The Cry Volume 1 Number 1 Trinity 2019

The REC reaches out to the Roma By the Rev. Edward W. Fowler At the checkpoint on the Croatia side of the border, a sign painted onto the façade of the cinder-block building warns sternly in English:

DON’T ACCEPT AND DON’T GIVE BRIBE

A quarter-mile down the road, on the Serbia side, no such admonishment appears. Croatia has joined the European Union, taking on all of that organization’s fussiness about ethics, rules and regs. Serbia bothers with none of it. She has little hope and perhaps less ambition to throw in with the E.U. The rot of corrup-tion still pervades her government at the highest levels. Croatia and Serbia share a blood-stock and a language, yet the former sees herself as Western and Roman Catholic, the latter as Eastern and Orthodox. They have been at odds for a long, long time. And we haven’t yet men-tioned all the killing. Deacon Bob Hitching has steered his old Ford compact around a long line of waiting trucks, squeezing past a car or two in the oncoming traffic lane. An inno-

cent would queue up behind them and sit for hours. Dcn. Bob is an old Central Europe hand. He knows the big rigs may cross the frontier only at prescribed times and that cars have the right to zip past them. He lives in neither nation but a little over an hour away in Hungary. He pinballs among the three countries

with practiced ease, ministering to the Bayash (BY-osh) tribe of the Roma people wherever he can find them. There’s no shortage. About 150,000 of them are scattered among some 65 villages in Croatia, 100 in Serbia and 250 in Hungary, with a smattering in Bosnia. In this part of the world they’re as easy to find as paprika. When they finally escaped the yoke of slavery in Romania in the mid-19th century, the Roma migrated along the rivers, the Danube, Drava and Sava. The Bayash were not the only gypsies who were enslaved but they remained in bondage the longest, 400 years, and under the harshest regime. A master could kill a slave

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Dcn. Bob Hitching with his new friends on his initial visit to Conta, Serbia

Houses along the street that comprises the gypsy quarter in Conta

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A man for all seasons shepherds reconciliation A map of Protestant

churches in Central Europe would make a very crazy quilt indeed. Germany would look much as it did shortly following the Refor-mation, of course, with Lutherans predominating in the north whereas Roman Catholics were never uprooted in the south. Switzerland likewise has not changed a great deal. Elsewhere, the picture has shifted according to the degree of success of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

In the Reformation Mu-seum in the Good Shepherd Church in Osijek, Croatia, there hangs such a map pinpointing the numerous Protestant congrega-tions in the nation at the apex of the Reformation. An “after” shot, if it were present, would reveal a depressing diminution. In Croatia, the Catholics struck back hard and the nascent Protestant church lacked the wherewithal to resist. But a mere half-hour’s drive through the corn-fields will take you to Tordinci (Tor-DINTS-y) and a Protes-tant church that has endured since 1551 through more wars than anyone can count. Just around the corner from it, in the front yard of the Catholic church, stand two markers commemorating a mass grave, the final resting

place of 208 souls who perished at the hands of the Yugoslav Army and Croatian Serbs in 1991-92. The Protestant church closed its doors during the war, reopening in temporary quarters in 1999. Parishioners finished a rebuild of the demolished structure in 2002. With the help of an assist-ing priest, Bishop Jasmin Milic (YAZ-min MIL-ich) serves as pas-tor. He presides at a Sunday morning service in Tordinci and evening worship at Good Shep-herd Church in Osijek, the regional capital, where he makes his epis-copal seat. His history leaves no doubt as to why God tapped him to spearhead ministry in a part of the world that for centuries has

made civil war its national pastime – to say nothing of bloody occupations by Venetians, Turks, Austrians, Hun-garians, Germans and Russians. In every nook and cranny, the mission of the church is, or should be, reconciliation. In the Balkans (many Croatians recoil from that designation, reserving it for those to their east and south), her mission should be reconciliation to the 10th power. Osijek still wears a war-weary face. The district in which Good Shepherd resides is part of the sprawling old fort complex built to repel invaders from the east. Can-

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To support the work of the Reformed Episcopal Church in Central Europe: You can give online at: http://www.recbfm.org/donate/default.html

You can give by check: Reformed Episcopal Church 23501 Cinco Ranch Blvd Ste H120 #642 Katy, TX 77494 (Please enclose the form available on the website.) You may also contact Dean Jason Grote by mail or tele-phone (281-463-9454) about other giving options, in-cluding securities/stock, real estate, life insurance or bequests in your will.

