Vision
Osijek,
a university city is considered the center of the mostly agricultural area of
Slawonia and thus, the Osijek church is considered to be the center of Baptist
religious life as well. There are several village churches and some small town
churches, as Vukovar, Vinkovci, Ilok or Slavonski Brod that tend towards Osijek
and accept help from it. So to the ordinary church work to the Osijek church
comes the care for counseling and community of believers in the region,
leadership education and organization of local conferences and baptismal
services (the Osijek church is the only one with a baptistery).
Since there was no hope for building
during the past 10 yrs, the present pastor, Toma Magda and his wife, Ksenija,
have focused their strengths at first to the building up of a young leadership
team. They were aware that the raising up of leaders helps the church grow
faster and on the long run more consistently then mere evangelistic
outreach. Today, almost every little
church in the region has at least one person who cares for it and many new
leaders are involved in the program of leadership training. So the broad spectrum of activity has been
carried out by pastor Toma (organization, preaching, teaching, work at the
Baptist Union of Croatia), his wife, Ksenija (organization, teaching, women,
Baptist Institute), Timothy Špičak, younger pastor, and his wife, Ivana
(preaching, teaching, children, youth, young couples), Tomislav Tribuljak,
assistant pastor (home visits, elderly, Vinkovci, Vukovar), Jasna Radojčić
(women, prayer groups), Anita Bašić (administration), Rahela Bratić (Baptist
Institute, Ilok), Zvonko Paluh (Ladimirevci, Ilok). The Osijek church is also a training center for the students of
the Evangelical Theological Seminary in town.