Global Missions
The Buzz
Serbia Short-Term Team Updates
Thursday, July 31, 2025
1:00 p.m. CST / 8:00 p.m. CEST
The Serbia team has stayed busy all day long! We follow a schedule set by the camp with team meetings (including worship and devotions) each morning, breakfast with all the families, separate group time for the young children, teenagers and parents. Throughout the day our goal is to be present for fellowship and conversations. The camp is set up to be able to linger and visit in unique ways. We end our days with a follow up meeting for all the volunteers (and then more time to visit after that). We try to turn out our lights by midnight!
These pictures are of the American team winning medals in the Olympic Games and a giant water balloon flight!
It’s been a joy to serve with volunteers from other places, including Brazil, Russia, Hong Kong and Serbia. We feel like we’ve known each other for much longer than four days!
Monday, July 28, 2025
3:42 p.m. CST / 10:42 p.m. CEST
Serbia Day 3: (dys)ABILITY
In 2010 or so our host Sladgen Milenkovic held their first summer camp for kids in Serbia with disabilities. Game changing in a country where stigma and shame follow a diagnosis of cerebral palsy or autism. Soon after, in faith, he bought a parcel of land in Opovo (population 5000) with a vision for a community center for kids with disabilities. Honestly, ya’ll, looking back it looked like a fourth and long and he should have punted. But that is not how God works, so I continue to learn…me of little faith. Little did Sladgan know, on the other side of the World (California, to be exact) around the same time, Joni Erickson Tada (https://joniandfriends.org) was conceptualizing an idea for “Joni’s House”…and somehow she and Sladgan connected, and Sladgen and His cancer survivor daughter Sarah met with Joni in Los Angeles and Shazam!Below is pic of Sladgan giving us a tour of Joni’s House of Opovo! It will open later this year and be only the third to open worldwide! I really don’t have words to tell how unlikely/amazing this is! In addition to a community center for kids with disabilities it will house a coffee shop and THE FIRST EVANGELICAL CHURCH THAT OPOVO HAS EVER HAD. WOW! Glad they did not ask my opinion because I am way too cynical to step out in faith like that. This is why I need to be here…to be stretched, and to see God at work in ways I could not fathom.“ This is what the Lord says: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the Lord.”Jeremiah 9:23-24 NIV.
Today we cleaned to get ready for more volunteers that will be staying in campus as well as make more preparations for the families who will arrive Tuesday afternoon. We also had some team building and training with more sessions in the morning. In one pic the boys are taking a break and playing hearts outside in the gazebo one of the many hang out spots on campus!
Saturday, July 26, 2025
7:30 a.m. CST / 2:30 p.m. CEST
The 11 of us arrived safely in Serbia after traveling through Detroit and Amsterdam without event! Traveling with the Alley Family of 5 along with Greg Thompson is like traveling with the Dream Team: Kind, gentle, prayerful and Godward facing. I have learned so much from them already. We will sightsee in Belgrade tomorrow with our host Sladjan Milenkovic and his daughter Sarah who is a childhood cancer survivor. Monday will be training, and Camp Nade (Camp Hope) starts Tuesday. There will be 85 people at camp including childhood cancer survivors and their families.
Pray for a quick adjustment to the time change and the travel “yucks”. . Also, it was over 100 degrees today which was challenging, though thankfully it will cool down in time for camp.
Pray we would decrease and He would increase. Pray for Sladjen who just lost his mother two weeks ago but has really not had time to mourn in the business of the summer camp season
Thank you all for your prayers.