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Lisburn, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland
 
 
 
 

Sloan Street team�s missionary trip to Romania

The team from Sloan Street Presbyterian Church who spent eleven days in July on a Missionary Trip to Romania. L to R: (back row) Darren Aitcheson, Julia Nixon, Eileen McKillop, Nicola Aitcheson, Alan Templeton, Gareth Wilson and Gareth Baxter. (front row) Kathryn Martin, Judith Conroy and Judith Cunningham. Missing from the photo - David Morrison. The Rev. John Keefe Minister of Sloan Street Presbyterian Church

The team from Sloan Street Presbyterian Church who spent eleven days in July on a Missionary Trip to Romania. L to R: (back row) Darren Aitcheson, Julia Nixon, Eileen McKillop, Nicola Aitcheson, Alan Templeton, Gareth Wilson and Gareth Baxter. (front row) Kathryn Martin, Judith Conroy and Judith Cunningham. Missing from the photo - David Morrison.

The Rev. John Keefe Minister of Sloan Street Presbyterian Church

A team from Sloan Street Presbyterian Church spent from Friday 1st to Tuesday 12 July 2005 on a Missionary Trip to Romania.

Led by Darren Aitcheson, the team consisted of: Nicola Aitcheson, Alan Templeton, Eileen McKillop, Judith Cunningham, Gareth Baxter, Judith Conroy, Julia Nixon, David Morrison, Kathryn Martin and Gareth Wilson.

They assisted PCI missionaries Csaba and Ilona Veres (originally from Sloan Street) with their work with underprivileged children from the city of Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania.

The team spent the first two days in the city of Cluj meeting the various staff that work with the children in the Aksza Mission for Street Children and working alongside a team from the PCI Youth Board.

This gave them time to prepare for their missionary work and allowed them to get acclimatised to the Romanian way of life.

The next five days were spent in the small town of Algyogy, at the foot of the Apuseni Mountains, running a Bible Camp for 40 children, including those from the Aksza Mission.

All of the children who attended the camp had various issues in their home lives; some had been abandoned by their parents and others had suffered physical abuse, etc.

As part of the camp, they ran a Day Club based on the parables of Jesus, played sports and games, organised craft activities and helped the children to improve their English.

Darren said the activity, which provided most spiritual blessing for the team was the "coffee bar" which was organised by the PCI Team.

Each evening they gave their testimony and a short talk and three young Romanians and one member of the Northern Ireland teams became Christians as a result of this.

The week was extremely rewarding for both the team members and for the young people who attended the camp.

However, Darren also explained many problems still remain in Romania.

"There is an acute shortage of funds to pay the salaries of those who are trying to help the children and there is also a shortage of Christian literature in Romanian and Hungarian to help the young people who had became Christians during the week to grow in their faith,". he added.

It is the team�s hope and prayer that God will touch the hearts of many in Lisburn to help Romanian people, as they are wonderfully kind and welcoming, and have suffered too much for too long.

This was the third year that a team from Sloan Street Presbyterian Church had gone to Romania to help with missionary work.

During a service on Sunday 16th July 2005, the minister, the Rev John Keefe, whose daughter Naomi is a missionary in Brazil, gave thanks for the safe return of the team, for the way in which God had used them to be a blessing to others and how in the process they also had 'been blessed'.