An Introduction
Greetings! Welcome to the new blog for Mark & Rochelle Groombridge.
For our first blog, we just wanted to introduce ourselves and let you know a little bit about what we are doing in Slovenia.
Rochelle and I have been in Slovenia for 8 years now. We were invited to work alongside pastor Peter Novak, who is a Slovene we met while studying at Bible College in Australia. We serve the people of Reformirana evangelijska cerkev, which is easily translated as the Reformed Evangelical Church. The acronym REC fortunately works in both Slovene and English, however we usually use the Slovene sounds, hence we say RETS (a 'c' is Slovene sounds like the 'ts' you make when using the Russian title czar or tsar).
The church consists of about two dozen men, women and children. We are committed to teaching Slovenes to know God and his Son, Jesus Christ, through reading the Bible. We will obviously talk more about the challenges we face doing this in later blogs.
Rochelle and I have three children. Our eldest son is Matej (this is the Slovene form of Matthew and said like Ma-tae), who was born in Slovenia in 2006 and attends a local pre-school every day. He really enjoys playing with Lego, wrestling with his Dad, and watching cartoons. Philippa was born in Australia in 2008, while we were in Sydney visiting our sending churches. She also loves pre-school, going to exercises, and doing anything which involves playing with other people. Calvin is our youngest and he was also born in Slovenia in 2010.
Through this blog we have several goals:
- We want to provide you with another avenue to hear about what we are doing here in Slovenia through us
- We want to share some of the challenges we are facing.by living in a different culture
- We want to encourage you to pray for what God is doing here and around the world
- We want to encourage you to consider how you can serve God's church throughout the world
We are thankful to Missionshub for allowing us to join them in their project to promote God's mission through modern internet features. We trust this blog will be fruitful in bringing glory to God.