Missions Textbook 13
Plant Another Austrian Church

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

Rejoicing Again!

In the previous letter, you probably noticed that a church had been planted in St. Pölten – probably in early autumn, and there was no fanfare at all. I’m sure we must have been thrilled, but there was no time to stop and celebrate, much less, to write about it.

Walter and Floyd found a large restaurant willing to rent us a small meeting room with chairs. Because the restaurant was closed Sunday mornings, I was able to take the children to another part of the restaurant for Sunday School. Walter’s teenage daughter helped me and taught some of the time so I could hear a sermon.

After less than a year, we had outgrown the room, and the owner was tired of getting up early to let us into his building. He gave a set of keys to Walter and said we could use any part of the place we wanted. There was a large banquet hall. It was big and airy and had lots of chairs, so we didn’t have to buy anything. The downside was that there were always parties with lots of alcohol consumption on Saturday night, and to keep our costs down, we agreed to do the cleaning Sunday morning before the service. It was not pretty. Thankful for a place to meet, we still began to pray for a more permanent home for our church body.

Oh, No, Don’t Tell Scott We’re Moving Again!

Erich and Michael were rarely seeing their father. We would get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and go to school. Some days, Floyd would drive, but often he hadn’t gotten home until midnight or even after, and we would let him sleep. So the boys would take the train to school, and I would go with them, if it was a day that I was teaching.

When they got home from school, it was usually 4 or 4:30, and sometimes Floyd was already gone because the Bible study was a two-hour drive away, and began at 6. The boys would immediately start on homework, we would eat supper, the boys would finish their homework, and then go to bed. The schedule for everyone was grueling. Floyd was having a blast, but the rest of us missed him, and we felt that our lives were less important and tediously boring.

Floyd had set up regular “dates” with each boy every other week. They would go to a pastry shop and have delicious pastries and hot cocoa, and they would talk about anything they wanted to talk about. That was good, but Floyd sensed that it was not enough. Erich, particularly, was struggling, and one day Floyd issued a command.

“When you get home from school, I don’t want you to do your homework for the first hour.”

Erich was surprised. “Why?”

“I want you to play your guitar for that hour every day.”

In disbelief and relief, Erich said, “Really? Can I?”

And he did. It relieved a lot of the tension he was having and also gave him the sense that Floyd was really aware of the fact that our whole situation was not ideal.

Erich was our child who was always happiest where he was. The grass was never greener somewhere else, and if he never moved again, it would be too soon. When Erich came to us one day and said, “I think we ought to move closer to St. Pölten,” we listened; it was as if God had spoken. We let everyone we knew know that we wanted to move, but we didn’t have time to look for ourselves. A German couple, who was working with the German equivalent of Child Evangelism Fellowship, was moving to Bulgaria. Someone we knew heard that their house would be available. We all piled into the car and went to see it. It was as nice as our apartment and cost a third less because it was so far from Vienna. It had a big yard, an apple tree, a wine cellar, and was located in a small village on a main train line. The boys would be able to take the train to school, although their tickets probably made up for the money saved on the rent. We took it. It had a normal hot water heater, but I would once again be building a fire all winter long to heat the house. Fortunately, this heating system was efficient and safe and relatively easy to use, and we had learned to spend the money on compressed wood chip logs rather than taking the time to chop and stack wood.

It was the first time since arriving in Austria that we had to furnish our kitchen, but even that was fun. We had cut off 60 miles from Floyd’s daily commute to Bible studies. We moved in the middle of the spring semester, and Scott (Sue’s son and missionary with Leslie south of Vienna) and Roger (my brother-in-law), and their friends came to help with their trusty truck. Scott and Floyd, the landlord and his father renovated the upstairs space so Erich could have his own bedroom.

Even that was an evangelism opportunity. The father noted, “I haven’t heard you swear when you smash your fingers.”

Scott said, “We don’t know any swear words in German.”

He disagreed. “I know English swear words and I haven’t heard any of those either.”

