BUCHAREST, Romania (BP)–Cornel Tuns navigates many of the roads he traveled as a child in Romania as he locates Roma Gypsy villages near the capital city of Bucharest.
Tuns is seeking out a people group he was taught to avoid while growing up.
While many Europeans consider Roma Gypsies an uneducated, poverty-stricken group of thieves and bandits, Tuns reaches out to the Roma with a changed heart that only God can give.
“For a Romanian to go to a Roma to bring them to Christ, it would have to be a miracle of God,” says Tuns, now a missionary with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board. “I’m trying to lead by example and have been privileged to set aside that perception.”
To escape communist rule in the 1980s, Tuns’ family moved to the United States when he was 14. After college, he worked with Promise Land Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., to reach his own Romanian people. In 2005, when God challenged him to reach out to Roma Gypsies, he accepted the call by moving back to his native country where the IMB’s work with the people group first began in 1999.
Today, more than 2 million Gypsies live in Romania -– the second largest population of Roma outside of India, their ancestral homeland, and the largest people group without a nationality in Europe. The Roma are an isolated people who refuse to adapt to the European lifestyle, which helps them maintain close family ties and their own Romani language.
For Tuns and other missionaries working with Roma Gypsies, those family ties and shared language are conducive for sharing the Gospel. Today, more than 100 Roma Bible studies and churches meet throughout the country, with some churches multiplying to the third generation. As he takes up Roma work that God is blessing, Tuns hopes to motivate his own Romanian people to seek out the Roma.
“Missionaries came to Romania to focus on the Gypsies and are leading by example,” Tuns says. “I came from America to show compassion to them. I say to the Romanians, ‘Why not in Jesus’ name love the Gypsies?'”
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Dea Davidson is a writer with the International Mission Board.
