International English Speaking Church Thessaloniki Greece

Billy Ray

Billy Ray

1935-2012

“Billy Ray” was one of Marion Baldwin’s favorite nicknames for William Ray Baldwin, who went to heaven on June 22nd, 2012, just a couple hours ago as I write this. I’m always kind of jealous when someone goes to heaven, but I would be lying to you if I said that this one doesn’t hurt a bit. Bill was 77, young by Greek standards. He deserved another decade, in my humble opinion, but I’m betting were he offered another ten years, given where he is now,  he would refuse them without a second thought.

God  had called me to Greece within months of my conversion at the age of 30, in 1984. Through various sources I’d learned about the serious spiritual needs of Greece, and, having made myself available to the Lord for Him to do with me what He willed, believed He wanted me there. Three different churches later, I found one that expressed at least a minimum interest in supporting God’s calling on my life. That third church, West Chicago Bible, in my home town, had one of the deepest commitments to World Missions of any small church I’ve ever attended or visited.

I had absolutely no idea whom I might be able to talk to about the Greek work, or how to go about fulfilling that calling. Greece had, and still has, very few American workers. For many reasons, despite her nearly perfect climate, Greece is an implacably hostile place for any non- Eastern Orthodox Christian worker or organization to take root and flourish.  In more than 23 years I’ve probably seen upwards of a hundred people come here with every good intention to stay, only to leave after a term or two. Or three.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the West Chicago Bible Church was also the home church of one of the few American cross-cultural workers in Greece, Bill Baldwin. Bill and his wife, Marion, had been in Greece since 1966. In the spring of 1987, I found out that Bill and Marion were coming to West Chicago. They would be staying in a guest house owned by the church. I saw Bill speak at the Sunday service. The text was Romans 12:1.

Bill was a born preacher, and as he explained in this particular message, God was asking believers, via the Apostle Paul, to “please” (Greek “παρακαλω”) dedicate their lives to Him because it was only logical. “Can you imagine,” Bill said,” God Almighty saying to us, ‘please?’” Then with tears in his eyes, he said, “If I were Him, I wouldn’t say ‘please.’ I would say GO!” It was one of the best messages I’d heard in my relatively young Christian life.  I got excited. I wanted to jump up and shout “YES! YES! THAT’S the way we need to look at God! Wake up, everybody! Dedicate your lives to Christ! Give Him EVERYTHING! Go to the North Pole if that’s where He wants you! No holding back! No holding back!”

After the service, I was worked up. There were several people in line ahead of me waiting to share a few words with Bill. I got  tired waiting for my turn to talk to him. I jumped the line and interrupted someone who was, in my opinion, probably not saying much of anything important to him. Billy Ray turned and said to me sharply, “Wait a minute!” He was clearly irritated. It was one of the very few times I’ve seen him irritated. When it was finally my turn,  I told him that God was calling me to Greece and I asked to meet with him. He agreed to see me the next afternoon.

And so the next day I got home from a hard day of laying cement blocks, took a shower, smoked a cigarette, popped a couple sticks of Wrigley’s Spearmint in my mouth, and walked down the hill from my rented room in a house on Fairview Avenue to the WCBC guest  house where Bill and Marion were staying. I remember  hoping that they would not smell the tobacco on my breath.  (I was cutting down- I’d actually quit for  the year I was a student at Moody Bible Institute because of their no smoking policy, but had backslid and was smoking  5 a day at the time. Within a month I would smoke my last fag.) Hey, I was still a young Christian. What was the Mark Twain quote? “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

If I had known Bill better, I would have had nothing to fear. He was one of the least judgmental people I would ever meet. He sat there quietly as I told him my story: I was the grandson of a Greek immigrant. I was saved three years ago. I believed God was calling me to Greece. I was 33 years old. I’d done a year of training at the Moody Bible Institute. I’d dropped out one year before in order to pay a $10,000 debt I’d incurred before getting saved. Nearly a year later, I still owed 70% of that debt.

