Short-term teams and partnerships

Ukraine Football

Use your gifts to serve a community somewhere else in the world, and expect to be blessed, challenged and motivated as you do. You may find God calling you to the mission field at home or abroad.

Each year we send a number of teams to serve alongside our mission partners wherever they are in the world. Have you got a passion for sharing God’s word? Using your medical, agricultural or project management skills? Teaching children? Doing something practical with others? All kinds of people can be part of a short-term mission team.

In 2012, teams from Above Bar Church will be going to:

• Ukraine: the men’s football team are hoping to go to help at a football camp at Kompas Park, a children’s camp near Cherkasy run by Hope Now.
• Spain: Rooted (our group for 14–18 year olds) are organising a trip to visit our Short-Term Mission Partners Peter and Kate Knowlson in Spain.
• Uganda: Paul and Di Allcock are hoping to take a team to Mbarara to visit Zillah Whitehouse and learn more about her work at the hospital and with students.

Get in touch to find out more about being part of a team in 2012 »

Partnerships

We think strategic partnerships can help us reach more people more effectively. So we’re looking to build a number of partnerships with international Christian agencies at the moment.

Eastern Europe Fund

Above Bar Church in Eastern Europe exists to help fulfil the church’s commitment to be mission-focused internationally. The objective is to facilitate spiritual, financial and practical aid to needy communities, families and children through local Christian churches and welfare establishments for the glory of God.

Above Bar Church has been supporting pastors and congregations in Eastern Europe since the early 1970s. The pre-Revolution era was a time when the emerging Christian church endured immense hardships and persecutions.

Recent developments

The Eastern European Fund has:

• Supported pastors and families in Romania. One example is Pastor Lajos and Evodia Budai, Hungarian Church Romania.
• Given financial aid to build several churches the latest being the completion of a Gypsy church in Gilau.
• Enabled, needy and special needs children to go on summer camps.
• Given aid, amongst other things, to make good above ground retaining walls, maintain and equip a small village church at Rastolt, north west Romania. Some of the congregation arrive by modern transport!

Look at some photos from the Eastern Europe Fund’s work »

Many people in cities and towns have access to supermarkets and out of town shopping centres and can afford to use them. The Eastern Europe Fund is therefore focussing on horticulture and agriculture to enable the deprived, mainly in rural areas, to improve the growing of their own food, through continuing vegetable trials and by supplying quality seed, implements and machinery.

Contact Chris Chanter through the church office for further information.

Football fellowship

There are 5 ways you can support our football missional community as they again travel to the Ukraine this summer to run camp for disadvantaged children this July.

• Pray For God’s blessing on all the camps at Kompass Park this summer and for the team from above bar travelling from 22–29 July

• Attend one or both (questions will be different) Charity Quiz Nights on Monday 2 July and Monday 9 July—7.45pm at Que Pasa 104–108 Above Bar Street, SO14 7DT

• Sponsor the team as they complete the 3 Peaks Challenge this coming Jubilee weekend (details to follow)

• Cake Sale! Bring a cake or some money to Above Bar Church on Sunday 17 June between the two morning services