VBS Memo from Romania-8/31/09

Dear Prayer Partners,

WHAT A WEEK! Our 4th annual Vacation Bible School was an awesome experience, both in activity and in challenge. Our high day was 90 on Wednesday (with a close second of 88 on Friday). Over 125 children came, and 4 of the older kids trusted the Lord as their personal Saviour! Our workers were exhausted, but we are all praising the Lord for what He did this week.

Sunday was a good day. We had several new children come for Sunday School and a few more showed up for Junior Church. This Wednesday afternoon we will hold our first monthly Christian Children's Club with the hope of continuing our relationship with the children who came to VBS. Please pray that this will provide opportunities to meet and minister to their parents as well.

In the month of September, we have scheduled Back to School activities, Ladies Bible study, a Teens In Action activity and our first Involvement Night where we will be challenging people in our church family to get personally involved (with training) in some aspect of the ministry of the Timisoara Independent Baptist Church.

We are once again without a church pianist, so I will be trying to play for services while teaching Bethany and a couple of others how to play congregational songs. I knew I should have practiced more over the years! Please pray for a skilled pianist for our church because we want to be able to always have Christ-honoring special music as well. I am praying that someone would be called of God to come and minister with us in the development of our music ministry. Will you also pray for this, please?

Next week, I will be taking my wife away for a 3-day trip to Venice in celebration of our 25th anniversary; so I may not get the Monday Memo out. Don't think we're going deluxe...we got both plane tickets for 100 euros, and the hotel was a special deal I found online! We are thankful for the goodness of the Lord that we can celebrate in a special way.

Thank-you so much for your faithful prayers and support!

VBS UPDATE - part I

SUNDAY-WEDNESDAY VBS MEMO

We are past the mid-point of our VBS, and WOW! is it exciting. Our attendance has grown from 65 to 90, and we have 2 more days to see the Lord answer our prayers for 101 (a request initiated by the prayers of Rachel Sewell, a WCBC student who spent a few weeks with us and helped with VBS preparations).

We are also very aware of the spiritual warfare that is manifesting itself in very personal ways. Our youth director's wife was traumatized today when their 2-year-old boy was choking on sunflower seeds he had swallowed and stuck up his nose. Her husband was working at the time, so she had to run down the street in her house shoes trying to find a clinic in the area. They are new to the area, and it took nearly an hour for her to find someone to help her. It sounds absurd, but she literally asked dozens of people to help her, and they only pointed down the street and let her go on by herself. She also went to several clinics which were closed or "too busy" to help. She felt like her son would die in her arms before she could find help in a strange city. But he is ok, and they were faithfully in their places serving the Lord tonight! Yet when the night was over, she broke down in tears as she shared the details of the day.

I also asked the other workers how they felt today, and all of them admitted that there was a great trial just to get to VBS tonight. Our mini-van also died after dropping off the last child last night, and so we are trying to pick up about 30 kids with our church van and 2 borrowed vehicles.

Pray for us and for these dear children to understand the Gospel and to be saved. Several parents are also staying each night; so pray that we can reach them as well.

I will be posting updates and pictures on this blog site and on Twitter - http://twitter.com/tim2ro . Please feel free to follow us (our posts) as we follow Christ!

More to follow soon...

Thanks, Rachel!

Rachel Sewell was such a blessing to us! She recorded several accompaniments for our choir.

She also helped with the VBS decorations.
She modeled "service with a smile". We tried to convince her to stay with us, but she had to return home; but not before she got to see 68 children come for our first night of VBS! She is praying for 101, so we are gearing up for more to come!!!