I knew that Bill had founded the Greek Bible Institute. That it was a Moody-Dallas Seminary type school theologically (that is, a Dispensationalist, 4-point Calvinist, inerrancy of the scriptures in the original autographs kind of place). I wasn’t asking him for any favors. I was picking his brains, trying to see what he might have to say to me. I ended up getting much more than I had bargained for. Bill Baldwin listened very attentively, and didn’t interrupt.

When I finished, he asked me if I spoke Greek. “No,” I said. He thought some more. Then he blew out some air. “Well,” he said, “The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn a foreign language. And Greek is no walk in the park. The only thing I can think of is for you to get your debt paid off and come to Greece. You can stay at the Bible school, study Greek for a year or so, and then pick up your Bible education where you left off. It’ll be pretty intense, but if you don’t blow a gasket you’ll do fine.”

Whether I blew a gasket or not is debatable, but I must say that Bill’s proposal, in my view, was nothing less than visionary. Here I’d been hoping to get out of debt in another year or two, finish up my last two years at Moody, raise support, and get to Greece, oh, somewhere just on the south side of 40 years of age. Bill explained that in his opinion this was not workable for one simple reason: language. My most important tool in Greece, he said, would be the language.

So to Billy Ray Baldwin, the answer was simple. What he didn’t tell me at the time was that he threw that idea out as sort of a lifeline, because with my level of debt, and my age, he thought it unlikely I’d ever make it to Greece. But what he suggested had a wonderful effect on me: it focused my energies and efforts to the degree that I had my debts paid off within a year and a half, and was ready to come by the winter of 1988.

Bill Baldwin was from St. Louis. God in his kind fashion as my spiritual Father has provided three exceptional mentors in my Christian life. Bill was the second of these three men. The first was Phil King, the man who discipled me for three years after my conversion. Phil was also from St. Louis. Funny that both Phil King and Bill Baldwin were from St. Louis. Phil and Bill. There’s a story in there somewhere. The third was Korky Davey. Korky’s from Bristol, England, which is a long way from St. Louis.

Bill remotely resembled Telly Savalas, but had not a drop of Greek blood. He had the slope-shouldered, powerful build of a wrestler or pole vaulter. He was both, in his youth. In high school he qualified for the state wrestling meet in Columbia, Missouri. He’d never been away from home by himself before, and he and some of his teamates spent most of the night outside their hotel, “goofing off,” as he told me. He lost his first match the next day because of lack of sleep.

His family moved to Houston a little later. Bill got saved, did a year at Moody, and got his seminary degree at Dallas. He used to ride home on weekends with Hal Lindsey, who also lived in Houston. During his time in Dallas, Bill met Bob Evans, founder of the Greater Europe Mission, whose goal was to found Bible Schools throughout Europe and train nationals to serve their own people.

Bill got a bug in his ear  about going to Greece and starting a school. And that’s where, after a number of twists and turns, including a year as the youth pastor at West Chicago Bible Church, and a quick marriage to Marion, whom he met in Detroit for  Greater Europe Mission’s training school, he ended up in 1966. After a long period (too long, Bill would say) of language study and building friendships in the tiny Greek Evangelical community, Bill opened his school in 1973 in downtown Athens.

By the time I showed up in January, 1989, the school had moved to the far northern suburb of Kastri, into a former Swiss orphanage. It had 25 live-in students and a half dozen full-time staff. I always thought that school was a remarkable testament to Bill’s single-mindedness.

John MacArthur said that his father told him that if you do just one thing, and do it well, you’re way ahead of most people. MacArthur used to go on the mission field and ask people whom his church supported what they did- ‘Oh, a little of this, a little of that, a little of the other,’ they would reply, and Macarthur would realize that in the final analysis they weren’t doing much of anything. Bill Baldwin wasn’t like that. He did one thing-theology- and he did it well. He harnessed his love of theology with an intense desire to teach it in a school he wanted to found in Greece, and that became the engine that drove his entire life. Why Greece?  He didn’t exactly know. He’d befriended a young Greek student in seminary, and somehow felt himself drawn to that country.

