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The team from Sloan Street Presbyterian Church who spent
eleven days in July on a Missionary Trip to Romania. L to R:
(back row) Darren Aitcheson, Julia Nixon, Eileen McKillop,
Nicola Aitcheson, Alan Templeton, Gareth Wilson and Gareth
Baxter. (front row) Kathryn Martin, Judith Conroy and Judith
Cunningham. Missing from the photo - David Morrison.
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The Rev.
John Keefe Minister of Sloan Street Presbyterian Church
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A team from Sloan Street Presbyterian Church spent from
Friday 1st to Tuesday 12 July 2005 on a Missionary Trip to
Romania.
Led by Darren Aitcheson, the team consisted of: Nicola
Aitcheson, Alan Templeton, Eileen McKillop, Judith Cunningham,
Gareth Baxter, Judith Conroy, Julia Nixon, David Morrison,
Kathryn Martin and Gareth Wilson.
They assisted PCI missionaries
Csaba and Ilona Veres (originally from Sloan Street) with their
work with underprivileged children from the city of Cluj-Napoca
in Transylvania.
The team spent the first two days in the city of Cluj meeting
the various staff that work with the children in the Aksza
Mission for Street Children and working alongside a team from
the PCI Youth Board.
This gave them time to prepare for their
missionary work and allowed them to get acclimatised to the
Romanian way of life.
The next five days were spent in the small town of Algyogy,
at the foot of the Apuseni Mountains, running a Bible Camp for
40 children, including those from the Aksza Mission.
All of the
children who attended the camp had various issues in their home
lives; some had been abandoned by their parents and others had
suffered physical abuse, etc.
As part of the camp, they ran a
Day Club based on the parables of Jesus, played sports and
games, organised craft activities and helped the children to
improve their English.
Darren said the activity, which provided most spiritual blessing for the
team was the "coffee bar" which was organised by the PCI Team.
Each evening they gave their testimony and a short talk and
three young Romanians and one member of the Northern Ireland
teams became Christians as a result of this.
The week was extremely rewarding for both the team members
and for the young people who attended the camp.
However, Darren also explained
many problems still remain in Romania.
"There is an acute
shortage of funds to pay the salaries of those who are trying to
help the children and there is also a shortage of Christian
literature in Romanian and Hungarian to help the young people
who had became Christians during the week to grow in their
faith,". he added.
It is the team�s hope and prayer that God will touch the
hearts of many in Lisburn to help Romanian people, as they are
wonderfully kind and welcoming, and have suffered too much for
too long.
This was the third year that a team from Sloan Street
Presbyterian Church had gone to Romania to help with missionary
work.
During a service on Sunday 16th July 2005, the minister,
the Rev John Keefe, whose daughter Naomi is a missionary in
Brazil, gave thanks for the safe return of the team, for the way
in which God had used them to be a blessing to others and how in
the process they also had 'been blessed'.
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