By Romicã Avãdãnoaei
Romicã is the SVM2 National Lead Facilitator in Romania and lives with his family in Bucharest.
Recently, an Ignite conference took place in Bucharest, the first SVM2 conference in Romania. There were about 150 students and youth in two days of prayer, worship, teaching and fellowship.
At the end of these days, five young people had signed the Go Declaration card committing themselves to serve God among the unreached following graduation from college or university.
I saw many young people in tears as they prayed fervently for missionaries, nations, for their generation and for God to raise up laborers to go to the hardest places in the earth with His love burning in their hearts.
This event was a tipping point for the future ministry of Romanian people in the nations. We understand that God is looking among the earth with His same love at nations with a rich Christian history as well as among the unreached nations.
We are the same in God’s eyes, no different, because we are all His creation. If we will understand this at a heart level and begin start to preach this and teach this in our churches in such a way that that allows the Lord to bring deep revelation to His people, our brand of Christianity will inevitably change.
The spiritual atmosphere in the churches, in families and in our hearts will be different. A wave of young people from the today’s emerging generation will rise up and respond to the calling of being an agent of transformation among every last people group.
Two days after the conference I presented the SVM2 vision in a small church in a mission prayer meeting. Following the meeting two more young people signed the Go Declaration for long term mission involvement. Young people want to be involved in what God is doing today.
They want to be on the front line. They are being prepared by the hand of God to respond with wholeheartedness to His call as we are faithful to declare it to them without compromise and watering down the message of serving among the nations.
Providing clear information of what God is doing in the nations is critical. Such information is the key, the Holy Spirit is the power that will turn the lock.
The door is the various barriers keeping young people from being released into involvement that will be smashed from the wave of dedicated volunteer students. A new generation of Message Bearers from an ex-communist country will go into the difficult harvest fields of the world.
What could be better than this, to see a nation like Romania, for so long the recipient of foreign Message Bearers, now being raised up as a sending nation to the ends of the earth? Now is the time for Romania to become a strong nation which sends Message Bearers out by the multitudes.
Romania currently has about 150 long term Message Bearers serving in the mission field. I believe we are living in a time of greater expectation among the young people of Romania. They want to do more than merely go to youth meetings to sing or to play football.
It is time to help them catch God’s vision and to treat them as if they are ready to receive a strong challenge that requires their all. Many are ready for such a challenge and will respond accordingly.
Obviously, many will reject this but our calling is to lay out a firm and strong understanding of what God is doing and saying among the nations and to call them to wholehearted involvement. Many are ready to be proactive in responding to His calling.
More than ever before, now is the time when the call of responding to God with a total life dedication will bring great fruitfulness. Now we have in Romania the possibilities of dedicated students going to the mission field because more and more mission agencies have established bases in Romania.
The new student volunteers have the channels, because a few pioneers opened the ways for the mission in wild areas of the world. More Romanian youth go in short mission trips for between 2 weeks and 2 months. Some of them will choose a wild area, and they will dedicate their life for long term mission in that place.
Romania, a country with about 22 million people has a strong student area with about 770 faculties and 714,714 students in 2006. Many of them are not Christians yet, but with the ministry of the student organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ International, InterVarsity, YWAM, etc, they will become saved.
And after that they will be ready to do great things for God. They will respond to the great calling for the ministry. For the moment, they don’t know what adventure life will give them. But that will come, after God brings them into His Kingdom.
We must be aware about the potential that the young generation has to change the future of the worldwide mission. Never the same as now. The number is increasing. They are like a latent force that is ready to be released. Who can stop this?
Never in history have we, the Church, had so many human and financial resources. In the last five years, in Romania the world wide mission has become more stable. It is now like a platform for the future student generation that will help them to go to places where a common Christian will never go.
From the present situation in Romania, from 150 missionaries for long term, to a wave of volunteer students is just a problem of time. That wave has already begun. And what will put gasoline on the fire will be the information.
When the pastors and leaders start to preach about the urgency of ministry and when many Churches in Romania receive information from the mission fields, then the Christians will know about the necessity to support the world wide ministry and will be ready to do it.
I found many prayer support groups for world wide ministry in Bucharest now. That means there are much more than that. We need to connect them all together for to enforce them in their job, to pray, to give and to send volunteers for the foreign mission.
Romania will be more and more present on the table of the countries that sends missionaries. You will meet more and more Romanians on the mission fields. That is what the Holy Spirit is doing, He will change more and more hearts for the mission.
In the same way that we, as Romanian, received missionaries a few years ago in the same way they, the Romanians will go into hard places in the world to preach the Gospel. They are closer, culturally speaking, from the ex-communist countries and the Islamic countries. And geographically also we are closer to them.
Some how, because the iron curtain of communist time, Romanian Christians live in past. The information canals are not totally opened. In the case of the Romanians, we need to present the reality about the world wide ministry.
We need to do that in every youth meeting in the churches and in every student organization gathering around Romania. We will try to put in contact this 150 long term missionaries that we have had for the moment from Romania with the students and youth all around the country.
We need to inform the youth and student leaders about the Global Prayer Meetings to help them to start it and to give them resources and training.
We need to connect them, to put together all the student organizations, youth organizations and mission agencies in a common work to help all the student organizations in their ministry to reach new believers in their campuses, to unite all the students in the world for the global mission, and to equip them to minister in the nations.
