fbpx
News Articles

Gypsies’ family ties conducive to their responsiveness to faith


EDITOR’S NOTE: The following articles continue a series describing efforts to reach the Roma Gypsy people scattered throughout Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East and South America. The series will conclude in BP on Wednesday. The Roma have strong family and cultural bonds that set them apart, yet they also tend to adopt the cultural practices of where they live. The push and pull of this identity crisis tends to leave them ostracized and poverty stricken. Southern Baptist workers and overseas Baptist partners are reaching out to the Roma by providing literacy and job education, but most of all by teaching the displaced people group of Christ’s love for them.

KRAKOW, Poland (BP)–When Jerry Goss attended a revival service “to please my wife” in 1992, the only Bible passage he knew was the Ten Commandments from the 1956 Charlton Heston movie.

“But I said, ‘Don’t ask me to go to church again,'” Goss admits. “Then I went to the revival and it all made sense. I knew at that moment that I had sinned against God.”

Since accepting Christ that night at age 32, Goss knows no barriers to sharing his faith. In 2003, after serving God through mission trips and a jail ministry, he and his wife Brenda answered God’s call to serve as missionaries among the approximately 30,000 to 60,000 Roma Gypsy people of Poland.

“What God did in my life, He can do for the Roma people,” Goss says.

The Gosses’ calling to the Polish Roma Gypsies didn’t fit the mold. The job description called for a family with no school-age children -– they have five. The original request was for Roma work in eastern Poland, but two weeks before they moved, the assignment changed to Krakow in the south.

The Gosses served in Krakow more than a year before seeing the first Roma believer come to Christ in November 2004. That decision resulted from a summer family camp the missionaries organized to introduce whole Gypsy families to the Gospel.

“God laid it on my heart to rent a bed and breakfast, and we placed Roma families from a few different villages under the Gospel message for five days,” Goss said of that first camp. “At the camp, God really built a trusting relationship with several Roma people.”

The Gosses also build relationships with Roma Gypsies by visiting their villages, relying on a family-to-family approach in sharing the Gospel. Often a Roma believer will say, “I have a cousin or family member in another village.” Then they load their van with two or three Roma men and head off in search of that unreached village to share the Good News.

Through summer family camps and village-to-village evangelism, many Gypsies from five different clans in southern Poland have come to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. A group of these new Roma believers formed a Bible study that meets every day in a former communist bloc building in Krakow.

“These villages used to be chaos, violence, disorder -– not very nice places,” Goss says. “Today, you can go into the villages and every night at 6 o’clock, you’ll hear them praying, playing music and singing.”

While these Roma found peace for their souls, they still face outer trials that test their new faith. During a Bible study one night, firecrackers were thrown through the window, catching a couch on fire. Another night, some Polish men beat the new Roma believers.

Yet, rather than deterring them, the persecution strengthened the believers’ faith when their enemies returned three days later to ask for forgiveness –- a direct answer to their prayers.

“Six months after salvation, Janek [a new believer] said to me, ‘Jerry, I’m sorry because for two years I talked bad about you,'” Goss says. “I told him, ‘You didn’t hate me. You hated the Jesus in me.'”

Goss has learned that Roma like Janek are the best way to reach Roma villages, since they share cultural ties and a language -– Romani. Today, evangelical tools such as the “JESUS” film and the New Testament have been translated to Romani. The Gosses use these as outreach tools at their ministry center.

Through conversations and Christian love, Roma Gypsies are coming to know the Lord in Poland. These new believers are an encouragement to Goss, who says he will stay in Poland until God tells him to leave. Until then, he and his band of young believers continue to travel from oikos to oikos -– family to family -– to share the Gospel.
–30–
Dea Davidson is a writer with the International Mission Board. To learn more about opportunities as a missionary, volunteer or prayer warrior among the Roma Gypsy people -– and for more stories, photos and sounds of the Roma -– visit hope4cee.org and imb.org.

    About the Author

  • Dea Davidson