You Do the Math! Multiplying Leaders in Eastern Europe

By: Bob & Sandy Barber with Jeanette Windle

It's All About Multiplication

“It’s all about multiplication,” say Bob and Sandy Barber, who pioneered BCM’s teacher training outreach in Eastern Europe.

The year was 1991, and it was a bitterly cold winter. The Berlin Wall had come down, and the grip of Communism was beginning to lose its control. Behind the Iron Curtain, Christians had endured decades of repression, imprisonment, houses searches, denied job and educational opportunities. Now doors were opening. Through those open doors flooded missionaries and material from the West.

Bob and Sandy Barber, BCM missionaries who’d spent years teaching in Bible clubs and other children’s ministries in Scotland, felt pulled to the needs in the former Eastern bloc countries. But they didn’t want to simply jump on the bandwagon heading east.

“How can we best help?” they asked an Eastern European pastor visiting Scotland. “What do you need most?”

“We need to reach our next generation,” the pastor told them. Under Communism outreach among children and youth had been banned. “We don’t want someone to come in and do it for us. We’re willing to do the work. We just need someone to show us how!”

Which was good because the Barbers were only two people. That January, the dead of winter with snow heavy on the ground, the Barbers packed their small and well-used car and began driving across Eastern Europe.

“We had no clue where we were going much of the time,” Sandy Barber remembers. “The maps had the old Communist names, and these had been changed.”

A Chilly Road Trip, but a Warm Welcome

Traveling through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Barbers met with church leaders, offering their services. Local believers, inundated with Western organizations and even cults pouring across newly-opened borders, were cautious in their welcome. Sandy and Bob appreciated their insistence on carefully checking out the Barbers’ teaching and doctrine against the Scriptures.

On one of their stops in the town of Cluj, Romania, church leadership agreed to allow the Barbers two hours. In a dimly-lit, cold church basement crowded with people, Sandy and Bob spent the two hours teaching basic principles for a children’s ministry centered on God’s Word and using resources the local church already had at hand.

Delighted, the church leaders invited Bob and Sandy back for a 20+ hour course to prepare their youth for their first children’s outreach. 350 children showed up. Since then Barbers have been back to Cluj many times. As teens involved in the children’s outreach became married couples, then had children of their own, the Barbers have gone on to teach seminars on marriage, family life, leadership. Children and youth crowded into those original basement meetings are now leaders themselves.

That’s multiplication!

Bible-Centered and Culturally Relevant

The Barbers eventually became part of a group that developed BCM's comprehensive 22-hour teacher training course, In Step with The Master Teacher, now translated into six languages and in the process of being translated into a dozen more.

Why are so many Christian leaders in so many countries and cultures expressing their excitement about ISMT? Two reasons are heard again and again.

First, it’s solidly Bible-based, Bible-centered, using one simple curriculum—God’s Word. Teachers are trained to take a passage of Scripture or Bible story and develop their own lesson plans within their particular cultural context.

Second, it’s practical and visual. No imported or expensive materials that strain developing churches’ limited budgets or require continued foreign subsidies. Following the Master Teacher’s own example, ISMT participants learn to use resources at hand and visual aids all around to teach Biblical principles. Along with plenty of creativity!

The best part of a curriculum that is centered solidly and entirely on the Bible is that God’s Word is itself relevant to every culture and language. ISMT has proved adaptable and relevant to every people group where it has been introduced, not just in Eastern Europe, but Asia, Africa, North and South America. Multiplication!

“This material isn’t just for Sunday school teachers,” one Slovakian pastor told the Barbers. “Will you teach it to my church leadership as well as the leaders of all the organizations in my church?”

Gladly!

Road Trip Goes Global

It’s been over sixteen years now since that first snowy road trip across Eastern Europe, and the Barbers have lost track of how many places they’ve traveled or teachers they’ve trained—or even how many nationalities. One exciting two-day conference among African refugees in Bucharest, Romania, ended up with representatives from Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Congo to Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana.

Countries have changed, and so has Eastern Europe. When Bob and Sandy began, groups they visited often had no more than a Bible. Not just church cupboards, but stores were empty of crayons, markers, paper. Travel and communication were difficult—not to mention scheduling! A border crossing might be a 17 ½ hour wait on an unlit night road or a wave-through when border guards mistook them for foreign diplomats. Obtaining fuel for their vehicle was its own adventure.

Today a modern border crossing stands where the Barbers once encountered a small games table set up in the middle of the road. Fuel queues are virtually non-existent. Roads and power service have improved. Food and other commodities are readily available. And so are more and more Christian literature and supplies.

What hasn’t changed is the urgency of reaching another generation for Christ. And the need for well-trained church leadership. Because more church groups in Eastern Europe were wanting training than the Barbers could handle, Bob and Sandy began a new phase of multiplication: Train The Trainer, or TTT. Not just training teachers, but training regional trainers to train their own teachers.

More than a hundred key leaders in both Eastern Europe and Continental Europe have now taken the TTT course, using ISMT as a base curriculum. One Ukrainian lady alone is responsible for 155 Sunday school teachers in her region. Another is in charge of Christian Education in a Bible institute. Such stories could be repeated over and over by other BCM trainers in Latin America, Asia, Africa, North America.

You Do the Math!

Yes, it’s all about multiplication. At the end of a training session, the Barbers like to show what they mean by this. Two Ukrainian TTT courses alone equipped 85 leaders from a radius of up to 30 hours train travel.

“If each of those trained repeat the course only 5 times with no more than 10 teachers in a course, and each of those teachers reach no more than 20 children in a Bible Club or Sunday school outreach, that’s 85,000 children discipled in the Word of God,” sums up Sandy Barber.

That’s the kind of math we like!