Bill was first, last and always a theologian. The attributes of God, and how they manifest themselves in this universe He has created, were his greatest passion. He lamented the ascendancy of science over theology, and theology’s slippage in the esteem of modern man. He was one of those rare people who considered theology to still be the “queen of the sciences,” and he used that phrase often in conversation. Perhaps that was the attraction Greece had for him.

After all, it was the Greek language that God used to explain Himself to the world in the greatest theological work in history, the New Testament. Just days after I came to Greece, Bill and Marion were driving me to their home north of Athens. I picked up Bill’s worn Greek New Testament. “What translation is this?” I asked as I opened it up, flipped through the pages, and tried to make sense of the Greek alphabet. “That’s not a translation,” Bill said. “That’s it.”

It struck me that the words in the book I was holding were, once upon a time, directly copied by faithful scribes before Johann Gutenberg came along, from original autographs breathed into being by the Holy Spirit Himself, and written down by men who had, with one exception, been eyewitness of the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. Bill thought it was the funniest thing in the world that there were, in Greece, King James Only church planters. The reason is obvious.

Bill did not read fiction. He read a lot, mind you. But I’d never seen him with other than theological and works of practical Christian living in his hands. He did keep up with the latest news in this turbulent land, news broadcasts full of obscure references to alphabet soup government ministries, and its constant, dreary parade of mostly corrupt, incompetent and forked-tongue politicians. Bill could not discuss literature or cinema with you, or the arts. He didn’t know who Frank Lloyd Wright was. Neither did he care. I suspect he was the last person on the face of the earth to never write an email. He couldn’t name the best-loved actors in Greek film comedy. He only knew that they were side-splittingly funny- “It’s like Greece has about 10 Jerry Lewises,” he used to say. Bill did not fish. He did not ski. He was no renaissance man. He did one thing, and he did it well.

Bill was a consummately logical person. If someone was depressed, he sincerely could not understand why that person could not just ‘snap out of it.’ He was emotional, himself- he felt things deeply, and he had rare passion and drive- but he was just blessed with a happy personality. He was a very unusual person in that, although he was highly intelligent, he was also a fairly simple human being. Most highly intelligent people are also rather complex, and sometimes hard to figure out. With Billy Ray Baldwin, the old saw applied: what you saw was what you got. He never kept you guessing.

He had a candor which was rare in this country, where personal information is closely guarded because knowledge is power, and you never know how a confidence you share with a friend can come back to haunt you when that friend ceases to be so close to you.  The result of this is that ministry in Greece is often a case of knowing a lot of people superficially and no one deeply.

Bill shared with me, as I shared with him, more than a few personal confidences the first years I was in Greece. Bill and Marion shepherded me through one of the most difficult periods in my life as I tried to learn the language and struggled with the culture, which is vastly different from my own. For that I owe them a great deal. The last time I saw Bill, in February, 2009, it was to specifically thank him and Marion for all of their help. Bill knew what I was going through during my first years here, getting acclimated in the culture, and he felt deeply for me the ten years I spent in Greece as a single person. He was overjoyed the day I brought Zoe to his house to meet him and Marion, his face radiant, and his lips full of congratulations.

Bill’s narrow focus allowed him to accomplish something that perhaps no one else ever could: the founding of an institution that has become the hub of almost all Evangelical activity in this country. Everybody who is anybody in the Greek born-again community has had some dealings with the Greek Bible college, whether as a student, or an instructor, or  someone doing research in its library, the largest of its kind in Greece, or as someone just passing through to see what is going on there. It really is hard to overstate this accomplishment. Bill was humble, and flexible. He could think on his feet, and it is a minor miracle that he was able to establish a school of this type under the cultural conditions which exist here.

Bill was an introvert by nature-  he was gracious and polite to everyone, but, given his druthers, he’d be just as happy sitting in his easy chair reading a commentary by a contemporary theologian, books he heavily underlined in pencil and filled the margins with observations. “I like to interact with the books I read,” he said.

