October 13 & 14

On Saturday, October 12 we finished our seminar for pastors in Sofia and then drove to Plovdiv with Lilly and her parents. They had been at the seminar so it was nice to have more time with them on the way to Plovdiv. The next day, Sunday, Pat with out to the Gypsy church in the neighboring town where we go so often. Many of you have seen pictures from there before. We have been going there for years and have a very close relationship with the people there. This time, Pat was teaching the women on how to find God's purpose for their lives. That is quite a new idea for many of those women because Gypsy culture is very male dominated. Since Pat was gone, I took the opportunity to go to 's church and visit. They are a small church and I felt like they all knew all about Pat and I; Lilly can talk!!!! It was really a lot of fun and they are very nice people. After church a bunch of us went to lunch and made an afternoon out of it. It was great! On Monday evening I went out to the Gypsy church and did almost three hours on church administration. That is an area that the Gypsy pastors have had virtually no training at all. Most of them do pretty well by just using common sense but there are areas where they could improve a lot. Hopefully, I gave them a lot of food for thought. I will be going back tonight and give them more. This is all pretty basic stuff like how to build an effective plan, how to hold an effective meeting, how to organize, how to build effective processes in the church, etc; all very practical things that they need to know how to do better. Here are a few pictures from the last couple of days.