An Englishman in England

Culture Shock
In all the countries I’ve been to over the last 18 months, I’ve had the greatest culture shock when visiting England. I’m staying with family in England over Christmas time, and also seeing friends and the church in Fareham, and sorting out things with my house.
Part of the reason for this culture shock, I think, is feeling that I don’t belong here now. An opportunity has been opened for me in Macedonia and I feel and believe that it is the place I should be right now. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t still care about England.
Students
The main focus for me over the last couple of months has been the work with students; that is the reason why I was sent to Macedonia – to start up a student work in the church there. I have a great team with whom I’m working; some of them are university students, others are those who want to work with students. Macedonian culture is very relationship based, so it involves spending a lot of time with people, which I really believe in. I have found that, when you are with people, you can encourage them and teach them in ways that can’t really be achieved by simply “preaching”. I have seen several people really flourishing because they’ve been given something to do for which they have a vision and in which they are being encouraged. It is exciting to be involved in this.
I have also been realising (mainly because I’ve had two people encouraging me to realise it!) that we need to have a structure to what we are doing. We have a vision, but we also need to organise things in such a way that the vision is not dependent on any one person – this means we are now planning for the long term.
The vision we have is for a growing Christian group in every Faculty and Hall of Residence in the university. And one of the ways that we are structuring for this is by starting up Cell Groups. One member of our team is Sashe, who has just finished a degree in Maths. He already has a group of people who have become Christians and whom he is discipling; he will start a Cell Group with them and I’ll be with him to encourage him.
Church
The church in Skopje to which I belong is also going through a period of structuring and new things. One of those things is starting up a café. There is a youth congregation within the church and we have been given a place to use for this café. In fact, I was a little surprised to discover that 24-7 Prayer had published an article about it: http://www.24-7prayer.com/cm/lodown/633
Travels
I hadn’t done a lot of travelling over the last couple of months, but I did make up for it a couple of weeks ago when I did four countries in 24 hours! The cheapest flight I found was from Sofia in Bulgaria, via Budapest in Hungary (one of my favourite European capitals), so I took a bus from Skopje to Sofia and stayed up all night there with a Macedonian friend who is studying there at the moment. I had never been to Bulgaria before, and I got that excitement of travelling again and seeing a new place. At the border high in the mountains, it was dark and the snow was falling quite heavily. When I saw some of the old guard posts along the road, I was reminded how severe a form of communism had once been in control in that country, especially in their persecution of Christians. It is a truly amazing thing to hear of the freedom that now exists there as it does in Macedonia and other ex-communist countries. The harvest is ripe...