As befits a born athlete, he was a fitness freak. He jogged regularly, and loved to spend hours working in his yard. When I first met him he had a dark tan which I figured he’d gotten lounging around on a Greek beach somewhere. That’s the last thing he’d do. His tan came from hours out in the sun working in his yard. He would go to the sea to swim, and then he’d get out of the water, dry off, and leave as often as not. “What are you going to think about while you’re laying around on the beach looking at a bunch of near-naked women?” he told me once.

He loved his work. He hated furloughs- he felt he had so little do when he was in the US, and there was so much to do in Greece . He had the sunny disposition of a man who knew he was making a difference. Who knew he was right in the center of God’s will for his life. He never expressed any doubt in that area. More than once he said that the life of a missionary was the best possible life imaginable. Although, like everyone, I’m sure he had bad days, I’ve never seen him depressed, moody, or irrationally angry.

Billy Ray Baldwin suffered a massive stroke on May 17th, and spent the last month of his life on life support. It distressed me no end to read about him via Marion’s Face Book page, being in an induced coma, knowing that he never wanted that sort of thing for himself. But he had to obey Greek law, which rejects Living Wills (which he and Marion had both signed, for just such an eventuality) and their desire to not prolong a life through artificial support. He never woke up.

He spent the last month of his life in sort of a twilight world, not dead, certainly, but not really alive, either. I hated it that Marion, their kids, and their grandchildren had to watch him waste away, one day at a time, growing thinner each time they visited him in the hospital.  In such cases it is helpful to do what psychology calls ‘reframing:’ You step back and look at the total picture. Bill Baldwin was alive for 936 months. For almost all of those months he enjoyed fairly good health. It was only the last month that was really bad. That, I suppose, is a pretty good deal overall.

Here’s my takeaway for Billy Ray Baldwin: he was one of the very few men  whom I knew personally and whom I could comfortably characterize as ‘great.’ He was a model for world missions. He and Marion have given this country everything- including their children, all of whom have married Greeks. I loved being around him, and I missed him a great deal after I moved away from Athens in 1999 to Thessaloniki.

My life, had I never met him, would have been much poorer, and much more different. I thank God for his friendship, and can’t wait to see him in heaven. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve shed more than a few tears for this man during the last month. That’s only natural, because I loved him and respected him. God bless Bill Baldwin, and his Marion, and their children, their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren.

Dan Truitt

June 22, 2012

May, 2012

Extremists

A few days ago I went into a local shop to pick up a pair of trousers a seamstress had taken in for me. She was in a heated discussion with a couple young communists, a man and woman in their early 20’s, their arms full of literature and posters.

 Greece will vote for a new prime minister within the week. The communists are all excited because they see in this current crisis a chance to grab some real power. The young couple tried to give me some of their literature. “No thanks,” I said. “I’m an American. Do you know how many years we spent fighting communism?” “Ah, you fought a dirty war,” the guy said. “How many people has Stalin killed?” I asked. “How many people has capitalism killed?” he said. “I’m amazed you two believe in this stuff,” “I said. “You seem like smart people. You know, in 20 years you’re going to wake up and say, ‘Man, was I ever stupid!’ My hope is that you find God and His love. He does exist, and He does love you.” “Man is God,” he said. Some people need to get in the last word. I had to go, so that’s what I did. (Quick update- May 9. My wife and I stopped by the same shop yesterday. The seamstress laughed when I asked her how much longer after I left were the communists in her shop. “Oh, after you started talking about God they left right after you did,” she said.

Aleka Paparigou, the head of Greece’s communist party, who, with her under 5-foot stature and her constant frowning aspect strangely resembles a beardless Grumpy the dwarf, sends her kids to America, not Cuba, or China, to be educated. Having said all that, however, I kind of like the young communists in Greece: at least they care about improving their country, even though they want to do it with an ideology that is provably bankrupt.

