This weekend, East European Bible College is full of life as leaders from seventeen churches across Romania and Ukraine gather for our third annual Praxis Conference. Each one has come ready to grow, connect, and return home better equipped to serve.
My phone showed me a photo from 2014 this week—and I couldn’t stop thinking about the stories behind it.
It’s just a simple group picture, but every person in it represents a piece of what God has been building over the years.
Allyssa was the only girl in the group back then. Since that day, she met Razvan, got married, and now they’re raising three kids while serving…
Years ago, we set out to do something simple in Romania.
We wanted to train Roma men from small villages to lead churches in their own communities. The goal was straightforward: equip local leaders so the church could grow from within.
But we quickly ran into a challenge.
Can I tell you about someone I met in a small Romanian village?
Her name was Domnica. Whenever our volunteers gathered with the kids, she was almost always nearby. Not in the middle of things—just quietly watching from the edges. You could tell life hadn’t been easy for her. Poverty had left its marks. But she always had this warm, steady smile.
One day we decided to stop and talk with her...
As we celebrate thirty years of Remember the Children in Romania, I’ve been thinking about how this journey has shaped both the ministry — and me.
My earliest memories there are not easy ones. They’re marked by the lingering weight of communism, by hardship, and by the quiet tragedy so many children endured. For many Romanians, those scars are still close to the surface.
What I remember most clearly, though, are the children on the streets — and sometimes beneath them, living in the sewers.
One of them was a boy named Florin.
We have the unique opportunity on this trip to provide a respite for these kids, but more importantly give them hope. The kids in these villages are, from our cultural view, not treated well at all. From their cultural view, they do not know any other kind of life. Despite the incredibly hard things that happen to them they still smile easily, and they just want love (which every human being needs and wants).
In Romania, many children who are ‘orphans’ are not orphans in the literal sense. This was the case with Ana. At age 12, her family was one of abuse and she was kicked out. She lived with her grandmother for a year, and when her grandmother died, Ana was sent to a state facility to enter the orphan system. In this facility, Remember the Children staff met Ana and offered her a home with House of Hope, our orphan care home in Romania.
