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Missionaries to Romania BUCHAREST TALES (Read the latest from the Cox's) Hear Dave's Call to Missions (Audio) Hear Jen's Call to Missions (Audio) Christ Church has been blessed to have the opportunity to support the Cox family as missionaries to Romania. Following is their current message to the Church. Greetings to all of you at Christ Church! We are the Coxes… Dave and Jen and our children Jonathan (16) Joel (14) and Emma (11). We appreciate your faithful prayers and gifts to us over the years! We’re now in our 12th year ministering as church planters in Romania. Thanks for making it possible for us to do this work that we love. We will get to see you soon as our home assignment is getting close. We’ll be visiting Christ Church on June 29th and our boys leave with your youth for Juarez Mexico on a mission trip on the 30th.
Here in Bucharest we have a regular attendance of about 30-40 on Sunday mornings. We often remain after church for all sorts of social activities including ping-pong, art classes and picnics in the back yard of the clinic where we meet. These activities help create a good environment to which we can invite new folks.
A couple or times a year we get away from Bucharest to the mountains to enjoy more relaxed time together. We use these opportunities for in depth teaching on subjects like prayer and to encourage deeper relationships in the body.
Dave has an increasing role on the national level. He travels to visit leaders of the other 6 Evangelical Free Churches in southern Romania. They meet for special occasions and to discuss vision and strategy on a countrywide level. Currently they are pursuing legal options to begin moving toward the status of a denomination of churches.
National church leaders meet several times each year for the Timothy Institute. Our mission started this institute to help train church leaders. The first group of leaders have just finished the cycle of ten courses. They will now be taking more of a leadership role in passing the concepts and principles they’ve learned on to a new generation of leaders.
Back in Bucharest we are excited by the possibility of soon purchasing the clinic building where our church meets. The Lord has blessed our small fellowship with ownership of a piece of land in the city which has grown exponentially in price. The proceeds from selling that property will likely be adequate to buy this existing building. Our dream is to use the building as a ministry center in which Christian professionals will serve the community in various ways. We’d love to have a church building that is bustling with activity 7 days/week.
We are very glad that Ed and Connie Smith and their family have returned to Bucharest after being in America for over a year. They are part of our ReachGlobal city team. Ed is a musician and has a great heart for evangelism. He is helping us think about something he terms evangelistic environments, where Christians and non-Christians can spend time together doing things they enjoy (music, art, photography, etc.). This can provide openings for the gospel and chances for Christians to better understand how others look at the world.
Our children attend Bucharest Christian Academy, where Jen is the board director and part time librarian and Dave co-leads the senior high Bible Study. The school has embarked on a building campaign to escape from rising rent costs and to provide a quality facility for missionary kids and kids from business families. We have been encouraged as the Board pledged $22,000 of personal funds and then our mission agency, ReachGlobal, donated $25,000! But we have a long way to go to reach our goal of $1.5 million. Join us in praying that the Lord will provide in His timing!
We appreciate your prayers for our family. God has given us a double dose of happiness in Him and more than made up for any difficulties of living overseas. Just last week a photographer from our church asked to take some shots of Emma for a kids’ magazine. As you see in the upper left, she ended up on the cover!
We’d like to leave you with one of our favorite verses. It’s a reminder of our purpose on earth and where all of history is heading… Habakkuk 2:14 “for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, As the waters cover the seas.”
Our email address is David.Cox@efca.org. Also, if you’d like to begin receiving regular email updates from us, just write to the above address and let us know!
Thank you again for your friendship, support, and prayers.
He is Risen! Dave and Jen
A recent news update the Coxes :
“Faith gives birth to prayer and grows stronger, strikes deeper, rises higher, in the struggles and wrestlings of mighty petitioning.” - E.M. Bounds
Jen and I are asking the Lord for greater devotion to Him in prayer. We’ve been inspired and challenged by the attitude of Epaphras (Col. 4:12) who “always labored” for the Colossians in prayer. We’re humbled by those of you who pray for us and our Romanian friends. Your labor will not go unrewarded. No lasting spiritual change can ever occur apart from God’s touch, so prayer is our greatest weapon in this battle against sin.
We’d especially appreciate your prayer for some good Romanian friends who are struggling in their marriages. While counseling, advice from friends in the church and marriage books might help, only God has the power to save and richly bless these families. We plead with Him to do so for the glory of Jesus Christ, the happiness of our friends and the advance of the kingdom.
This month we turned in an application for a permanent visa. It will take 6 months to learn if we’re approved. A positive response would mean that the rest of our lives we’d never have to go through the expensive and time consuming visa process again. We’re asking that God would give us favor in this area (already living here 13 years and planning for many more, we explained to the authorities that we are pretty much “permanent”!) We’ll let you know the results of your prayers sometime around Christmas J.
We’re on vacation this week in Croatia with our good friends the Ginns. We have a great place to stay at the home of some missionaries here. We’ve had the chance to visit some islands off the coast, snorkel every day and see a National Park with woods full of more waterfalls than I’d imagined possible. Here are a couple of pictures from our trip…
We’ll close with one more great prayer quote and verse…
“If we were more with God in the great ordinance of intercession, more brightly would our faces shine, more richly endowed would life and service be with the qualities which earn the goodwill of humanity and bring glory to the name of God.” - E.M. Bounds
“Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ…” Col 4:2-3
May the Lord encourage all of us in the knowledge that prayer is the very heartbeat of His work here on earth!
Dave and Jen July 18, 2009
Note: "Bucharest Tales" are published periodically by the Coxes. When available they will be posted on the Christ Church web site. |
