T here’s a whole story to each of our lives—a story that led to this moment. Our God is a God of details, and he’s present in all the details, for God’s the greatest architect ever known. This is the story of how God has kept us moving toward his blueprint.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus sums up the entire law with these words:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There’s no other commandment greater than these.”
This passage demonstrates our ministry well. The picture God was trying to pass on to us is that we should love God with everything we have and nothing less. There’s no reason to try to compartmentalize what is related to the heart, the mind, the soul, or our strength. The idea is to love God and neighbor with all we are and with all we have.
Felipe and Janelle originally made this presentation at Mission 2025, an RCA Global Mission celebration event. Watch the video or read the lightly edited content as follows.
Use everything for God’s kingdom, even rock climbing
In our early days in Romania we were often reminded of this—how everything we are needed to be used for the kingdom, including our passion for rock climbing and adventure. It is not that God wanted us to leave that on the side and go do ministry. God had shaped Janelle and I to start what he wanted to start in Romania. God is a God of details, the Great Architect, and this is how God built a ministry in rural Romania by our deep love for him, following his will, and being attentive to the passions and guidance of the Spirit. In this way God built our ministry—in an organic grassroots way. To become more holistic, we began with the rock climbing gym. The rock climbing gym gave birth to the church plant, and the church plant gave birth to the education program. As God deepened our roots in him and in the community our branches reached further, and slowly, in God’s time, produced fruit as we worked with a group of youth.
We saw kids who had little regard to the future and were without direction, so we saw the need for extracurricular activities for their vacant time outside of school. We were both rock climbers so we used our passion for rock climbing to provide a space for kids to do indoor rock climbing.
Related: God’s light breaks us open
Andrea’s story, part 1
One of those kids was an 11-year-old girl, Andrea, who lived in one of the Communist blocks around the gym. Andrea’s situation was difficult. She was looked after by her two older brothers; her mother had left when she was two years old and had never returned. Her father had been working for many years at a car wash in England. Many of the children in our program struggle with the migration difficulties of the unemployment that we face in Romania. Andrea’s two older brothers had both dropped out of school after the fourth grade. Think of someone you know who is nine years old, and think of that person never returning to school. They worked where they could. Their apartment had no water and no electricity. They heated it by fire, and they carried water bottles up the stairs to the ninth floor from the water spring. They had problems with fleas and they had no fridge, so they survived on shelf food. In the years before her father had left, there had been much physical abuse in their home, so much so that her youngest brother had been removed from the home and was adopted by a Romanian family. Amidst all of this, Andrea was and is a strong girl. She was motivated and, on her own will, she continued to go to school. As God was working his plan in our lives, God was working his plan in Andrea’s life, too, by bringing our paths together.
Jumping ahead in her story… Eight years after we had begun to get to know Andrea and teach her how to climb, she was baptized at The Anchor Church, which is the church plant we started in Romania four years ago. She began her testimony like this:
One day as I was looking out the window, and I saw children and people. It was the opening of the climbing gym, Fara Limite, which means “no limits.” Running towards the gym with a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm, I arrived. It was so beautiful—full of happy children and many smiles on everyone’s faces. There was also a table with cake, cookies, and juice. For me this was something new because I had never experienced anything like this!
She went on to share about how it was the first safe space she had experienced in her life and that it was organized and rules were respected. She knew that violence and bullying would not be tolerated there and this for her was stabilizing.
Do for others what we would want done for us: loving our neighbors through church
After Jesus says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” we are told to do to others what we would have them do to us. We need to be reminded how much we do for ourselves—in every day, every area of our lives, we care for our health, we care for what we see, we care for having opportunities, we care for being loved, and we care to be cared for. As the gospel changes us, these areas are areas that we are called to love our neighbors. And this is where we know that God gave us a special love: the love of Jesus Christ for each of the children in a gym. We love them and we continue to love them and to disciple them. In Andrea, we were reminded that we get to reflect God’s love to her because these are our neighbors. God gave us a call to the children of Dallas, Romania, to Andrea, to the children, to their parents, and all the other Romanians who joined us in this vision.