This is the hour of the extremists: At the other end of the political spectrum we have the “Xrysi Avgi,” the Golden Dawn, a quasi-fascist group who have adopted a swastika-like emblem. They dress in black shirts (hey, how original is that?). They like to go around and beat up Pakistani refugees in the Athens city center or throw Africans in the water along Thessaloniki’s seafront promenade.  Their leader was elected to the Athens city council and lost no time greeting his fellow council members with a Nazi salute. “If you see some Afghan sitting on your doorstep,” they say, “don’t call the police. Call us.” These guys are set to win seats in the Greek parliament for the first time in their history.

This place needs prayer. What would be best at this point is a sane governing majority. All things being equal, the best hope under the circumstances is New Democracy’s Antonis Samaras, a former college roommate of a previous PM, George Papandreou. George’s father, Andreas, and his socialist party, PASOK, are largely responsible for the mess Greece is in now. Greece could do a lot worse than an intelligent, center-right guy like Samaras. Think of him as the Greek Mitt Romney. The real problem is the likelihood that the next government in Greece’s parliamentary system will be weak, because of all these other knuckleheads like the communists and Xrysi Avgi who want a seat at the table.

(Update: we now know that Greece failed to form a government after the sound rejection of the 2 ruling parties. What will likely happen is the election of a weak government later this month, and then the country going to the powers that be in the EU, hat in hand, and ask for a further lessening of the austerity measures. The man of the hour is Alexis Tsispras, head of SYRIZA- the Coalition for the Radical Left. This guy’s a real stinker. He’s charismatic, with not plan A for running the country. You don’t even have to understand Greek to see, when he speaks, an empty suit. Hmmmm. Sounds like someone I know…)

Bye-bye Bettsy

I took my friend David Betts to the airport at the end of April, after a 6-week stay. David is 78, and not quite the guy he used to be. He kept breaking things, like our microwave, an electronic water kettle, a hot water switch, a portable cooler, our front door lock (I was able to fix that), and other sundry items. But having said that, his visit was well worth it. It took him some time to get going, but he gave out over a thousand pieces of literature. Our church is in the burgeoning Valaritou night club district of Thessaloniki see thisNew York Times article.

David got into the habit of going out after midnight from his room at the church and hitting these little hole in the wall night spots and giving out tracts. The young men and women there seemed to like him. He was something different and exotic, a white-bearded, English, Father Christmas  figure with an innocent, somewhat befuddled demeanor.

These kids really know how to party: I rode my bike to church around 7:30 AM last Sunday and some of the night clubs were still banging out loud music, with young people stumbling into the street, stunned by the bright early morning sun. I always have to navigate around the broken glass in the narrow, twisting streets in the area. Next Sunday if I leave that early I’ll bring some literature, tell them to put it in their pockets, and read it when they wake up that afternoon.

We also had a visitor from Hungary during the month of April. Krisztián Czinki came down here with his family to escape pollen season in Budapest; he very kindly went out with us for some open air meetings and took a service for us. He was a great guy, and we hope to see him next year during pollen season.

Open Airs

We’ve started doing open airs. I’m in touch with a couple other local churches and the plan is for us to go out as a team on a weekly basis. I tried, for the first time in my 23 years in Greece, and open air in English, at a platia frequented by twenty-somethings just to see what would happen. We didn’t attract much of a crowd. The picture is the angle we use in open air work when we don’t have much of a crowd:

We’ll go back to doing the messages in Greek next time.

 

Survival Mode

I don’t know, to be honest, how long our little church will survive. We’ve just paid a $1300 electric bill, a large portion of which came out of our pockets. The plan for now is to keep plugging. I committed myself to this ministry for one year, and that anniversary comes up in June. At that point we will evaluate our situation and see how best to move forward. Ii think we can keep going till the end of the year at least. We’ll be talking to the landlady about an adjustment in rent. Rents have fallen 25-30% here in the last couple years. I still see the church as a wonderful vehicle for ministry, and especially for outreach in this needy city. On the other hand, we are finding it impossible to support ourselves. We could squeak by if everyone tithed- gave 10%. But I hate asking for  money all the time. One reason I stayed away from Christianity for so long was because of all the idiots I saw on TV fleecing people in the name of God.

