a video format. First, they were done in English, and then they were done in many different languages. Macedonian came just a couple of years ago. It's a wonderful tool to let the people watch, in a sense, watch the Bible, watch the New Testament. Why it is important, I'll tell you a little later, towards the end of this thing. We have online correspondence courses. We used to have correspondence courses which were paper, but children don't write. The only thing that comes to my mailbox these days are the bills. And slowly, probably they will also disappear, and we'll be getting everything by email, at least in our part. We did a mobile application with 150 stories for children that the children could download, listen to them at ease, whatever way they want to do it. Over 400 downloaded it and are using it regularly. We thank the Lord for that. This is God. This is not us. I mean, we we cannot take credit for this. Now, one thing which is very important for us was the choir that we had, children's choir that we had from kids from different churches for many years. And why was that important? Was because you see, there is no such a thing in Macedonia. And very often, not very often, but the last six or seven years, every Christmas, they invite our choir on national TV. We go on national TV on Macedonia, national television, like BBC One for you, and they would let us share, you know, a few songs with the kids. The kids will sing songs, then they will have an interview, usually with Susanna, my wife, because she leads the choir. She will share with them, you know, why do we have the choir? How are we going about it? And then the good part starts. Because they start asking questions. Where did these kids come from? And we say, well, they come from a church. So why would they come to sing about Christmas? Well, then we can share the gospel and we can share a little bit more about Christmas and what got what God has done on the holiday. Although we are Christian country, allegedly, although we have 70% Orthodox, we still have children that have no idea why we celebrate Christmas. And we've tried that. In few places, we would ask, why do we celebrate Christmas? Have no idea. Absolutely no idea. And not only on the national TV, there is also another private national private television which is also national, and we've developed relationships with them, and they are also broadcasting our well, this is the second thing. They're also broadcasting our Christmas program in a sense. Pray for this. It gives us an inroads in the society which usually we would not get. It's not the real evangelism like we would want to see it person to person. But when all the country watches it, it helps us. Why? Because the neighbors then say, Oh, we saw you on TV. Are you going to have a program for the kids? And then we would do something for you know for Christmas for the kids in our neighborhood or even further afar. We do radio ministry in Macedonia. For some of you that don't know, Macedonia borders Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Greece. I shouldn't forget Greece at the bottom. But the western part of Macedonia is where the most of the Muslims live. And we thank the Lord that now for the last three years we have developed our radio ministry there through a couple of radio stations that cover almost all of that area. Regularly, every day, in the morning and rerunning the evening, we play children programs. Now, how many children listen to radio? I don't know. How many Muslim children listen to this radio? Honestly, I don't know. What we know is that that radio station in particular, which is a commercial station but is a Christian commercial station. It was formed by believers by Christians who did it, is in the top three radio stations in the region. How do we know that? Well, there is a body, I don't know how it is in this country, but there is a body in our country that monitors all these radio stations to know how much they can charge them for advertisement. And they said that this station is in the top three in the region, which means people listen to it. Pray the children will hear the word of God, even among the Muslims. We do a lot of distribution of materials, whether it's attracts, you know, whether it's different booklets that you might even recognize in, you know, because we translate them from English. We give it to people, they take it, then they go around and distribute. Sometimes we distribute something bigger. You know, maybe you know, a few books that we give in a special setting when we have kids that we gather for a particular event. Or for Easter, for example, we do a large-scale tract distribution. The reason why they are halfway out is to honor the law. Because then the parent can see what's in there, they can take the tract and not give it to the child. You know, well, we have a legal reason why we keep it halfway out, but it works. Praise the Lord, we are safe, we can do it. And we usually every year we do a program that some of you that receive a prayer letter have seen it or heard about. It's called Christmas Together. Do you do this in Ireland? Christmas Together is a program which actually does one very important thing. All of us involved in the CF ministry in Macedonia go to each and every believer. We go to churches like yours, and we would say, We have a challenge for you. And the challenge is the following We will give you a lesson, Christmas lesson free of charge. We will give you memory verse, everything free of charge. We'll train you free of charge if you're willing to gather the kids in your neighborhood to hear the gospel around Christmas at least once. Bake