Floyd and Scott used that opportunity (and the long hours of work) to slowly and with humor present the Gospel to our landlord. Over lunch, they had a good conversation, although we never convinced him and his wife to come to a Bible study.

By the end of the semester, Erich had decided that he preferred to be involved in some of the Bible studies and leading youth group rather than commuting to Vienna every day. This meant that he would do his senior year at home by correspondence. Michael wanted to continue at the school even though the commute was much longer, and we agreed as long as his grades did not suffer.

War in Yugoslavia

For the ten years since the death of Tito, Yugoslavia had managed to stay together by the untiring work of people in the United Nations working with interim leaders. Yugoslavia was, however, merely a collection of very diverse people. The Slovenians and Croatians were at least nominally Roman Catholic – labeled Christian. The Serbs were the most communist, claiming atheism, and scorning superstitious religions. The Bosnians were, for the most part, Muslim, and the closer one moved toward Greece, the more Greek Orthodoxy was practiced. And all of this in an area the size of Wyoming. Explosion was inevitable.

The Yugoslavian Wars lasted from 1991-2001. Slovenia broke away relatively peacefully, but when Croatia wanted to be free, the war really began. Every kind of prejudice drove the armies, and people killed neighbors with whom they had shopped the week before. Homes and villages were destroyed, and people were often buried in mass graves. Serbian airplanes, carrying bombs, sometimes strayed into Austrian airspace above Graz.

Austria is a very compassionate nation, and, as I mentioned once before, they had been taking in war refugees from various wars since 1956. Now they were taking in Croatians and Slovenians, and eventually Bosnians. On television, certain programs would have fundraisers to collect money and clothing and food to be sent to refugee camps as the Croatians fled to Slovenia and then the Bosnians fled to Croatia. It was stunning how much money was raised from the Austrians.

We also heard of many children who had been orphaned by the war, and after talking to Erich and Michael, we decided to look into adopting a couple of children. Scott and Leslie had adopted a baby girl from an orphanage in Romania a few years earlier, and we thought we could learn from them what we would need to do. Someone – I don’t remember who – found a Croatian pastor who was willing to make the inquiries for us. We learned from the U.S. Consulate that we had to have a paper from the Croatian government confirming that the parents were dead or that the parent or parents wanted to give up the children so they would not die in a war. Also, if we adopted the children and stayed in Austria for two years, we would not have to go through all the usual paperwork that is required if you live in the States. The children would receive a U.S. passport and that would be it.

We recognized that the children would probably be traumatized by the war and that I would have to teach them English. With all that we were doing, it still seemed a humane thing to do, and as we talked and prayed about it, it became something we wanted very much. Besides, I loved being a mother, and my boys were growing up so fast!

Then the Croatian pastor got back to us. Yes, there were many orphans, but the Croatian government was not willing to let them be adopted by foreigners. They were quite capable of finding Croatian homes and caring for their own children, thank you very much. So, the door to that idea closed, and, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, we didn’t try to open it again.

Another Quick Trip to the States

Floyd wrote:

In September I spent a week in New Jersey as one of the missionary speakers at the first “Missionary Orientation Program” (MOP) sponsored by Christian Missions in Many Lands and their Canadian partner, Missionary Service Committee. There were 22 participants, fifteen of them on the way to the mission field. The seminars were quite intensive and some were better than the courses I had in Bible college and seminary. [Note: This program continues to this day. Prospective missionaries attend to acquire a realistic picture of what it is to “be” a missionary. The organizers also encourage church leaders to come to learn what life is like for their missionaries and how they can better serve them.]

Since I returned to Austria, nine evangelistic Bible studies every two weeks have started up again. We think that three couples and one man and his sister accepted the Lord over the summer! If all are believers, we’ll have 14 men at our next men’s meeting and over 20 kids in Sunday School! We expect a couple more conversions before Christmas. We’d like to hold our first baptism in November, although we must find a place. My suggestion that we cut a hole in the ice was met with some resistance!

