What's Next in Trnava

Greetings from Trnava!

I'm so happy to finally be able to update you all on what has been happening over the past few months. Since I first found out about the ministry in Slovakia in 2006, I knew that July was the busiest month of the year. For months leading up to the summer, all of the staff prepares for this one very intense month of English camps. I had personally started projects for camp, such as logos, posters, English class booklets, t-shirts, daily themes, English lessons, and videos & songs of the day, back in January.

Everything that we chose, from the themes to the videos to the t-shirt designs, all beautifully connected to one another, giving us many opportunities to reiterate Gospel themes in a subtle, yet clear way.

For high school camp, which was titled "Into the Daylight", one of my jobs was to choose songs that correlated to our daily themes which were twilight, darkness, starlight, dawn and daylight. We not only studied the English during camp, but I was to form a "band" that could perform these songs on a daily basis at camp. For one month, I along with a band practiced, and when it was time to perform every night, we had so much fun and the kids loved connecting to the music.

Another task I was given was to teach an English class every morning. This was a very intimidating job for me, as I don't believe I'm skilled in this area. However, after being told some tips by our resident ESL teacher on the team and much planning, I felt confident in what I was doing and the classes went incredibly smooth (below).

For the last two weeks of camp, my main duty was to film and edit daily videos as well as staff-led themed videos. You are welcome to see the daily videos I made and all of us make fools of ourself for the staff-led videos by clicking the link to the left!

Before those weeks started, my computer crashed, making it very difficult to do my job. I was able to use another computer, but this problem and the incredible amount of technical difficulties I had led to much stress for those two weeks. We could all feel so much spiritual warfare happening to each and every one of us. Though this was hard to bear at times, we prayed through it, encouraged each other, and realized that spiritual warfare was something we had to go through during such an important and effective part of our ministry.

Making friends at camp was very important to not only the kids, but the staff as well. Because we had spent so much time preparing and organizing in previous months, we were able to relax and connect with each other. One girl I especially connected with is named Sylvia, or Sisa. Sisa has told us that camp was one of the best weeks of her life and it is so obvious that God is doing amazing things through her life because of that week. Another girl that came who was in my cabin, did not know that we were all Christians until she got there. She said if she had known it was a Christian led camp, she would not have come. The week after camp, she showed up to The Building for a few nights to spend more time with us. We are praising God for so much answered prayer and these are just a few examples of how His goodness is so abundant here!

For months we have been praying that God would provide a meeting place for the church. After so much time of searching, the Lord provided a place at the last minute. We will now meet in a building located underneath the Lundgaard's, a missionary family here. The week after camp ended, we started moving things out of The Building into the new church. We are still continuing to move so many things from The Building into the new place which is significantly smaller as well as into each other's homes due to lack of space.

This has been an emotionally trying time for me, and all of those who have invested so much of their lives into The Building, or have grown up going there. We are constantly reminding each other that it is not about the building we're in, it's about people.

Please continue to pray for us as we finish moving and for our attitudes and hearts as well, as we say goodbye to a building that we love, and adopt a new place and type of ministry. Our first church service will be Sunday where we'll be celebrating God's provision.

As my ministry time becomes shorter and shorter, please pray that God will provide a job and housing for me in whatever city is best. I have already started this search process. I want to also thank the Lord for answering so much prayer this summer. Despite the amount of physically demanding work and stress, I did not become sick once!

Thank you for all of your prayers and support.

Ande Truman