Yesterday, we livestreamed Jenn Kelley (Hungary). Learn about what the Kelleys do, about Hungary, and how you can pray for them.
Links Mentioned:
- Read more about Jenn and Dave Kelley here.
- Visit their website here.
- “Go, Dog, Go” by PD Eastman
Quotes From the Livestream:
- To get to know the area you live and work in, take Jenn’s advice! “Dave and I like to check out the different coffee shops around Budapest. There’s some really great ones and we are working our way through a list of the top 25 that we found on a tourist website. So, we go, and we get the same coffee, and we try out the different the different shops and check out the different atmospheres, things like that.”
- “But actually, my own personal faith. That’s when I started asking a lot of questions to try to really understand Christian doctrine and a practicing of the Christian disciplines more regularly, like Bible reading, and things like that. So that’s when I really feel like I started to grow in my faith was when I started practicing disciplines.”
- “So, these are some examples of third culture kids. The term third culture comes from the way these kids blend those two or more cultures together and create something distinctive. That distinction is called the third culture. So, if you think about a Venn diagram with two cultures overlapping, the TCKS (Third Culture Kids) live in that overlap section, and they may have more than two cultures that are coming together inside of them.”
- “We have some students that speak like four or five different languages, and sometimes they can also grow up to be very compassionate because they understand what it’s like to feel isolated and alone. And they can look for people in environments that seem to be lonely.”
- “I felt like the Lord was calling me into foreign missions, but I knew that I needed to explore that more than just the two-week trip because I knew, okay, this is in regular life on the field. I need to see some more of the ins and outs of what this looks like.”
- “And he does have kind of individual conversations with the students. Now he gets a significant amount of time with the students who are struggling. So either they’re in his office for disciplinary reasons or they’re struggling with a certain disruptive behavior or they’re just not achieving as they should or as they would think they might be able to. And so he’s really digging in with a lot of them and be like: tell me about this, let’s see if we can troubleshoot this behavior that we’re seeing, where is this coming from? What do you need? So, he’s spending a lot of time with the struggling kids who maybe aren’t able to go to that depth with the classroom teacher. So, we’re seeing a lot of that.”
- “I feel like putting in the quality time and the quantity time helps to get more buy in from the students and that since we’ve been there so long, they know we’re not going to leave in a year or two.”
- “So, we kind of kept that in mind as we appreciated the perseverance of these dogs where it’s like we’re just going to keep at it. So that was that was an additional aside about the book: Go, Dog, Go, it’s a literary masterpiece.” (Go, Dog, Go)
- “All of our staff are professing Christians that work with the kids, but not all of our students are. We make no qualms about admitting that to parents who want their kids to go to ICSB. We don’t apologize for it. We don’t hide it (Christianity). Very open about it. But for some parents, very different reasons why want their kids in the school and so they send them anyway.”
- “And so, trying to come together and say, this gospel, this is what we both hold to, and then kind of parsing out which pieces of my faith are actually cultural, and which pieces are biblical. And so that can be some challenges in discipling some kids. If you’re doing a big group, you’ve got them all over the spectrum of where they are with Jesus.”
- “Christianity is, for most Hungarians, very nominal. They may not actually believe any of the tenets of Christianity. It’s just, ‘I’m Hungarian, therefore I am a Christian.’ And sometimes this means if, for example, I have a friend who grew up in a Catholic family and the Catholics were also persecuted under communism and she was baptized secretly as a child and her family’s very nominally Catholic. They just refused to accept the yoke of atheism that comes with communism and said, No, we’re not going to take that. We’re going to maintain our identity as Catholics. We keep doing our sacraments. And so, when this friend became a Christian, when she really met Jesus for the first time and walked away from the Catholic faith and joined a Protestant denomination, her family felt betrayed.”
To see these quotes in context or to hear the whole story, watch the livestream.