Bp. Jasmin Milic reads the gospel in Tordinci.

A monument marks the spot of a mass grave at the Catholic church in Tordinci. The Reformed Episcopal church is around the corner.

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In a region torn by invasion and civil war, healing makes a lurching start

busy street – a little red car rolling up onto a massive green tank. You’ll never get the Balkans until you’ve lived the Balkans.

Enter Bp. Jasmin, a walking, talking amalgamation of virtually everything Balkan. He was born in 1969 in Bosnia to an Orthodox Serb mother and Muslim Bosnian father. They divorced before his birth. He was baptized Orthodox, but didn’t bother with religion until his teen-age years. By then he had charted a course for Orthodox ordination. He went to Dalmatia, on the coast, to attend an Orthodox high school while living in a monastery. There he met some Pentecostals who invited him to a Bible camp. “That was my first contact with the gospel,” he says. Changing course after high school, he moved to Osijek to attend an Assembly of God seminary, was or-dained and pastored a Pentecostal church for three years. “I was looking for my theological identity,” he says. He began to study Reformed theology and found it compel-ling. He also met the priest in Tordinci, who was using the Book of Common Prayer. He was installed as pastor of a Hungarian Reformed church in Osijek in 1997. He planted Good Shepherd Church the next year but prob-

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A Yugoslav Army tank crushes a small red Fiat in Osijek in 1991 (left). Today, the little car’s assault on the tank symbolizes Croatia’s hard-won independence.

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non ports dot the red-brick bat-tlements and a stroll down almost any street in the area reveals plaster walls pocked with bullet holes, souvenirs of the 1991-92 Homeland War. The city, about 100,000 in population back then, has lost 10 percent of its people and the economy has never fully recovered. Membership in the European Union has proved a mixed blessing; it makes it easier to emigrate in pursuit of better-paying jobs. This is a region in which the ironic morphs into the iconic. Osijek contains what may be Croatia’s most compel-ling symbol of the Homeland War. It is certainly its most sar-donic. Yugoslav Army tanks rumbled into the city in what would have been an awesome show of force in any circum-stance. It was the more chilling because Croatia had no army of its own. A local man left his red Fiat sub-compact in the middle of the street in a token bid to slow the tanks’ advance. A news photographer captured the image of a tank looming over the tiny car like a mon-strous spaceship in a sci-fi movie and then crushing it into a speck, finally pinning the wreckage against a city bus. This testament to the futility of resistance went viral – by 1991 standards, anyway – and stood until a curious thing happened. With a rather large assist from the other side of the Atlantic, Croatia prevailed, securing her independence. Osijekers have memori-alized that victory with a most conspicuous monument on a

“ This is a region in which the ironic morphs into the iconic.

”

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lems soon developed owing to the “nationalistic” char-acter of his Hungarian colleagues. He and Good Shepherd took leave of their fel-lowship in 2001. Casting about on the web for a land-ing place, he found the Reformed Episcopal Church. Bp. Jasmin had been studying Reformation history both globally and in his area. Centuries earlier, one of the stalwarts of the Reformation in Croatia had com-posed a paean to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, father of the movement in England. It looked like it might be a fit. Locating an REC mis-sionary in Germany, he made contact. He got a frosty recep-tion. Here began 10 years on an island. In that time he launched a seminary, planted churches and made the Book of Common Prayer the staple of worship. He now had the church his investigation had carried him to, Reformed and liturgical. It still needed an identity grounded in some-thing bigger. In 2011 he discovered the REC had installed a bishop in Germany. He reached out once again. This time he en-countered a decidedly differ-ent reaction. In two weeks, Bp. Gerhard Meyer and Canon Bill Jerdan were on his door-step. A month later, Bp. Royal Grote arrived. “He was like a father,” says Bp. Jasmin. “His heart was with Croatia.” That was the year God smiled on him and his sheep. In fact, it seemed He couldn’t stop smiling. All it took was keeping the faith through that decade of wandering in the wilderness.