a cake, buy a couple of chocolates, bring in the kids, do it. In our country, in Macedonia, this works perfect. For years now, we would train people, we would go in a town and maybe find two believers there. We would go and we will share the goal, you know, the lesson with them. We will encourage them to do it. We usually do a video of the lesson as well. So if somebody says, Well, I'm ashamed, I don't know how to give this lesson to the kids, we say, fine, play them the video on your TV at home. Grandmothers would first do it with their grandchildren, then they'll invite the neighborhood. We have a granny in Macedonia, in Skopje, very close to where I live. I mean, she does three or four clubs like that around Christmas. She would just gather kids today, gather kids tomorrow, gather kids after tomorrow. And in a country of less, as I said, less than 2,000 children, sometimes there are big events, sometimes they are slower, smaller events. Sometimes we just encourage the child to watch the whole program on their mobile phone. And we just say, take a look at it. Look, enjoy it, listen to it. You know, we'll hear the gospel at least once. Two kids, three kids, five kids, fifty kids, depending where they are. All around last year, nearly two thousand seventy some children. I think I have it there on the video. Two thousand seventy plus children heard the gospel in person. And for us, that's a huge thing. You see, that that's a kindergarten, this is part of a local church somewhere. It's amazing. Pray that we will continue getting the children to hear the gospel in this way, especially around Christmas, because then they are open, you know, they want to hear the gospel, they want to get a gift. We don't usually give big gifts. We give something little, small, maybe tract, maybe, maybe, maybe something else. Pray for each and every one of these kids because we never know when these children will respond to the gospel message. We also have regular CF activities like goodness clubs, church-related goodness clubs, big events for the children to gather them together, sometimes in our office, sometimes in a different place. We cannot go to schools. That is not allowed. Religion and schools are very separated with each other. The Orthodox Church would love to have religious education, but at the same time they're afraid because if they get it, the Muslims would get it too. So now nobody has it. Sadly, we do five-day clubs just like you would do it here, except we usually rent the place where we do it because we have to be in a place registered for religious activities. And very often, maybe this is different than of a good news club in Ireland, we invite the parents to come with their kids. Why? Because usually the parents have not heard the gospel. So the first few times when we started with a good news club, they would come with their parents. The parents would listen to the program, see how the program goes, and they say, Fine, my child can come because they are afraid that we are a sect. You know, the Orthodox Church says that everybody who is not Orthodox is a sect. So people are scared. We say, come, see what's going on. After the meeting, Susanna or whoever is teaching, they would gather together, have a coffee, and then they let kids come. We also do camps. Every year we also have a team for the last five or six years now from the north of Ireland. Great, great young adults coming and helping us in the ministry. We do, as I said, a lot of summer, different summer activities. Some are small, some are big. But we thank the Lord that for these 35 years we developed a relationship with every single church or denomination in Macedonia as Child Evangelism Fellowship. And they invite Last year we began more specific ministry among Roma. We did train Roma people, Roma pastors, Roma workers, you know. We would give them the training to work with kids, but at the same time, uh it's very difficult for them because it's a very specific culture. I don't know how the Roma in Macedonia, but Roma in well, Roma in Ireland, but in Macedonia, they are they live in one place. They are not the ones that move around. The problem is it's a society that works like a pack. And what their people can do among Roma children, I cannot. They can shout at them, they can scream at them, they can slap them. I would never do that. And yet nobody is gonna complain if they do it. So we train a lot among them, and very often we would just do an event to show them how things are done at the end of our trainings, and then we let them do it themselves. We do a lot of trainings. We train people for Christmas together. We also train people to use our CF material. I teach at the Institute of Child Evangelism Fellowship in Romania. I usually teach working in an Orthodox and in a Central European Muslim setting, how to share the gospel. I'm also involved in Turkey. Pray for Turkey. It's a big country, very strong Muslim country. I love going there. My wife is always scared when I go there because she never knows what's going to happen. There are people of God there. They are people that want to reach children. It was shocking for me when I was sharing. I had a pastor's wife there at one of the trainings, this training actually. And at the end of the training, she came and she said, for seven years in our church, we were doing children's ministry, but we never shared the gospel with the children. Because we thought that we should do that when they are old. They are first generation Christians. No one has told them what to do and how to do it. Pray for them, for their safety and for their growth there. We do trainings online. We had