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Mission Connections

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	A letter from Steve and Michelle Kurtz in Croatia

	December 18, 2003 Dear Friends, Benjamin will soon be taller than his parents, thanks mainly to Croatian bread, they say. Once again, acceptance of “those things we cannot change” is the direction in which we try to head on the journey toward maturity. After a decade in Croatia I often still feel like a newcomer to this adopted homeland with its mysterious culture. Mysteries don’t solve themselves simply for having been identified as mysteries. Neither does getting used to mysteries mean we understand them. In the end, Culture, like Trinity, is both basic and yet remains inscrutable. It’s fun to take new missionaries to the places we’ve grown used to and hear them say the same things we had said, noticing the newness, the strangeness, and the unexpected beauty. New missionaries get shocked easily too, which is good, because getting shocked is a sign that you have not grown cynical. The choice to engage the power of pain—the powerful compulsion to make past pain the justified source of new pain is a choice that requires just such shocked energy. Michelle is training local people here and seminary students to make that choice through the Alternatives to Violence Project.

	The only time in his life our son Nathan has ever worn a tie is for this Christmas picture. It was his idea. Our kids grow up into their own unique people right before our eyes and we can only watch in amazement.				She frequently loads up the car and goes to the nearby city of Vukovar where she facilitates seminars for people who are willing to believe that there are alternatives, having already experienced the futility of pain-for-pain as a strategy for ending pain. In the fields on the way to Vukovar you can see several big white signs with red triangles labeled “It is forbidden to go here. Mines.” The capacity for the old reasons to inflict new damage is ever present, unless alternatives are embraced.

	The men of the volunteer fire department in the village of Dalj have begun to embrace that alternative vision. Through her work with the Center for Peace in Osijek, Michelle has been meeting with them to work out a means by which this deeply war-divided village can begin to function again as a community; no small task when everyone in the village knows, for example, that the public library was a prison-camp run by neighbors who victimized neighbors just over a decade ago. But amazingly—shockingly?—there is still a will to live beyond that horror; to live into a future in which Serb and Croat men can put out a fire together and celebrate past fire-fighting victories around a common pot of fish-paprikash soup.

	A different kind of engagement (but no less energy) is required for work in the Reformed Christian Church in Croatia. In this complicated corner of the kingdom of God, 16th-century congregations continue as ethnically Hungarian. Borders have changed, but identities are more persistent than maps.		Michelle with volunteer firemen and peace team in Dalj.

	So, the bus pulls up and unloads its cargo of highly charged kids in places like the village of Hrastin for day-camp, gathering over 130 young people to sing songs, make crafts, and perform dramas which witness to a deeper identity, a citizenship in a kingdom without borders. Some of the youth come from families that fled into exile in the war; some belong to families which stayed and endured occupation. Which ones were the true patriots? Which were capitulating traitors? These invisible questions, like those land mines, still persist with a powerful capacity to divide. This camp is one of the few places in which these young people can find a reason to believe that there are questions more fundamental that need to be asked; that forgiveness is a greater power than vengeance, and that the inheritance of the Reformation is fundamentally an inexhaustible cache of grace, undiminished by being given away. For believing in this vision, for participating with us, for being our partners, thank you. For enabling us to be here these past ten years in Croatia, involved in the task of spreading the shock at the status quo in the light of the Alternative Vision, engaging the powers of cynicism and despair with hope, God bless you. Steven and Michelle, Benjamin and Nathaniel Kurtz Mission co-workers Osijek, Croatia Support Information If you or your church would like to support the ministry, or other projects of the Reformed Church in Croatia, you may do so by using the PC(USA) Extra Commitment Opportunity (ECO) system. For evangelistic computer training program, use ECO # 051623 - Evangelism in Croatia. Or click here to give online. For renovation of the Tvrdja building in Osijek, use ECO # 047856 - Rebuilding the Church in Croatia, Tvrdja. Or click here to give online. For rebuilding war damaged churches, use ECO # 047856 for Rebuilding the Church in Croatia. Or click here to give online. For new church development in Osijek or Zagreb (please specify which), use ECO # 051623 - Evangelism in Croatia. Or click here to give online. For direct support to poor Congregations / pastors, use ECO # 051623 - Evangelism in Croatia. Or click here to give online. For the peace building in Osijek, use ECO # 051638 - Peace Building Project, Osijek Peace Center and specify “volunteers peace project” or another project of the Peace Center. Ask Michelle for more details at michlkurtz@aol.com. Click here to give online. For support to PC(USA) mission personnel, use ECO # 048024 - Mission Personnel. Click here to give online Our directed giving (Directed Mission Support) number is D 506648. This is only for PC(USA) churches, not for individual gifts. For more information, visit PC(USA)'s Mission Funding and Development Web page. The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.336

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