A Brief Cultural Note That is Totally Unrelated to Christianity

You don’t have to read this if you don’t like the intrusion of secular insight into a prayer letter. I’ve been reading Alfred Hitchcock’s biography and am struck, after reading bios of Cary Grant and John Wayne, how stupid actors- even great actors like Wayne and Grant- are compared to directors like Hitchcock. His whole approach- his inventive camera angles, imaginative lighting, his use of music to drive tension, his linking of images together in film, as he has stated, as a composer links notes in music, is so much richer, and so far above the interpretive act of simply memorizing and parroting someone else’s words, that the difference, in the world of cinema, is one of kind, and not degree. Actors, entertaining as they are, really are a rather dull-witted tribe.

 It shows in the shallow insights they favor the rest of us regular dolts in today’s over-politicized environment. One wishes they would just kindly…shut up and do what they do best. I suspect the price successful actors pay for their stunning good looks and a certain charisma is a low-wattage cerebral cortex.

In the meantime a fat, unattractive man like Hitchcock spends his formative years with books, in art museums, and in the analysis of storytelling technique in the theater and infant cinema instead of preening in a mirror. Hitchcock, believe it or not, grew up in a very happy London home, and his family was rather rich, owning a chain of fish and chip stores and greengrocers. He was a more or less devoted  Catholic. I’ve been watching some of his silent classics on Youtube, like The Lodger, and The Farmer’s Wife. He’s wonderful.

Back To Religious Stuff

Please pray for the church, and for the open air work. We don’t want these Chrysi Avgi guys wandering into our orbit and giving us grief. We actually got hassled by one of their members several years ago in Athens. He wore hob-nailed boots, believe it or not. But he was by himself and we were able to calm him down and talk with him.

As Always, thanks–

If you support us and would like to do so online, you can do that here.

April, 2012

Thessaloniki, Greece

April, 2012

We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

Yesterday I was talking in Church about Jacob’s ladder. How Jacob, on his way to the home of his ancestors to find a wife, stopped at the place he subsequently named Bethel, used a rock as a pillow, and had that eerie dream of a ladder extending from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending it. And then God at the head of the ladder promising the land to Jacob and his descendants forever, and promising that the Jewish people would be a blessing to all nations. Thus the fervent belief amongst the Jews that they have every right to their country, and the remarkable contributions of this tiny race to world civilization, from entertainment to medicine to technology, in addition to being the stream of humanity through which salvation to all people is offered.

“What’s most remarkable to me about this whole thing,” I said, “Is that Jacob used a rock for a pillow and actually got a decent night’s sleep.” Nobody laughed. Usually no one laughs at my jokes in church. Not because the audience is spiritually repressed,  but because, culturally, my humor often doesn’t strike the funny bone of Africans, Philipinas, Sri Lankans, Afghans, Greeks and others. I’m thinking of printing a large “LAUGH!” card and flashing it when I say something that’s supposed to be funny. But I suppose there are a number of Christians who would say that’d be going too far. This, for better or worse, is the kind of behavior one sees in an individual who didn’t come to faith until the age of 30.

At any rate Christians can sometimes be a rather dour, humorless people, which I think is a shame. Because if anybody has something to laugh about, it is those of us who have secured for ourselves, by the grace of God, a remarkable eternal destiny. To know the meaning of life is a great gift that grounds you in a fashion that easily affords having a good laugh now and then- hopefully at nobody else’s expense. Indeed, survey after survey shows that, despite the sourness of some believers, on the happiness scale, Christians consistently score higher than non-believers.  Even Woody Allen (himself a highly gifted Jew) has said that he wished he had faith, but he does not, and so he keeps cranking out movies because that’s what he does best.

