Pastor Roth with Tracts

 

The first time that I went to Romania was in August of 1990, just after the revolution.  There were four of us.  Ron Kuhns was the only one who had been there before.  He told me of their hunger for gospel literature.  I found a Mennonite publishing house in Ephrata, Pennsylvania that had hardback Romanian New Testaments for $5 each.  I bought 200 of them along with several hundred gospel tracts, which were packed into two duffel bags.  We flew into Frankfort, Germany and rented a small Opel Vectra car for the four of us.  The car was packed so full that two bags had to be strapped onto the trunk lid of the car – those two duffel bags with Scriptures in them!  We crossed borders into Austria, Hungary, and finally into Romania.  The countryside was beautiful, but the cities were crowded and drab.  As we traveled across Romania to Braila, our destination, we would stop in a town and distribute some of the literature.  We looked for a quiet park to give away tracts.  Within minutes, we would attract such a crowd that we would have to move to another location.  I have one wonderful scene burned into my memory: our pastor, Clif Roth, was a big man.  There he was with a handful of tracts and little kids crowding around him grabbing at tracts.  He had to hold the tracts above his head with one hand while handing them down one at a time with the other hand.  The children were so intent on getting their own piece of paper that they were mobbing Pastor Roth!  He was patient but frazzled.  One little boy climbed up a nearby tree crawling out onto a limb just above Brother Roth in order to get at the handful of tracts that Pastor held above his head!  What a beautiful picture of hunger for spiritual information!  Jesus said in Mark 4:20, “And these are they which are sown on good ground; such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred.”  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after the Word of God!  I trust that they read and understood the blessed Words of Jesus!