Vision Report #2

Saturday, July 19 – Last night, we went to Vrnjacka Banja to sing at the Evangelical Holy Trinity Church.  Last year, they had just bought a new church building, a former restaurant, and we sang at their inaugural service at this new venue.  This year, we noticed now much they have improved their building, adding a new portico with a cross at the front while doing considerable modification to their meeting room.  Pastor Radovan apologized for the slow progress but noted that he only had two hands to do these building modifications, meaning he had been doing most of the work himself!  We started the service at 6 PM, but many had come by 6:30 and were waiting expectantly for us.  Brian and Stephanie shared their testimonies and Mike preached a message from Matt. 5 in between our singing.  We could sense the Spirit of God with us as we sang.  After the meeting, we went to the park.  We sang on the same platform we sang last year but it was quite windy this night and started to drizzle as we were walking there and as we sang.  Because of the drizzle, there were a lot less people there than last year.  Curiously, as we started to sing, we noticed there were many young children there making a lot of noise, but we sang anyway.  There were also several elderly there, many of them Christians, because we could see them mouthing the words, especially when we sang Isus me lubje (Jesus loves me).  Betty Anderson later told us that what some of the children were doing was witchcraft and mocking Jesus, but that we were there to take authority over the land, but God had sent His saints (those elderly folks) to help us as we sang.  Praise God He is sovereign.   Since it was getting late, we left after singing, talking to only a few people and got back to the church a little after 11 PM.  We were starved, but were reminded we gave up our "rights" to 3 meals a day and to be grateful to God that while in the world only eat one meal a day, we usually have more than enough to eat 3 tines a day.  Meiring cooked an omelet that we then gratefully ate.    We slept in a bit and had breakfast at 9 AM, still a little jet-lagged.  We did our group devotions and talked about last night.  Some of us went to buy lunch, some to the market, others to buy a jacket for the colder evenings and some of the guys practiced. We were joined by 5 Serbian and a Gypsy youth.  Most of them knew their music so we spent most of the afternoon singing, with Josh teaching them about proper posture and breathing.  They had already learned some of the songs in Choral Praise that we had given Pastor Stephan when he visited last November.  We also did some sectional practices to go over notes and closed our first afternoon of joint practices by singing together the older and new songs they just learned. You can catch up on any missing items by going to http://visionchoir.blogspot.com