Anyway, about this rock as a pillow business… Zoe told me something this morning that she said she hadn’t thought of until the message yesterday, and I haven’t thought of at all. “You know who the rock is?” she said. And I have to agree with her: the picture of Christ as a rock is all through both Testaments, from Moses’s striking of the rock in the desert to obtain water for the Israelites, to Paul’s development of that figure in 1 Corinthians 10.

This church is a funny place: I feel a great sense of financial burden for it, and for the needs of the people who attend. I constantly feel unworthy to pastor a church. I know what’s in my heart, and many times it makes me cringe. I often do not look forward to going on Sunday, many times because I really wonder if I am doing any good there.

 But at the end of every service- and there has been no exception to this- I feel that God has somehow visited us. He is knitting us together as we worship together, many in the audience banging away on tambourines or hand drums, and He is knitting us together as we sit around for up to two hours after the service eating roasted chicken and visiting each other.  We are learning about each other. We pray for each other. Yesterday after the service and meal a woman from Sri Lanka wanted to pray for salvation. I realized from talking with her that she already was a believer. What she really wanted to do was to dedicate her life to God more closely. Typical of the church membership, she is under extreme financial pressure: her husband left her and her two small children, and she has adopted two other children of a close relative who could no longer care for them. Her name is Julaman, and she needs prayer.

Sia

A couple Sundays ago we appointed the church’s first elder. Sia Kassopa Joany is a French speaker from Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta). “Burkina Faso” means “the land of upright people.” Sia is a quiet, dignified 46 year-old responsible for a wife and 6 kids in his home country, for the rent of his home in Burkina, and for the tuition for his oldest son there, who is in his twenties. Sia has been without work for months, and spends his mornings rooting around in trash bins to find things for recyclers.

Even though his English is limited, one senses his integrity and maturity immediately. The church never had elders, and I wanted to start commisioning them, and some deacons and deaconesses as well. Sia leads the growing French-speaking contingent in the church. We give him work around our house from time to time. Our hearts really hurt for him and we pray that he will find something more permanent.

 A former employer owes him several months’ back pay, but is under no legal compunction to make good on it because of Sia’s status as a refugee. Zoe called the employer up and identified herself as a lawyer. Immediately the employer said, “Oh, so he’s calling a lawyer on me, eh? Now he’ll NEVER get paid! “No, no, it’s not like that at all,” Zoe said. “This is a friendly call, and a request for you to help our friend. We’re Christians, and we will gladly pray for you if you have financial pressure in your business.” He manufactures bamboo umbrellas for beaches. He plans on gearing up for the tourist season, and has offered Sia his job back. Here’s hoping he pays what he owes- something else to pray about.

Black Folks White Folks

By the way, dealing with Africans is very different than dealing with Americans of African descent. For a white boy from suburbia, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with black people: I was the only white guy on a bricklaying crew I worked with in New Orleans for a couple years, and I lived for a time in the ghetto of the Fillmore district in San Francisco. I know how to talk to American blacks in a way that they don’t walk away from me shaking their heads, saying, under their breath, “White folks.”

What I find interesting is that slavery is always there, lurking in the background, even 150 years after its abolition. I’m reading a biography called ‘A. Lincoln,’ based on our 16th president’s correspondence, which humanizes Lincoln much as does another fine bio of his presidency, ‘A Team of Rivals.’ Because we minister to a lot of Africans, it really floors me that there was a time in our history when people took it for granted that they had the right to own another human being. And the generally lighter skin of black folks in the US is a reminder of what a lot of those owners did with their female property. A lot of people in the south think Lincoln was an oppressor who instigated an unnecessary war when slavery in the south would have died out on its own accord.

One only has to glance at some of the writings of southern politicians of the mid-19th century to understand what a load of nonsense that notion is. Many southerners fought tooth and nail not only to own human beings, but to retain the right to own human beings in the expanding west. Lincoln was absolutely right when, in his second inaugural, he equated the price in human life paid as just due for the sin of slavery. But we sinners continue to sin, sometimes until we are forced to repent by changes in law. Thus the abolition of slavery in the mid-19th century, and the overturning of Jim Crow in the mid 20th.