To the Court of Human Rights Bound by both lineage and language to their Serbian neighbors, Croats draw a sharp line at religion: Serbs are Orthodox, Bosnians are Muslim, Croats are Catholic. This fierce attachment applies even to

(Continued from page 3) their cultural identity. Not without justification, Croats trace their heritage back through the more enlightened and cul-tured realms of Western and Central Europe than their Serb neighbors. They look to Venice, Vienna and Budapest for their historical affinities (no matter that the foreigners were occupiers) while Serbs in their Orthodoxy are attached to Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. To be Western, on this view, is to be Catholic. At the last, Croats look to Rome, as they have since the Roman Empire fractured. In

these parts, tradition dies harder than a mutant cockroach. This religious-cultural ma-trix dictates a difficult terrain for Reformed outreach on more than one level. People whose very identity is encased in it will con-sider a change ever so cautiously, if at all. The Protestants make up a fringe movement at best and an unwelcome intruder at worst. They are met with suspicion and sometimes overt hostility. Bp. Jasmin got the latter from both barrels in his decade on the is-land. He might have taken ref-uge in Western trappings. Mainline U.S. denominations did come calling, usually offering money. As importantly, they would have provided an aura of legitimacy and moral and spiritual support. Each time he looked behind the door, however, he discovered a liberal and liberaliz-ing church to which he could not in good conscience bind him and his people. “We knew God would provide,” he says.

Good Shepherd raised funds and purchased the building it now occupies. It was the first Reformed church planted in the region since the 16th century – but like those of old it didn’t happen without a fight. The Hungarian Re-formed Church demanded title to the property and then filed suit. Good Shepherd was evicted. For eight years be-lievers met in makeshift spaces – a derelict café-bar, a room in the bishop’s home, rented space in another church. “The police came to my house,” says Bp. Jasmin.

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After a decade in the wilderness, God smiled on Bishop Jasmin

Bullet holes pock the plaster of an Osijek building.

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“They came with pastors from the church that was suing us. The police asked for money. They took my car, they took my TV. My wife was angry. Others would ask me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ My bank account was blocked. I went with no salary for 10 years.” They lived on the pay of his wife, Tamara, a nurse. In Croatia as elsewhere in Europe, the government levies a church tax and doles out funds to registered con-gregations according to a formula. Authorities withheld much of the money due Good Shepherd on trumped-up reasons that amounted to blatant discrimination against an isolated Protestant parish. Bp. Jasmin took the government to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Another court case dragged on. Then God smiled. In 2011 the Croatia high court ruled in favor of Good Shepherd and its property was re-stored. In a staccato burst, the Strasbourg court awarded another victory and the money spigot opened and then Bp. Royal arrived and welcomed the Croatia contingent into the REC. “Bp. Royal came and preached every year after,” says Bp. Jasmin. “He really loved Croatia.”

Onward, Christian soldiers Those long, lean years took a toll. “There was a lot of stress, much pressure,” says Bp. Jasmin, “but this is my calling. God called me. I can do many things. In those years I wrote seven or eight books and finished my Ph.D. I am an educated man. I am happy when I preach, when I celebrate the liturgy. God gave me a lot of energy back then. Now I’m really tired. But I never give up.”