Monday Memo - Aug. 10, 2009

Today is a very special day for us because 25-years-ago, I married the girl of my dreams and God has truly given us the desire of our hearts as we have served the Lord together! We now have 3 of our 5 children living half-way around the world, and so our Anniversary seams a bit quiet. But consistent with the pattern which started on our 1st anniversary when we were on a church bus coming back to Wyoming from summer youth camp on the campus of Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College in California, we are busy today with a VBS program at the Gypsy church here in Timisoara. That's ok, we enjoy being busy and sharing our day with people we love (even though we miss our kids, parents and friends from the States). Deb and I will take a special trip next month for a few days, because we found a roundtrip airfare of 50 euros each from Timisoara to Venice, Italy!

Our camp season is over and our young people had a great time. It is apparent that the Lord really spoke to their hearts! In two more weeks we will be conducting the VBS at our church for 6 nights. With a dinosaur theme and an excited team, we are praying for more souls to be saved than in years past and for families to be added to the church.

By faith, we have expanded the area we rent to include 3 more rooms so that we can have room for new classes and a larger Junior Church program. After VBS, we are also planning to start a weekly Christian Children's Club on a weekday to continue to reach children and their families with the Gospel.

Our attendance remains consistently between 45-55 on Sunday mornings, but some of our folks have been gone on vacation. We are looking to a growing time when school starts. We printed 10,000 more tracts and they are being distributed rapidly.

Our personal budget has been devastated by the cost of repairs on our minivan. It has been in the shop 4 weeks out of the past 5, and the costs have grown over $1500. I had hoped to sell it before any such problems developed, but now I'm stuck. The owner of the shop is a Christian and he is allowing me to pay off the repairs in segments of about $500. Please pray that we can get this resolved and try to get into a smaller, more affordable vehicle.

Thank-you so much for your faithful prayers and support!

Friday in Timisoara with Rachel.

Rachel Sewell took a brief tour in Budapest before returning with us to Romania.

Monday Memo from Romania-7/13/09

MONDAY MEMO

Dear Prayer Partners,

Today began our summer camp season at Camp of Joy (Tabara Bucuriei). We have 4 of our teens who are counselors or workers this year, and we have 10 who will be campers. What a blessing it is to see how God has been working in their lives - especially Ioan and Angi, who are brother and sister and were both saved on Feb. 29, 2008 at a youth rally in our church. They have grown so much and have a great burden for their father as well as their older brother and sister to be saved. Please pray for them and for Gabriel and Teodora as they minister to children at the camp.

We are working on the plans for VBS in August and for a weekly childrens program that will follow. We have the opportunity to rent another part of the building where our church meets so that we can have extra rooms for children's classes and for a church office. The owner is giving us a price of 200 euros (about $280), which is about half price compared to other places. We really need this space in order to divide our growing Sunday School classes and to provide a work space for ministry planning and operations on-sight. We are going ahead by faith, though this is above our monthly budget. Please pray that our church will continue to grow and be
able to also give toward this important need.

Pray for Rebekah this week because she is a camper at Silver State Baptist Youth Camp in Colorado. We are asking God to make this an extra special camp experience for her just before she starts colleg in the fall. Also, Bethany is a camper this week here in Romania at Camp of Joy. Please pray for her as well.

About our family car...still waiting to hear the price for repairs (and after 3 weeks of waiting, I am beginning to get a bit nervous). I know it will be substantial; so please pray for God's provision.

Thank-you so much for your faithful prayers!

Your servant in Christ,
Tim J. Tyler
Missionary to Romania

Music Matters

We all know the importance of godly music in ministry. We are endeavoring to develop a good repretoir of anthems and songs to prepare the hearts of people for the even more important part of any service: the preaching of God's Word. We are constantly looking for appropriate music, and are making requests to translate some into Romanian. Please pray for our team as we labor to accomplish this.

Summer Camp Season

Our church in Timisoara has 4 teens working in the Camp of Joy (Tabara Bucuriei) in Bihor this summer. They are at a training this week with Dr. Ken Hay and Dan Burk from The Wilds Camps Abroad, and next week will begin the 4 week camping season. We are excited for them to have this privelege to serve the Lord and minister to other kids.