a training for young families with small children just before I left. And now when I go home on June 13th, we will have a conference, life conference, for parents that have, you know, younger children that they can how they can actually share the gospel with them. Sometimes there is a big group that is trained, sometimes it's a small group that is trained. But very often we use Lego. Children love Lego, and we do a lot of Lego clubs in a places like otherwise they would not let us go. It's good for the neighborhood. We just invite Lego club. Kids come. Sometimes there are maybe 20, sometimes there are 50 kids coming. But we praise the Lord that we can do that and share the gospel with them. I mentioned that our daughter is a person with special needs. So we are in now. This is not exactly a CF ministry, but this is a ministry because we are into it and God enabled us to do it. So we take part very often teaching parents that have persons with special needs about the love of God. Most of the people that we meet and actually work with are non-believers. And they have a child with special needs and they have no hope. And these two things are just a disastrous combination. You know, very often we would share the gospel and they're shocked. And we started now something for the last uh two years. We use a church premise in Skopje. It's a rented place for the church, but we also use it every Friday as a respite. The parents can bring their people with disability, leave them there for two hours, and then they can go and have a little bit of free time for themselves. My wife and I trained the trainers, trained the people that work with them, and now we can also enjoy Friday out when we go with our daughter. Prayer is the foundation of our ministry. We encourage the churches to pray for us, we encourage different groups to come together, sometimes two or three people, sometimes 20-30 people. Pray because prayer changes things. You remember I mentioned the videos at the beginning. I'm sorry I don't have more time to explain this, but okay, I don't want to break my time. But this is what happened. When we did this uh video thing, and you can check it online, just go check the Gospel of John, for example, in uh in a video version on YouTube, and you'll find it immediately. And you'll see it in English, and then you'll know how it is in Macedonia. But we asked the United Bible Society, because I'm a member of the board, to give us the latest translation of the New Testament, which was done by the Orthodox Church. We recorded it, and then the organization that paid for the recording, they said we are going to give a small video projector to everybody that is interested in using it into their Sunday schools, into their ministry with people, with adults, you know, alpha courses, whatever. And it's done in a way where you cannot watch a movie, you cannot watch a game, you can only watch what's on the SD card, which we plug in, which we provide for you. And then we spoke to this organization, we said, can we share some of this with the Orthodox Church? And they said yes. So I was talking to the Archbishop of the Masonian Orthodox Church. We got permission to give 80 of these to their priests. And the first shocking thing that happened once we started talking about this was this article in a in their main publication, main Orthodox publication, basically what it says there is that the Christian organization, Child Evangelism Fellowship, is aiming to reach 100 million children in the world with the gospel. And the main point of that article was why aren't we doing something with the children? This is Orthodox asking themselves because they have nothing. There's no catechism, there is no teaching, there is absolutely nothing for the kids. After they get baptized, that's it. Off you go. And so we were able to actually have some of their people come into our office to see our material, to look through it, and we say, look, if you need anything, we are here to help you. They realize that our material is not uh denominational. We speak about the gospel, so pray. Maybe God will make inroads in that church. Because if they do, that will be a revival. This is an old meeting place or a church not far from where we live. It was like a basement. You go down the basement in a building, it was like maybe 40, about six by eight yards. That was the whole church they're meeting, and they left. But do you see what's left over there on the top? You can see the outline of the cross. They took the cross with them when they left the place. A lot of things we do make impact later in the lives of the children. A lot of things that we do today when we share the gospel might have an impact in a few years. Sometimes we don't even see the fruit of the ministry until much, much later. I was in Croatia teaching in a church. Croatia is not my usual place where I go, but I was in Croatia and a young man came to me and he said, Do you remember me? I looked at him, he looked familiar. He told me that he was in our camps and he was saved when he was 12. And I said, What are you doing in Croatia? He said, I'm a pastor. And I pastored a church here. And he called about three or four people that were at that event where I was teaching. He said, he brought them over and he said, if it weren't for CEF, I would not have been where I am today. So pray. Help us reach the generation, this generation, and the generation afterwards. Pray that there will be people that will take over from us. That will be the next generation of people who will share the gospel with others. Help us, be part of that ministry, and God will richly bless all of us. Thank you.