(Continued from page 4) Perhaps another 2011 will come along, perhaps not. He began with only the church in Tordinci and now oversees that parish, Osijek, a Roma church in Kapelna and two more congregations, one of those in Zagreb (ZAH-greb), the capital. He has high hopes for a plant across the border in Belgrade (BEL-greyd), where it ap-pears a Catholic church will make a chapel available for Anglican worship. Outreach to the many Roma scattered in hun-dreds of villages in Hungary, Serbia and Croatia has be-come an important part of the REC’s ministry. So has developing a web presence. Bp. Jasmin has raised funding for and implemented a sophisticated audio-visual system that allows him to webcast seminary classes. He posts his sermon each week and routinely attracts almost 1,000 views. Good Shepherd has incor-porated a copy shop to draw in students who attend nearby high schools. Challenges, in addition to a chronic shortage of funding, involve high turnover among both foreign mis-sionaries and national clergy. A Dutch couple went home this summer after three years in country. An American couple in their 20s plan to return perma-nently to the U.S. in the coming weeks. As in the West, some priests submit to the world’s blandishments and drift (or are chased) away. Bivocational clergy some-times relocate for better secular gigs to better support their families. But for all the obstacles, there are no tanks in the streets these days. That seems a major blessing. Ω

EWF

‘The police asked for money. They took my car, they took my TV.’

Croatia Facts Population: 4.19 million, 125th in the world Croats comprise 90.4 percent, Serbs 4.4 percent Capital: Zagreb Currency: kuna Language: Croatian, using Latin script Country name in Croatian: Hrvatska Organized as a parliamentary republic Member of the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO)

Religions: Roman Catholic 86.28 percent, Orthodox 4.44 percent, Protestant .34 percent, Muslim 1.47 percent, atheist 4.57 percent

Neighboring nations: Slovenia, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro

Features 1,185 islands in the Adriatic Sea, 66 inhabited

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who displeased him. He could do with a girl as he wished, including passing her around to his friends. Many cut off ears and lips as punishment. They castrated. The Bayash lost their language, which they were barred from speak-ing, and now communicate in a tongue peculiar to them, one of more than a hundred Roma languages and dia-lects. Theirs is based on archaic Romanian with Slavic and Hungarian influences. They lost most of their cultural markers, which they were barred from observing, and so they became un-clean. The ritual pu-rity of the Roma is not so far removed from that of Old Tes-tament Palestinian Judaism. If, for ex-ample, a gypsy woman allows the hem of her dress to touch a man’s trou-sers, she becomes unclean. Violations of taboos result in various penalties, most temporary. The Roma are the pariahs of Europe; the Bayash are their lowest caste, the Untouchables of the gypsy world. After their emancipation they continued in the lightly esteemed occupations they knew, animal-training and fortune-telling among them. They pursued the famil-iar way of life – incest, witchcraft, alcoholism, wife-beating. They still do. A Westerner’s mind aches almost to bursting as it tries to wrap itself around the historical forces that have kicked and gouged this benighted people into their current condition. Knowing them is not neces-sary for loving them – but it would be a big help.

Getting to know you The abundance of Bayash in these fields white for harvest does not necessarily portend a friendly reception. Dcn. Bob’s destination on this muggy morning in late July is the Serbian village of Conta (SOHN-ta), population ap-proximately 300, a couple of klicks from the Danube. He has investigated and identified its gypsy quarter as a tar-get for mission. This is his first visit, a probe. Now 68, he

(Continued from page 1) got hooked on a ministry habit early on and at various stages of life has supported it with forays into the eat-what-you-kill world. He was good at sales. You could call this a cold call. He takes a road that veers off from the highway and descends into a bottom. The road, paved for a quar-ter-mile or so, is lined with houses. The houses look a bit tired and sad compared to the perkier Serb homes up on the highway, but permanent. Some 15 of them house the

entire Bayash com-munity. Dcn. Bob stops the car to pray for protec-tion, for a gracious greeting, for a fruitful work in this place. Then he reconnoiters. He is wear-ing his collar, which speaks of stability and stature. Driv-ing slowly down the road he scans the area for clues as to what to ex-pect from the resi-dents. Are there inside toilets? Out-

side toilets? No toilets? Electricity? Running water? What’s the mode of dress? Do the women wear tradi-tional long skirts? Do they breast-feed in public? These clues will trigger cues as to how to fashion his approach.

