The story begins with Dan Psaute's annual summertime visits to that area of the former Yugoslavia beginning in 1982. His burden for the Balkans became increasingly heavier with each visit that he made. In the beginning, he was on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru). Then, he took a teaching position at what is now European Nazarene College.
About 1990, a young Croatian named Goran Medved began dreaming of spending his final year in high school in the U.S. as a foreign exchange student. He applied to the foreign exchange student program in the spring of 1991 but then began thinking that his oral skills in English were too limited. As he waited for an answer to his application he began looking around for a way to improve his English fluency. One day in early summer, he saw an advertisement in the newspaper offering a month of one-on-one conversational English practice with American speakers. He went to the orientation meeting. It was a group of Church of Christ young people from Brownwood, TX who were using the gospel of Mark as the text. That was a bit startling to Goran because he was an atheist. However, he wanted to improve his English skills, so he went through the program. Though impressed by their deep spirituality, he didn't respond in any way.
In late summer, Goran got an acceptance letter from the foreign exchange student program. He saw that he would be going to live with a family in Brownwood, TX -- a town where he already had some friends! During that year as a high school student in Brownwood, those Church of Christ people he had already met in Croatia loved him into the Kingdom.
Goran Medved was a good soccer player. During that year he spent in the USA as a foreign exchange student, he was offered a scholarship to play soccer at a two-year college now called Central Christian College of Kansas. So, in the fall of 1992, he went to that small school in McPherson, Kansas to play soccer. During his first year there, his team played at a tournament in Tulsa, OK. Southern Nazarene University's soccer coach was at the tournament looking for junior college transfers. He was impressed enough by Goran to offer him a scholarship to come and play for SNU for his final three years of college eligibility.
Goran arrived in Bethany, OK, in the fall of 1993 -- coincidentally the year that we were recruiting the very first of several groups of volunteers that would go from SNU to spend a year in Bulgaria laying the groundwork for Nazarene work in that country.
In the spring of 1994, Goran was in my Christian Thought class, a general education basic Christian doctrines class that is required of all SNU students. In the spring of 1995, he was a student in another of my general education courses, Ministry, Church and Society. Somewhere during Goran's time at SNU, I decided to improve my Spanish skills a bit so Goran and I wound up being fellow students in an intermediate Spanish class. He graduated in the spring of 1996.
In the fall of 1997, I began a year's sabbatical from SNU. In late September, Barbara and I left for Europe, where we planned to spend five months and then return to the U.S. to do some other things. After we had been there about a month, Southern Europe Field Director Duane Srader and General Superintendent Jerry Porter asked me to temporarily assume duties as district superintendent of the Italy North district. That wound up keeping me in Europe for nine months rather than the planned five.
One Friday in mid-March, 1998, Duane Srader asked me if SNU would consider recruiting and helping place volunteers in Croatia to assist in opening Nazarene work there. He said they didn't have any contacts there, but he just felt it was the right time. He mentioned Dan Psaute and said he would likely be the supervisor for the team while still continuing some of his work at European Nazarene College. I told Duane I thought we would be interested. Among other things, we were about to celebrate SNU's centennial, and I thought it would be fitting for us to have a special world missions project that year.
On Thursday of the following week -- March 18 -- I received an e-mail from Goran Medved saying he had found my email address on the SNU website and just wanted to say "hi." He noted that he was back in Croatia. He said he had gone back home to work for the government but had already become disillusioned with that and was now working as assistant pastor in his local church. When I responded to Goran's email, I told him about Duane's request and said we would likely be following through on it. I casually mentioned that I was spending a few months in Italy. Goran's response on March 25 reminded me that Croatia was next door to Italy and that I ought to make a trip to Croatia to personally check things out. He said he had already talked to his home church board (the Church of Christ in Zagreb) and that they had committed to doing everything they possibly could to help the Church of the Nazarene enter their country.
I got in touch with Dan Psaute. We began comparing schedules with Goran and decided that we would make a trip together to Zagreb in early July of 1998.
