How do you plant a church in a city of two million people where many people are skeptical of Christianity? For Joshua and Katie Haun, the answer includes a stack of sticky notes.
Joshua and Katie Haun – and their four children – live and serve in Sofia, Bulgaria, as church planters and missionaries with the Church of the Nazarene.
Before becoming church planters in Sofia, the Hauns were pastoring a healthy, growing church in Tennessee (USA). But then they were given the invitation to join the movement of God in Central Europe by returning to Bulgaria, where they had previously served as short-term missionaries.
As Joshua recalls, “I said, ‘God, I’m not leaving a healthy church plant and a wonderful life unless you give me a big sign.’ I was on a run, and there was a field full of cows. I said, ‘Send one of those cows over here – and just have that cow tell me that I need to move overseas.'”
The cow didn’t speak, but the Word of God did.
Moments later, Joshua found himself looking at a numbered post in front of an old farmhouse. He ran home, opened his Bible to the corresponding chapter and verse in Jeremiah (which he had been studying in his daily devotions), and read: I am sending you out as a prophet to the nations. (Jeremiah 1:5)
This word from the Lord led to the Hauns saying “Yes” to move to Sofia, the Bulgarian capital city where over a third of the country’s population lives.
Currently, they meet weekly on Sunday afternoons in their Alabaster-built home for prayer and coffee, followed by a worship gathering and children’s ministry together as a church family. They share communion every other week, with a shared dinner on the opposite weeks.
They also have a weekly small group and one-on-one discipleship throughout the week, where Joshua uses informal conversations to discuss sermon points and Bulgarian terminology with his congregants – bringing Sunday sermons out of a church service and into the realities and difficulties of everyday life.
Their church was started both on community research and a deep foundation of prayer.
Based on advice from Dr. David Busic’s book The Praying Pastor, Joshua shares how Post-it notes help keep their church rooted in prayer:
“I put prayer requests on yellow Post-it notes on my wall. And I also have all of the names of our church congregants there too. And if I didn’t have something specific to pray for them that week, I knew I wasn’t relationally doing my part in staying connected with them. How dare I ask God to bless this person when I’m not doing my part?”
For Joshua, the Post-it notes are more than a to-do list; they are a relational audit. If a name on his wall doesn’t have a specific need connected to it, he knows he needs to get closer to that person’s life.
And when a prayer is answered? He re-writes it on a Blue Post-it note and places it on a separate wall filled with other answered prayers.
Joshua points to that wall when asked what is giving him hope these days. “I believe God is moving in an uncommon way in Sofia,” he says.
“I believe that based on the witness of past servants of Christ in the Church of the Nazarene in Sofia. I believe it is based on the history of the Church in Sofia. But I think, very practically, it’s these blue sticky notes on the wall that give me hope.”
– written by Jeremy Height, Pastor of Grace Point International Church, Croatia