He lets them get a first glimpse of him. At one dwelling a middle-aged woman and a younger one are on the patio with nut-brown children swarming. They watch with interest and no apparent hostility as he drives past. Continuing beyond the paved section he rolls down a dirt track lined on both sides with an impromptu town dump.

He examines the refuse for more clues to the standard of living and the villagers’ habits. Is there cloth-ing? In some places Western do-gooders have supplied so many clothes that the people don’t bother to wash them but instead throw them away. No clothes here. Another sign of isolation is an abundance of plastic bot-tles. These gypsies are too far removed from a recycling facility to exchange them for cash.

At the end of the road is the end of the dump. Dcn. Bob turns around and works his way slowly back,

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Gypsies are the pariahs of Europe, this their lowest caste, Untouchables

A solitary soul is on the move on the Bayash street on a morning in July.

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gaining the pavement and pulling over at the house of the women and kids. He heaves himself out of the car and he and his companions approach, Dcn. Bob calling out greet-ings in Bayash. Here is the biggest test. Will these villag-ers speak the dialect he knows? Not all Bayash do.

The women respond with smiles and words – fa-miliar words. He and they are on the same wave length. The visitors are given seats on the patio and served orange soda and then strong, sweet Turkish coffee. Everyone sips, chats and swats flies. Dcn. Bob taps out a rhythm on a tom-tom he has pulled from his trunk. He offers a little book with the Gospel of Mark in Bayash and a child’s Bi-ble activity book. A girl clasps them to her chest. In a few minutes a man in his 30s materializes from inside the house and he, too, seems pleased to have company. This is vacation season in Europe. He and the younger woman are visiting from Montenegro, come to see her mother. Dcn. Bob and the man speak Turkish for a time. It’s the Balkans. Be ready for anything.

Experience tells Dcn. Bob to cut the visit off after 20 minutes. After animated gestures and a promise to return, he repairs to his car. This has been an exceptional first contact, as promising as he could have hoped. His next step is to return with his wife, Nancy. She will be an-other signal, like his clerical collar, that he is not one of those Westerners who nod and smile, all the while schem-ing to make off with some gypsy children. The approach must unfold ever so cautiously, but he and Nancy will en-deavor to introduce a Bible and literacy program Nancy has developed for kids. If that takes hold, they will move next to leverage it into relationships with adults. In a lar-ger Bayash encampment in the south of the country such an initiative has blossomed into a Bible study that regularly

(Continued from page 6) attracts 80 adults. The next goal there is to develop a seminary extension that will award a certificate in Bible.

Dcn. Bob points the car back toward the Croatia border, beaming. He has initiated a new work. And by the way, he has neither accepted nor given bribe.

Language-learning, and so forth Bob Hitching grew up in south London, the son of communist parents. By his teenage years he had grown into a determined pagan of the sort who smokes and snorts. Then God came calling, and He brought His

lasso. By 20, Bob was selling washing ma-chines as a side hustle and spending every evening in a Turkish Muslim community, ministering the gospel and pre-paring to move to their home-land as a mis-sionary. He went, but his tenure proved rather shorter than expected. It was 1971. He and his mates were

working the streets from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. in the decid-edly illegal activity of distributing Bibles and related lit-erature. The Turkish authorities scooped them up and pitched them into prison while they puzzled over how much of an example to make of them. By the time they decided, Bob had lost 35 pounds. The four of them – a Swede, an American and another Englishman who would go on to become the Anglican bishop of North Africa – shared one blanket. “There we were, like a row of tin soldiers,” Bob recalls with a laugh. After a desperate three weeks their sending agency arrived with blankets, food and Bibles. Life improved, but they were still in a Turkish prison, a 500-year-old building without toilets. He recalls seven holes. They were sardined into a tank 15 by 35

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Food, blankets and Bibles helped a bit, but it was still a Turkish prison

