October 6, 2013 Update

I know it's been a long time since I've last written.  Shame on me for getting out of the habit of communicating.  Sometimes it seems like over here we just get used to seeing the Lord's blessings, and think that no one would find these things all that interesting.  The Lord has certainly been doing good things here.

 

This summer we were able to have at least three large Turkish weekend meetings at the facilities up in Romania; we also had three over-night meetings at the church in Dabravino, and one five day English meeting in Romania.  There were also various special meetings in believer's houses (rather than the church house) where we were able to preach to some unbelievers.  We've continued to distribute evangelistic DVDs, and now we make our church services available on youtube; we have nearly two hundred videos that have been viewed thousands of times.

 

Perhaps the most encouraging event of the summer has been the start of a new meeting in the city of Ruse.  Being a large city, there have been several churches started there by various mission groups. Our work is normally in the villages (where most missionaries don't want to go).  But there were some people in the Turkish neighborhood that met our national pastor, Brother Nasuf one day and told him how blessed his people were to have a church in their town, because they didn't have anyone to come to them or their neighborhood.  Although it is over a hundred miles away, I still felt like we needed to go to those people and preach the gospel to them.  At first we didn't have much hope of seeing a church started, but thought we would go preach and see what happened.  We found that indeed there had been several meetings there started by various mission groups, but none of them had stayed.  It's been nearly three months now and we've been there every week.  The people are glad to have us. Several have been saved and three of them were baptized last week.  It was probably the coldest day of the year, felt like about forty degrees, and there was a blistering wind and rain.  I told the people that if they wanted to wait until next summer and warmer weather that would be alright, but they said that the weather was just a test of their faith to see how much they really loved God, so they insisted on being baptized in the Danube river on that cold, rainy day.

 

Continue to pray for us.   

From Bulgaria, Zachary Lefevre