Dan came down from Switzerland on the train, and I caught a 4:30 a.m. train out of Milan in order to meet him in Zagreb! We spent 4 or 5 days, staying with Goran and his grandmother (his parents were working in Germany at the time). We visited with some missionaries who gave us a discouraging report ("Croatia is becoming known as the graveyard of missionary dreams," they said). We were with Goran's church on Sunday morning, and they were extremely encouraging. We also got a chance to see some of their weekday ministries in action. Their pastor begged us to come! It was a great few days in many ways. The 1998 World Cup was going on, and Croatia played a quarter- or semifinal game while we were there. One important event in that trip was Goran taking us to the top of the stone lookout tower in old Zagreb, where we could look out over the entire city. While on top of that tower, the three of us -- Goran, Dan, and myself -- held hands and prayed aloud, asking the Lord for guidance and wisdom.
I left Croatia having decided to encourage Field Director Srader to move ahead with plans to plant some churches in Croatia. In discussions with Dan, I agreed that we would try to recruit four young men from SNU to spend two years in Croatia beginning sometime in 1999.
When I got back to Italy, I met up with a university Youth in Mission team who were spending eight weeks in Italy that summer. They were in Rome spending their final two weeks before returning to the U.S. One evening, we were sitting out in the front yard of the Rome property, and I told them about my trip to Croatia. As we headed up to bed later, Jason Lipscomb, leader of that team and who had just graduated from SNU, said to me that he would sit out the spring semester of seminary in order to be on that initial team. When I returned to SNU that fall, we were able to recruit two more (rather than my hoped-for three): Brett Simms and Mark Murray. The three left from the Oklahoma City airport in January of 1999. It was, of course, kind of a rocky first year with one of the young men returning home early due to a crisis of faith. It did, however, get us started!
I did get a sense of the kind of hatred between peoples in that area in the fall of 1998 when I spoke in chapel about my visit to Croatia and pleaded for some volunteers to step forward. After that chapel, a student from a different region of the former Yugoslavia (Serbia) came by my office to ask how I could dare speak so kindly of the awful people in Croatia.
In that fall of 1998, I suddenly realized that there were several connections I felt with Croatia:
So, Croatia had been on my mind several times before I ever went there!
As a result of my trip to Croatia (part of the former Yugoslavia) in mid-July, SNU will try to provide 4-6 volunteers to begin Nazarene ministry in that country in January of 1999.
My trip with missionary Dan Psaute was extremely fruitful. We stayed with a former SNU student of mine, Goran Medved (who came to SNU on a soccer scholarship).
The Church of Christ, of which Goran is a part, welcomed us with open arms. They offered to help with orientation and wanted our group to worship with them until we could start our own services. That church runs a very active program, including compassionate ministries, camps, publications, and English conversation programs. They own a large first-floor apartment that reminds me of our rented facility in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is far from adequate for them, but they are focused on ministry and not on a building.
We met with Campus Crusade for Christ (Now called "Cru") people and the director of Youth With a Mission ("y-wam" as they call themselves). Both organizations offered their assistance in orientation and training. They spoke of closely collaborating with us, even to the extent of channeling their contacts and converts into Nazarene congregations. We also spent some time talking with the director of an evangelical bookstore in Zagreb.
We checked out some language study possibilities for the team. Dan already knew a smattering of Croatian and wanted to do further study. We browsed through several bookstores, looking for language-learning books. Dan is taking back a book and some audio- learning material. I brought back a couple of books and some audio material for the SNU library. Croatian is a Slavic language that uses the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic one.
There are not very many Protestant churches in Zagreb (one million population) so there are lots of areas where we can work without seeming to be in competition with anyone else. Dan also has his eyes on a couple of cities on the coast where he has spent several summers evangelizing.
Like most European cities, Zagreb is fairly compact with an excellent public transportation system: lots of electric street cars supplemented by buses.
The country is culturally Roman catholic, with only a minority active in church. Economically, it appears closer to Western Europe than to the other former communist bloc countries.
Goran's pastor told us: "Don't send people to Croatia who just want to do safari evangelism." So we need to find our best and most committed. We need to get them signed up fairly early so we can begin training and they can begin raising prayer and financial support. Pray for us.
-- Howard Culbertson,