Dcn. Bob at his post at Holy Trinity, the Bayash church in Kapelna, Croatia

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feet holding a total of 52 men. A guard put a pistol to Bob’s head; another inmate set a knife to his throat. For-tunately, he serves a God who is in the business of using for good what man intends for evil. Bob recalls an “intensely spiritual” time. The four of them recited Morn-ing and Evening Prayer without benefit of a prayer book and at each session one of them de-livered a homily. Each was preaching every other day. Bob had begun learning Turkish back in London but the fluency that would allow him to converse easily in the language with a man from Montenegro in a Serbian village decades later got a big boost with involuntary immer-sion training in a Turkish slammer. In addition to an acute dependence on his Lord, preaching prac-tice that would serve him well later and language-learning, Bob was released after three months with one other lasting effect, tuberculosis. While it’s not certain he contracted it there, as we shall see, the disease mani-fested just after this time. As a result, he has suffered lingering colds and seven or eight bouts of pneumonia since and now struggles with COPD. “It isn’t heroic,” he says. “Missionaries who land in prison now write books and go on speaking tours. We never thought of anything like that. For us it was just an occupational hazard.” He returned to London. But he had scarcely had time for a plate of bangers and mash, 10 days, when he was off again. Now persona non grata in Turkey, he made for India and Nepal. It may have been on a three-day rat-tle from Calcutta to New Delhi that he picked up tubercu-losis. Third-class cars on Indian trains were known to in-cubate it at as vigorous a rate as Turkish prisons.

Going to America When next we catch sight of Bob he is in the United States, working among Muslims. He has trans-ferred his day-job skills from washing machines to adver-

(Continued from page 7) tising and that pursuit is going swimmingly. His elongated vowels and rounded English tones give him a cachet among the colonials. And he’s good at selling. He has married Nancy, a Maryland native, and they live in a tony enclave in Virginia while he spends most of his work days in New York City.

One day, some pho-tos arrive from a young man of their acquaintance who had accepted a call to min-ister to the Bayash in north-ern Croatia. An image of a suffering woman so moves Nancy that she decides she must act. Scooping up three of their four children, she boards a plane and sets off. Bob will pop over to visit for a long weekend. He has already been invited to speak on American business practices in Dalmatia, that enticing region on the Adri-atic coast that has cooed to tourists for centuries. When he arrives, Nancy takes him on a tour of Ba-yash villages. He gives his

talks. Then standing under a tree as they watch the kids play on the beach, they agree that God is calling them to Croatia and the Bayash. They plan for Nancy to move forthwith and for Bob to visit when he can and continue to work in New York for another 18 months. He has become involved in a busi-ness consultancy that is going so well that he reckons he will be able to sell his shares and walk away fixed, with no need to raise support for their work on the field. This balloon pops immediately upon his return to the U.S. His Wall Street partners have cut the ground out from under him. Nancy comes home. Yet if God has called them to Croatia, as they had discerned, Croatia is where they must be. Their arrival is delayed, with Nancy, who is trained in philosophy and early childhood education, spending summers in Croatia. She compiles the first writ-ten alphabet in Bayash and begins to develop the curricu-lum that will become the foundation of their missionary approach in the villages, “mother-tongue literacy for the little guys.” In 2001 they affiliate with the Roma Bible Un-ion and relocate permanently to Central Europe, where (Continued on page 9)

A Turkish prison: ‘It isn’t heroic . . . it was just an occupational hazard’

Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal, the Bayash church in Kapelna

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Anglicanism, with its sacramental, liturgical character, is the right vehicle

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they have lived ever since.