Related: How you can love your neighbor as yourself in today’s world
It is because of kids like Andrea that we were compelled to plant a church. We felt the call plainly from God and it was confirmed in many ways. We had so many eager faces that we sought daily, and we knew they were interested to learn more about God and to be further discipled. And we knew they needed a church body. After an internship at the K Christian Center in Mississippi, we embraced Christian community development as a model for ministry. The idea is that the church is the center of a ministry and that it has many facets and outlets to reach the needs of the local community. It’s placed to impact both the spiritual needs but also the social needs. Dr. Amy L. Sherman says, “Inside of our churches we are to be a reflection of the coming kingdom, and we are to be doing the work of the kingdom—a work of justice, of love, of healing, of hope and transformation. When the church functions rightly as the body of Christ, it will also serve as the hands and the feet of Christ in the world.”
So that is the vision we had in our hearts for The Anchor Church.
Related: A tale of two church plants: friendship and shared mission in Europe
Andrea’s story, part 2
Going back to Andrea. For a period of time, Andrea’s father sent her to a village to be cared for by a distant relative. We hadn’t seen her for over two years, but God is the great architect of each of our stories. In God’s sovereign plan, after the church had been opened for a few months, I met Andrea again outside and she told me that she had moved back but was not able to register herself for her last two years of high school since neither of her parents were in the country to sign for her. I went with her the next day to see if they would let me sign as her sponsor. We found out she had offended the secretary and they were angry with the way she had spoken to them. The director spoke to her and I, making derogatory comments about Andrea, saying she wouldn’t amount to anything and that the school doesn’t take risks on students like her. Respectfully, I told her that I disagreed; I thought Andrea deserved all the chances she could get, especially if she was still committed to school as an orphan with no parents to motivate her or encourage her in her schooling. She was a member of a family where no one else had ever made it past the fourth grade. The director finally gave in to me as a foreigner, and she signed Andrea up. That day I told Andrea about how we had planted a church and she was interested in coming to help with the Sunday school program.
On the day she was baptized she continued her testimony:
Over time as I listened to the sermons, I began to find answers to a lot of the questions I’ve always had in my mind. After a while, I began to feel something inside me—something I had never felt before. It was peace. I came to know this as the power of God. For the first time, I no longer felt alone, and some of the things that had happened to me in my life began to make more sense. Then one day as I left a store after stealing a perfume, I felt guilt for the first time, and I knew that what I had done was not right. I prayed right there, “God, help me not to steal anymore.” God helped me. The material things I had wanted so badly—being poor and only being able to have them through theft—began to have less value in my life, and I no longer desired them enough to take them. I began to trust God, and he began to work in my life.
Our church came around Andrea, and we hired her to be the janitor of the gym and the church to give her a source of income while she finished her high school years and to provide her with her first working experience. Our love for her depended; it flowed from the “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” mindset. Out of this love, we continually came to God to receive and were able to continue to give and to serve the same way that Christ taught us to love and the same way that Christ loved us— sacrificially and continually involved. His love spurred us on to love Andrea.
After a time, Andrea grew weary. She met a guy on the internet, and she left for a city far away. We continued to talk to her on the telephone and after six months, she called me to let me know she was on the train back home. She was going to arrive in an hour and a half and could she sleep at my house? So we picked her up and in the same way Felipe and I have known the loving arms of our Savior each time we come to him in forgiveness and for his care in Christ, we were able to open our arms and receive her once again.
The beautiful part of God adopting his children is that he places them in the family of God, and this family is even larger than we can imagine. Friends of ours with the Coldwater Canada program sponsored Andrea so she could participate in their leadership and faith training for a summer of wilderness programs. God as the architect ordained, as only he could, that a counselor from Canada offered to do free counseling with Andrea for the months she needed the extra support, and we watched amazed as God the great architect connected his global church.
And this is the beauty of community development: our little church saw the vision and embraced it. A couple in our church are now using their passion for coffee and business along with their resources to open a coffee shop. They were burdened with the many people in our congregation who struggle with unemployment, and they wanted to provide a job for some of them. In fact, they just opened Fern Coffee Shop and have already hired Andrea and another lady from our church to work there. They are loving God with all they are and all they have, and they’re loving their neighbor as they love themselves.
