“When Im With You I Feel Like Im With My Father”: GoAlbania Reflection

Last week I joined a team going to Albania. Our mission trip to Albania began, as all great spiritual adventures do, with a delay at Manchester Airport. It was only an hour, which by Ryanair standards probably counts as a minor miracle.

We’d left the UK during a scorching heatwave, so travelling somewhere even hotter felt slightly surreal. Most of us met for the first time at the airport and, to my enormous relief, everybody seemed surprisingly pleasant. This was important because we were about to spend a week living together in temperatures of around 37 degrees.

Our destination was Berat, a beautiful Albanian town surrounded by mountains. Mountains are lovely to look at, but they also appear to prevent anything resembling a breeze from reaching the town. Thirty seven degrees without wind feels closer to 45, which meant we would spend much of the week smelling like the armpit of a sweaty giant.

When we eventually reached Tirana Airport, we met Shona, who had travelled separately, and our local contact, Nathaniel, affectionately known as Natty. He ushered us towards a minibus and reassured us that the two hour journey to Berat would be air conditioned. What he neglected to mention was that the air conditioning was about as effective as blowing across the top of a cup of tea.

The following day, we met our final team member, Amelia, a wonderful young Polish woman who had travelled to join us. The team was complete.

Everything in Common

I deliberately didn’t go as the lead elder of Freedom Church or assume any official leadership role. The trip had been organised by Keith and Rachel Cooper, who are part of the ChristCentral apostolic team, alongside Les, one of our elders in Chester who has a longstanding relationship with the Albanian church.

I went to serve, observe and experience the trip properly. If I was going to encourage our young adults to go in future, I wanted to know what I was recommending. I also wanted to build relationships with the leaders in Berat, including their youth leader, Matea. She is one of the shortest adults I’ve ever met, but an absolute force of nature. Somehow packed into that tiny frame is a youth worker, lawyer and local politician. One heck of a human being, who loves Jesus and the church a scary amount!

Most of our team were between 18 and 25, and I can’t overstate how impressed I was by them. There were no cross words, simmering tensions or little groups forming in corners. If I had sun cream, we had sun cream. If you had water and I needed a drink, we had water. If somebody was tired, another person carried their bags. If someone was short of money, somebody quietly paid.

I couldn’t find protein shakes anywhere, so one of the girls tracked some down for me. Acts 2 doesn’t specifically mention the early Church distributing protein shakes according to need, but I’m reasonably confident the principle applies.

“All the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had” (Acts 2:44, NLT).

For one week in Albania, I watched that become wonderfully ordinary. This team was unusually generous, attentive and kind.

The question I came home asking was, why did that feel unusual?

Sharing water and carrying somebody’s bag shouldn’t be remarkable among Christians. Jesus said people would recognise his disciples by their love for one another. Perhaps we’ve made that sound more complicated than it is.

No Hit and Run Evangelism

Once the holiday clubs began, we settled into a daily rhythm. Each morning started with coffee at a local café, followed by a ten minute walk to the church, where we ran an English club for secondary school aged teenagers.

We played games designed to improve their vocabulary, shared testimonies of God’s goodness and talked about faith. More importantly, we built relationships.

We didn’t want to practise hit and run evangelism. We didn’t want to turn up, deliver our message, push people into praying a prayer they didn’t understand and then disappear back to Britain feeling pleased with ourselves. We wanted these young people to know we genuinely cared about them, not merely obtaining an impressive conversion statistic.

In the afternoons, we travelled to a local school hired by the church during the summer holidays. We played with younger children in the pool before heading into the gymnasium for Youth Alpha sessions. When we first entered, the room felt wonderfully cool. Within about fifteen minutes, it became the sweatiest sauna any of us had ever experienced. I’m fairly sure we sweated out a portion of our body weight on that gym floor every day.

Some of the young people were Christians. Others had no faith, and many came from Muslim families. Their responses when we spoke about Jesus ranged from giving their lives to him, to literally covering their ears and running from the room at the mention of his name.