All of which to say is that what gets me about the current brouhaha in Florida is that it proves that, unfortunately, this whole grievance about slavery thing, and the subsequent Jim Crow era, is a scab waiting for someone like an Al Sharpton to come along and pick it. These Africans in Greece know they can’t afford to feel aggrieved. They’re just glad to escape starvation, or the persecution they faced as Christians from militant Islam, in their home countries. Sure the black man in America has been poorly used, and often continues to be. But man…sometimes you wish people like Sharpton would just shut up at least until all the facts of the case are out, examined, and someone is brought to trial and found innocent or guilty based on the evidence as best a dispassionate jury can determine it. What’s so hard about that? Thanks to idiots like Sharpton, the odds of a fair trial in this case just got pretty steep.

.

Freedom or Death

March 25th was Greece’s Independence Day. Cathy got the plum part of Mother Greece in the school play. She got to walk around on stage wearing a sash saying “ELLADA” (the ancient name Greeks have for their country) brandishing a sword , then turning to the audience and proclaiming to the Greek people after 400+ years of abuse by the occupying Ottoman Turks, “Wake up, you sleepers! And those of you who have tasted death! Rise up! Be filled with life!”

As you can see, Cathy at 11 1/2 has become a rather pretty pre-teen girl. She’s grown 8 inches in the last couple years, and is now as tall as her mom. Please pray for her. Zoe and I have been praying for whoever it is she will eventually marry, for several years now. We feel that it is never too early for this sort of thing. Whether she marries early or late (or at all), the fellow will have had his life shaped, in part, by the prayers of his future in-laws.

The rallying cry for Greece during their revolution was ‘Freedom or Death!’ Which I think Greece nicked from American Patriot Patrick Henry, but who’s arguing? That motto is built into the 9 stripes of the Greek flag, in which each stripe is representative of a syllable in the Freedom or Death saying, in Greek, which goes like this: “E-lef-ther-i-a-ee-than-a-tos.” (ελευθερία η θάνατος).

Mr. David Betts

David Betts, whom I write about from time to time, is here for an extended stay to help me with outreach. He claims that he never has seen such responsiveness to literature evangelism in Greece in the last 30-some years of doing this than he is seeing now.  He toddles around town as best his 78 year-old legs can carry him. He likes to go down to the seaside promenade and give out tracts.

He gets into buildings, just like the private detectives in the movies, by hanging around the front door until someone comes in or goes out. Then he nips up to the top floor and puts tracts under doors or hands them to people he sees in hallways. He walked into a language school on the top floor of a building by the seaside he got into this way and sat and talked with the receptionist about God for a few minutes. He handed her one of our very  nicely made calendars shipped to us each year for free by Good News Publishers, and she, taking note of his age, gave him a euro. He doesn’t ask for money, but so far has been given upwards of 10 euros for his efforts. Our target with these calendars, which have a small church advert attached, is young Greeks, especially some of the 80,000 university students that comprise a large percentage of the population of Thessaloniki.

If you want to see a rather funny one-minute video of David doing newspaper distribution in Thessaloniki a decade ago, go to YouTube and type “Zorba the Evangelist.” Or just click here. The 2 year-old girl at the beginning is Cathy.

Thanks, as always, for praying—-

If you support us and would like to do so online, you can do that here.

Zorba The Evangelist

By Dan (or Cathy-daughter)| 1 video

Watch

A New/Old Post

New in the sense that this is the first post of this blog. Old in the sense that it’s a compilation of the last five years of my prayer letters as a Christian worker in Greece. The difference being is that I added some comments in between the letters explaining the letters themselves. I’ve compiled the letters, and will spend the next period of time (this means anywhere from a few days up to a full month) editing, fixing typos, and inserting comments where appropriate. I actually have 23 years of prayer letters to draw from, but will start with those from the beginning of ’07 to the present and see how things work out…