Kirstin, who is 14, wrote a report for a literature class on the meaning of life. She included the Gospel in her report and asked to read it to the class. Her teacher was a bit flustered and just said that it was good to believe in something. Kirstin is in a girls’ boarding school. She says that all the girls in her class get drunk every weekend and only think about boys. Taking a stand for Christ early will save her a lot of problems in the future. The Lord is still moving in the hearts of Austrians.

Readjusting Schooling – Again

I wrote to a friend:

We are enjoying the correspondence schooling. I love being the one to participate in my children’s learning. I actually do very little, though, because Erich is very disciplined and some of his material (Consumer Education and Pre-calculus) is beyond me.

Initially, we decided to let Michael continue at VCS, because at least he was getting the subjects that he needed. However, the schedule was so grueling and impersonal that his grades began to suffer. When I asked if he could drop the art elective and take a second study hall, so that he’d have a study hall every day, that was vetoed. The poor guy got up at 6 a.m., left the house at 7, rode the train for 1 hour and 40 minutes, was 10 minutes late for the first hour geometry class, stayed in school until 4:15, caught the hourly train at 5pm, and was home by 6pm. He would eat supper and study until 9, at which time, I sent him to bed, whether homework was finished or not – because he was always so tired. There was no time for sports, music lessons (or practice!), visiting his friends in our little church, or for any fun. It was no life for a 15-year-old, and we never saw him.

The three of us were enjoying having Erich home, and we all felt badly, sending Michael off into the horrible world every morning, while Erich learned in peace. When Michael’s first quarter grades came back all C’s, we pulled him out.

Having both boys home all day has changed our lifestyle quite a bit. It’s more work just having them around all day, every day. Michael does go into Vienna for piano lessons and Erich plays basketball every other Wednesday evening with other English-speakers in Vienna. They both play in a band – Erich, guitar and Michael, percussion – which performs at their old school now and then. They are trying to keep up some of the friendships from school, but it’s difficult. They are more involved in the youth group in the church in St. Pölten.

And even having “Christian” friends didn’t make things easier. Erich can remember arriving at a get-together at a friend’s home and hearing one of the guys groan: “Oh, no, Erich’s here. We won’t be able to watch the movie we were planning to watch.”

We were proud of the boys that they had that reputation. We had made a deal with them that none of us would watch any R-rated movies, and they seemed to stick with it.

One of the things they did for fun with their friends – and a couple high school teachers – was to play tag in Vienna. There is a game called “Scotland Yard,” where the detectives chase the criminal all over London. Well, they figured out how to play an enormous game of tag throughout the streets and alleys of Vienna. I don’t know the details, but they really had a blast, chasing and surprising one another.

Christmas 1992

In all nine evangelistic Bible studies, Floyd and Walter were teaching the Christmas story. It’s mind-boggling how many misconceptions have been woven into the fabric of the story. Ask yourself: How many wise men were there? Did Mary really ride a donkey? What is a manger? What did the stable smell like?

The two major religions in Austria offered religion classes to all the children in the school. In Zwettl, the Catholic religion teacher came to the Bible study to check it out and was surprised by what he discovered. He said, “I never knew that Mary had more children after Jesus was born!” (Check Matthew 1:25, if you are uncertain.) He was visibly shaken.

Floyd told him, “Well, don’t get mad at me; I didn’t write the Bible.”

He laughed, and then said, “I see it’s about time that I started reading the Bible seriously. Maybe after the holidays we could get together, and you could help me get started?”

Floyd couldn’t say no. But we hoped he was serious. A religion teacher who has never read the Bible!

The wife of one of the policemen in St. Pölten told Floyd, “Yes, I’m going to accept the Lord. I was just afraid that I would fall away later, but after hearing the special speaker and Floyd explain the gospel to me again, it’s what I’ve always been looking for.” The whole family came to church that Sunday.

We had already had one baptism, and it was now time for a second one. We had found an indoor swimming pool that was closed on Sunday, and we were allowed to use their facility. Nine more people wanted to be baptized!

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

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