But what about total depravity? On the day following the first contact in the Ser- bian village, Dcn. Bob again collects his two visitors in Osi-jek (OH-see-yek), the Croatian regional capital and episco-pal see, this time setting out for Kapelna (Ka-PEL-na). An hour’s drive through stern cornstalks and smiling sunflow-ers ends in a tranquil village. It was not always thus. The residents are overwhelmingly Serbs. In the World War II years Croats slaughtered Serbs, Jews and gypsies here. Kapelna has a fully functioning Bayash church, which more than half of their population of 35 attends regularly. Bob and another deacon, a local man, serve as pastors. Dcn. Bob will be ordained a presbyter in Septem-ber, Lord willing, and Holy Trinity Church will be able to celebrate the eucharist on a regular basis. Bishop Jasmin Milic (YAZ-min MIL-ich) planted the church before Dcn. Bob became involved. It represents their shared vision for ministry to the Bayash. Dcn. Bob describes the Roma generally as “a classically pagan peo-ple in a Catholic or Orthodox frame.” They appear at church to be baptized and buried, and otherwise never darken the door. Their strangled appetite for the Chris-tian religion is matched by their Croat and Serb neighbors’ distaste for their company in worship – or any-where else, for that matter. Kapelna presents a little wrin-kle. Because Serbs are themselves a minority here, they are more tolerant of the Roma. A couple of them even attend gypsy church.

Other than Re-formed Episcopalians, the only Christians who have ventured into the breach are Pentecos-tals. Bp. Jasmin and soon-to-be Father Bob, both normally open to ecumenical approaches, are bound by the con-viction that feelings-based religion is pre-cisely the wrong tonic for a people who for centuries have suc-cumbed at every oppor-tunity to their feelings. They see Anglicanism with its sacramental and liturgical character as the right vehicle to deliver the gospel to those in desperate need of order in their

spiritual life, indeed in life in general. The church building is a modest structure, one room that seats about 30, plus a tiny out-building where a Sunday school class meets. But the property covers an acre-and-a-half and it has a barn. Bp. Jasmin would like to convert that into a community center. He dreams also of a pig farm on the site. Dcn. Bob’s hope is for a peach and apple orchard. Holy Trinity has a recent amenity that would be easy for an outsider to overlook. A bathroom. It even has a shower. In addition to its use on Sundays and for church functions, the bathroom serves the daily needs of two families. Social services personnel swooped down, corralling children from families with no bathroom facili-ties and depositing them in various institutions. One member family lost its kids, reclaiming them only after the government was satisfied that they would have regu-lar access to the new bathroom in the church across the street. Gypsy children from homes with no toilets often suffer ridicule when they begin school and their class-mates see them urinating in a corner and rinsing their hands in the toilet. They balk at returning and their drop-out rate is abysmal. Access to a simple toilet, hardly worth a thought in the West, affects not only children’s (Continued on page 10) The Sunday school classroom at Holy Trinity Church

The Holy Trinity bathroom

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‘God is for us, not against us; God is for us, not against us; God is . . .’

(Continued from page 9)

hygiene and health but also family stability and educa-tion. This is ministry in the trenches. More directly theological concerns can be equally gritty. The Roma in general are, in their own eyes, a peo-ple under God’s curse. Back in Romania, slave auctions took place in the courtyards of Orthodox churches. There, under God’s gaze, they were bartered like cows and horses, to be treated no better and maybe worse. They have a “national” anthem that includes these lines: God has cursed us, We do not deserve to be cursed. We stole only one nail from the cross. God, don’t curse us any-more. The reference to the nail comes from a legend that puts a gypsy on Cal-vary. As for theft, well, if a gypsy is pre-sent . . .

The REC outreach features a “Una Club” for children, the acronym emphasizing themes of unity and togetherness in a place of physical safety and emotional security. Each Sun-day, all the people chant: God is for us, not against us. Some local non-Roma, staunch Calvinists, re-sponded sternly. They complained that such teaching crushes the TULIP, and especially its first petal, total de-pravity. But, well, at Holy Trinity Church they’re still

chanting. Ω

The cover of the Gospel of Mark in the Bayash language (left). Pages with illustrations that aid in teaching both Scripture and literacy.

Bayash children

in the house

across the street

from the

Kapelna church.

Major benefici-

aries of both

books and Holy

Trinity’s new

bathroom