We weren’t merely making friends, playing Alpha videos and asking prepared questions. There was a spiritual battle taking place. Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6 that our struggle isn’t ultimately against flesh and blood. The children weren’t the opposition. They were the people we had come to love. We prayed for them then, and we’ll continue praying for them from 1,300 miles away.

I Call This One the Seal

One day a little boy, who asked me to call him Josh (not his real name) nearly broke me.

I’d spent about an hour playing with him in the pool while he demonstrated various “moves” he had invented for me to copy.

“I call this one the seal,” he announced, before performing some sort of spin through the water.

Naturally, I copied him. My version probably possessed less elegance and more distressed walrus energy, but commitment was never in question.

After about an hour, he looked at me and out of the blue said, “Dave, when I’m with you, I feel like I’m with my father.”

I was grateful that my face was already wet because otherwise he would have seen me very visibly blubbing like a baby.

I don’t know anything about his relationship with his father, and I won’t attach a sad backstory to him that isn’t mine to tell. But for a young boy, there just isn’t a greater compliment than comparing a man to the most significant man in his life.

It made me miss my own children back home. Yet in that moment, this boy unknowingly put his finger on the whole reason why we had come. We wanted people to experience something of the Father’s love, safety, protection and joy, and to give them an opportunity to respond to him.

I hadn’t preached a sermon to him. I’d played in the pool, copied his seal impression and given him my attention. That doesn’t mean words don’t matter. The gospel must be and was shared at multiple times. But people need to know that the love we’re talking about is real, not simply part of our sales pitch.

Jesus didn’t love people as a trick to make them listen. He loved them because that is who he is. When the Holy Spirit makes us more like Christ, people should experience something of that same love through us.

This Is Bread

One evening, our hosts organised an Albanian night at the church. They staged a mock wedding to demonstrate Albanian traditions before filling the tables with local food. it was very special to get a view into Albanian tradition, even if the teenage boy playing the part of the groom, clearly hated every second of it.

Once the ceremony was over, our new friend & translator “Natty” carefully explained every local dish that had been prepared for us as honoured guests…at least, he did at first. Towards the end, his enthusiasm faded slightly.

“This is bread. This is bread. This is fruit. This is bread.”

Fair enough. There was a lot of bread. It was genuinely hilarious!

Then the dancing began. I have no idea how Albanians possess that much energy, especially in that heat. Apparently, a real wedding can involve more than ten hours of dancing. Madness. I was sweating just walking upstairs.

During the evening, we were invited to share a worship song. Liz, our youngest team member, led the room in Chris Tomlin’s Holy Forever. People sang together in English and Albanian, different words rising from the same room to the same God.

For those few minutes, the distance between our churches disappeared. We weren’t British Christians visiting Albanian Christians. We were brothers and sisters, one body worshipping one Lord.

It felt like a glimpse of Revelation 7:9, with people from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before God. Heaven won’t be one culture swallowing all the others. It will be a patchwork of languages, stories and experiences, somehow woven into worship too beautiful for words.

What Albania Gave Me

I travelled to Albania partly to see whether we should send more young adults. I returned humbled by the young adults I’d gone partly to observe.

Ministry can make you tired. If you’re not careful, it can also make you jaded. Serving beside such a Christlike team was deeply refreshing. They didn’t love one another through grand speeches or dramatic gestures. They shared water, carried bags, covered costs and noticed who was standing at the edge.

Albania’s painful history has left its mark, and many of the children had experienced real loss. Yet beneath the differences, they wanted what children everywhere want. They wanted love, friendship and safety. Ultimately, like every one of us, they needed Jesus.

Albania reminded me why we go. We go to share the good news, but also to stay, listen, play, sweat, dance badly, eat alarming quantities of bread & cheese and love people without treating them like projects.

Sometimes, if we’re very fortunate, somebody might even see something of the Father in us.