Leaving for Poland
Sunday the 23th of March

Tomorrow right after the Sunday meeting Kasia and me are leaving for Poland and will be away for a little over one week. Even though most of our Poland trips are firstly family trips, we always end up doing a lot of mission work.

Euromission Poland is very active both with internal gatherings, evangelism and bible school. Poland is also a country with desperately needs the true Gospel. The country is filled with churches, crosses and statues of Mary and other saints, but the religion is doing a better job blinding people than to open their eyes.

It is sad to see how many of the European countries have church buildings in every town, and in most Catholic countries people even go the churches. But they don’t hear the Gospel and they don’t learn to know the God of the Bible.

The good news is of course that the number of active Christians is growing rapidly and for those who would like to do mission there, the opportunities are many.

Yet another week and the Kingdom of God is going forward here in Nakskov. Last Sunday for the first time we split the Sunday service, so that the children went upstairs during the preaching. We had been talking about Kristoffer having Sunday school upstairs, but we had not planned it for this Sunday. However, suddenly there were just so many children, and actually without us planning it, they just went up during the worship, right before the preaching.

One thing I have learned during my years here in Nakskov is that systems don’t work. You can have the perfect church planting system, but the problem is that people are alive and they tend to have a will of their own …sometimes I wonder why God created man with a free will :-)

I have been more and more realizing that church actually is organic and if you try to make it static you’ll kill it. When you look at nature you see that God doesn’t like static things. There are not two leaves or trees that are the same – they are all original. The same goes for people; even twins are not completely the same. It is in the nature of God to make things original.

I believe that His nature should also be reflected in the church. There should not be two churches that are the same, because the church is the people and the people are not the same.

Does that mean that we should have no structure at all? No, I do believe that we need some guidelines, but they are not supposed to be external things. A human being has a skeleton, but it is an internal one. The internal skeleton does not hinder the external growth, but it supports it.

On the other hand you have animals like crabs. They have an external skeleton, which works more as protection from the outside world. Even though crabs grow, the external skeleton makes it slow, and with a hard hand it controls the growth.

The church consists of people and not crabs. We have an inner skeleton that supports our body, and not an external skeleton that protects us from the outside world.

Well, that was just some short thoughts on church planting.
God Bless and enjoy Easter!

- Ronald :-)

Another week has past and we’re one week closer to “the return of the king”. We don’t know when, but we know that we are closer now then ever before.

Last week we arranged a prayer night together with another new started church. Well, it’s actually more a prayer evening. We have been having it all night earlier, but for the sake of trying to get more people to join, we have started to have it from 18:00 to 00:00

Today we had a good meeting, with 13 people attending and I was preaching about reaching for God’s best and not settle for the second best. Often we get so comfortable in our Christian walk that we don’t allow God to stretch us any more. God has much more for us, if we are willing to step out of the comfort zone.

I will be writing more about mission in Denmark later, so stay in tune!

God Bless!
- Ronald Gabrielsen

Tomorrow Kasia is going to preach on the Sunday meeting, and I believe that will be great. The last month the average attendance of people on the Sunday meeting have been between 10 – 15. I can see from the statistic from last year, that in February the attendance also dropped in February, but we are more people this year, then last year in February. I have been very busy with work the last months and I actually think that I need to re-focus my time. After all we are here in Nakskov to build a church and not to run a company. But the work these months have been a blessing, because we have needed the money. God always provides …sometimes Gods provision just show up in work cloths.

Well, I think this is all for today,
God Bless you and live with passion!!
- Ronald Gabrielsen :-)