At the end of November, the entire second year class from the Word of Life Bible Center went down to North Macedonia and Serbia for an exciting mission trip. The first five days were spent in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia. After that we split into three different teams, one team stayed in Skopje, one team went to Stip, North Macedonia and a third team to Vranje, Serbia.
During our time in Skopje, we had the opportunity to evangelize and work with a local church in the city.
A girl from the Skopje team writes:
On Wednesday we had a worship night and I shared my testimony about how I found Jesus and about things that I had experienced. Later that night, another girl from our team shared a Bible verse and invited people to pray. As we stood at the front ready to pray, I saw a girl further down the hall and I felt the Holy Spirit prompting us to go up to her. We went up to her and she told us that she had been touched by what my teammate had shared. She shared a bit of her life and we were then able to pray for her.
A few days later we had another meeting and the same girl we had prayed for a few days earlier was now sitting next to me during the worship. I noticed that at the beginning of the worship she just stood up, but after a little while she slowly but surely started to worship. I knew she struggled with showing her emotions openly, so it was just amazing to see her worship God in this way! I felt so happy and can’t imagine how happy God was to hear her praise and worship!
In Stip, we had the opportunity to work and evangelize with a local church in the city. We also got to see God do mighty things like deliverance in an outdoor meeting we had.
In Vranje, Serbia, we were sent to a church that was ready for harvest work. We saw healing and salvation both on the streets and in the youth meetings. We also encouraged the church on one specific occasion to go out into the streets and evangelize. When we went out to evangelize the next day, around 15 people from the church came, for the first time, and they were eager and passionate to reach people about Jesus. The pastor even decided to make street evangelism a regular thing in their church!
But perhaps one of the most beautiful things we experienced during our time in Vranje was how God broke racism between Roma and Serbs. During our time there, our team met a Serbian man on the street, and he was invited to a local Roma church. The Siberian man came and words cannot describe how beautiful it was to see how the church immediately embraced him as their brother in Christ – we believe there are many people this church will reach in this loving way!
/ Mona Ilmjärv
Word of Life Bible Center, Year 2