Branching out again: loving God through an afterschool program
After the construction of our church, the ministry grew again—organically—and in the sphere of education. Many of the children at the climbing gym have learning disabilities, but there is no extra help available for them in our school system. We had a climber, Pilu, who was a national champion in Romania. He was 11 years old and was unable to sign his own name. After God provided us a building in the community for the church, we finally had the physical space to be able to open an afterschool program. Our God of details had it all planned out.
In our first year in Romania in our youth club, we had a girl named Damaris who was very involved in our program over the years. She went to Bucharest and got her college degree and because of COVID, she decided to move back to our area for a time. As we met with her and shared the vision of the education program, she wanted to work for the program. She talked about how her and her parents had wanted her to go to college to get away from the valley to have a better chance at life in a new place and she never thought she would come back; however, the Lord changed her heart and brought her right back to where she wanted. She had wanted to be a light and hope in her own city.
With the help of a grant, we were able to hire our third local employee who went to work creating an amazing program for the children. She helps them with science projects, homework, Romanian language, geography, and history. She also focuses on emotions, teaching them to identify their feelings and learning to self-reflect. She helps them identify a vision and a hope for the future—what they want to do, who they want to be, what job they might be interested in. She also caught the vision of loving God with yourself and using what you have to love your neighbor. She used her passion for beauty, color, art, and education to create a beautiful space where she works weekly with over 60 kids. She said, “I want the kids to have access to paint, to colored paper, to glitter, and fun craft supplies. It’s something I never had as a child, and it’s like I can relive my childhood through them and watch them benefit from something I would have loved to experience myself.”
Related: How a collaborative art project is changing one community
Our gym and education program includes a hot meal on Friday afternoons for all the children, and it is a place where Andrea now volunteers as well. As a high school graduate, she is able to serve the kids who are learning to love learning and to excel in their studies. God built roots in our lives and slowly as the ministry grew, he strengthened the roots of our ministry and in time branches grew and fruit was produced. The Holy Spirit cultivated the soil in Andrea’s heart and the small seed grew, and we have the privilege of watching it continue to grow now. And now Andrea has her own roots that God is stretching deeper and making stronger; she wants to be a missionary. Our dream is that in years, at Mission 2034, Andrea would be here speaking about the roots of God’s ministry in Dallas and how through that, he blessed her. Her roots now are deep and strong; the seeds that have been planted in her are newly sprouted as she also obeys the invitation to love the Lord our God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
Small links have big value in God’s kingdom
One of my favorite books is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and there’s a quote in this book that helps us to understand better what holistic ministry means. He says:
In a Christian community everything depends upon whether each individual is an indispensable link in a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable. A community which allows unemployed members to exist within it will perish because of them. It will be good, therefore, if every member receives a definite task to perform for the community that he may know in ours that no doubt that he too is not useless but usable. Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak, and the elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.
One of the beautiful things about our church is that we have many people who the world would label as weak—widows, ex-cons, the illiterate, the poor, people struggling with severe mental illness, and the list goes on. We know these people and know their strength in Christ. They are an essential part of our church body with important functions and areas of service. They love so deeply and understand so purely that it is better to give than to receive. They understand their need for God and they trust him so faithfully, thanking him for each little gift that they have in life, for each little miracle they experience. We have so much to still learn from them and together we are growing, giving, and receiving blessing and being blessed. And so when we see a man baptized in our church—who so far is unable to find work due to his illiteracy, his criminal record, and the fact that he lost an arm due to poverty—setting up chairs every Sunday morning, handing out bulletins, and greeting each person who arrives at a church, we see that God uses a man with a special need for a special and important task in his church.
Brothers and sisters, that is one way that we love God: we show our neighbors that his or her value is in Christ and also that he or she is needed in the community. In order to engage every person in ministry, the church needs to have its branches growing in varying areas of society in which each person can love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and interact in love with their neighbor. We know we will not be able to do it all. We all know the needs are many, but like Abraham who lived by faith in the land of promise, we also are looking forward to the city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God.
Felipe and Janelle Silva
Felipe and Janelle work with Roma youth, and the larger community, in the Jiu Valley (Romania) to build trust, perseverance, character, and courage through rock climbing and an education program. They have also planted Anchor Church. Learn more about their ministry here.
