With the large amount of progress made during the first two
days of the week building walls for the new church, and with Meghan, David,
Brian, and Kerry now very efficient in supplying bricks to those laying the
bricks, the remaining supply of bricks bought by the church before the mission team
arrived were quickly used up during the morning of Wednesday September 5. This
was an accomplishment that no one in the church or on our mission team expected
before we began the project on Monday. Pastor
Jerry later commented that this was the first time their church had experienced
a shortage of materials rather than a shortage of workers in working on the
construction of their new church!
Now the only remaining tasks left to complete for the
first-floor walls of the Konstantinovy Lazne Baptist church were to build
arches for windows and lintels for doors on the top of the walls. This would be done after our mission team
returned to the U.S. ,
so we spent the remainder of the work-day chipping off 100-year-old plaster that
coated the outer wall of what used to be a movie theater that would now be an interior
wall of the church’s sanctuary. With
Kerry, Brian, Meghan, and David using a pick-axe, chisels, and hammers, this
was very tiring work, and we were happy when most of the plaster was finally
removed. Clara did a lot of sweeping up of the plaster that was chipped off the
wall.
With the most difficult project of
our mission trip completed, team members enjoyed Wednesday evening celebrating
with a dinner at a nice restaurant in the center of Konstantinovy Lazne,
walking less than a mile there from our inn through the beautiful
heart-treatment spa areas that this city is famous for. It was a fitting reward for all our team
accomplished since arriving here on August 31.
On Thursday morning, our mission
team packed up to return to Prague
for the last four days of our trip.
We’d spent a wonderful five days in
Konstantinovy Lazne in holding a Crafts Fair at the church, helping to build
the new church’s walls, and seeing sights in and around the city. We’d be missing staff members Robert and Matt
of the “Flora” inn where we stayed and ate most of our meals. We’d especially
miss our good friend Maja, who is a member of the Konstantinovy
Lazne Baptist
Church studying towards her PhD in
Mathematics in Prague ,
who’d been our translator and co-worker during several workday along with
spending fun time with us. Before we
left, Pastor Jerry stopped by to give each team member special gifts from his
congregation to thank us for our mission trip that was a tremendous boost towards
the completion of his church. With the
$2300 of ABCRM missions funds allocated to this mission trip for buying the foundation
and bricks for the church’s first floor, and with the combined efforts of our
mission team and the church’s construction workers, they estimated we’d
accomplished in three workdays what would have otherwise taken the church three
months to do.
On our way back to Prague in
Pieter’s van, we stopped in Pilsen to see the town square with its enormous
cathedral initially constructed in 1295, and later we also visited the memorial
and museum at Lidice that commemorates the complete destruction of this once
quant village on June 10, 1942 by Nazi soldiers in retribution for a Nazi
commander being killed by Czech agents in Prague the previous month. It was quite emotional to learn in the museum
of how the children of Lidice parents were forcibly taken from their parents by
soldiers and subsequently gassed in the trucks they were transported in, as
well as our mission team walking in the exact area next to the museum where the
German soldiers had executed all 173 men in the village over 16 years of
age. It is a tragic event in the Czech Republic
When we arrived back in
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