Luton Roma Church is on the cusp. Since Alex and his team began coming to lead our weekly service back in November 2012, we began to grow as a church. Every week new Roma pastors come along with Alex, each bringing testimonies, teaching, and new songs. Last week we had both Romanian and Romani being spoken. They have all given up their former lives to preach and sing the Gospel wherever the wind of the Spirit takes them. All they ask from us is the fuel for the journeys from Coventry, Nottingham and London, and some better sound equipment. Not much, considering they give up a whole day for us, to say nothing of their charismatic gifts of communication.
It's feels like a baby is about to be born. Mother is wailing. Baby is longing to breath for himself. Our little team is doing all we can to bring this about with God's help. Much depends on us being able to fund Alex's team to do their stuff on an ongoing basis. The vision is grand. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, we are about to receive our first instalment from the Church of England's "CHURCH AND COMMUNITY FUND." For the next three years funds are coming our way to realise the vision we had just before Alex and his brother's appeared on the scene. Now we can fund our two minibuses which ferry the families in, and much else.
There is much work to be done before the Roma will be ready to lead and run their own church, but it is now just possible to glimpse that future. Essential to that vision, is that the next generation of Roma children acquire the literacy and language skills they will need to be employable in the UK. From January 2014 the law will change to make this possible for them. But do they have a will to integrate and break the only pattern they know? The argument that the Roma need to put back something into the system is a powerful one, indeed a biblical one. The call to be a blessing to all nations passes from one ethnic group to the next. None of us live in isolation. What the Roma uniquely embody is a transnational, international, nomadic people who make no demands to have a homeland - just the hope that every land might be a potential homeland for all. This is surely the future that the book of Revelation holds open before us. Do we have the imagination to see what God is doing through the Roma people?
