KITCHENER, ONTARIO — Kim Loney (49), Director of Urban Ministry Development and former Bible smuggler to countries in eastern Europe talks about lessons learned in her Bible smuggling days and how ITCanada has grown and changed over the years.
When and where were you serving in Europe?
I was based in Austria, Romania and England from 1985 to 2004.
What were you doing during that time exactly?
I was smuggling Bibles. At that time we were concerned about Christians behind the iron curtain and whether or not they had resources. So we were providing them with food and clothing, money and Bibles and medicine so that they could thrive there and also so that the churches had the resources they needed.
Did you do anything else while you were in Romania besides smuggling Bibles?
No, that’s all I did.
You were taking quite a risk for many years.
Well, it was more dangerous for the nationals. North Americans who got caught were only usually held for a couple of days.
Were you ever caught and arrested?
Only for camping on a secret military base.
Where in Europe were you smuggling Bibles?
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, parts of Yugoslavia, a little into Poland and east Germany. That was really one of the flagship ministries of International Teams. They were called “courier teams”. The team that I joined had existed for decades. When I joined it in ’86 there were 20-30 people on the team on average. We were located in the Vienna area of Austria because it was surrounded by communist countries.
What did your parents think of you as a young person being on a courier team smuggling Bibles into eastern Europe?
They were very supportive of that. My father Claude Loney was with IT in Latin America when we were kids. So there’s a real history there. Growing up I said I’d never do it—never get involved and yet years later here I am.
In the early years in Romania it was very exciting, very adventurous times. You didn’t know what the next day was going to bring. Initially it was quite unstable after the revolution. On the first anniversary of the revolution the government sent fighter planes to fly overhead as a kind of reminder that they were still there. Romania has a minority of Hungarians and when they revolted there were tanks in Transylvania. Then the miners revolted. You didn’t know what the day would bring. Where would we find food? Would there be electricity that day? Would the phone work? The courier teams from different organizations all knew each other. We worked together. We were on the phone updating each other on the state of the borders. There was a lot of unity. We helped each other.
How was the church involved with the courier teams?
We as an organization have really grown in our understanding of what it means to partner with the church. Part of that learning has happened as a result of our experience in Europe. When I first went to Europe the courier teams weren’t really working with the church. We had a poor understanding of our relationship with the church.
When the Iron Curtain came down we were already in the process of having people move into these countries to live. In Romania the orthodox church had suffered greatly as a result of communism but was very strong. So we were asking ourselves, why are we going to Romania? And the church was asking us, why are you coming to Romania? Were we going there just to have our own little North American ministry? We realized that that’s just wrong. We could go and minister but most of us weren’t going to stay there for our entire lives and when we left whatever ministry we started would probably die. I was just reading today from “Serving With Eyes Wide Open” by David Livermore. He said it would be like inviting people over for a meal and, without your invitation, they start rearranging the furniture. And that would be what it would be like if we went over and started our own ministry without having a relationship with the church to help us figure out, what is needed here? What is God doing in this country and how can we walk alongside the church? So that is the process we went through as we went from being a courier team ministry to actually living in some of these countries. That involved changes. We needed to learn the language and the culture and become part of the church and to listen to the church about what God is doing in those countries. We had concern for the marginalized. So who were the marginalized in those countries? In Romania it was the orphans. And it was critical that it wasn’t just us starting this ministry but that it was Romanians who had a vision for this ministry. And we could support them. We were sometimes successful and sometimes unsuccessful because we North Americans don’t like waiting. We like to run ahead. And it involved a lot of waiting and a lot of work. It involved a lot of relationship building. Romanians will tell you that in their lifetime they will have one true friend whereas we North Americans will say that we have lots of friends. We learned that we may think that we have this [Romanian] friend but maybe that’s just because we’re the ones who have the money, who are coming into their country. So we learned that we had to partner with the church. Sometimes that was a struggle because, for example in Romania, some of those churches that had survived through all the persecution were very legalistic in how you dressed, especially if you were a woman, and in other ways. So there were lots of things to work through. But the reality is that they are still the bride of Christ and we are called to walk alongside them. And we can learn from one another. We think we know it all but it’s really about the gospel. It’s not about the building or these other things.
The next thing that we learned is that the whole church is called to global missions. We started to see Romanians getting involved in global missions and not just being the receivers but being the senders too. As the world changes our forms need to change and we need to think about what God is doing in the world right now. And we need to join Him in what He’s doing. Part of that is that the world is coming to us.
How did ITeams partner with the Romanian churches at that time?
In Romania it was with street kids and orphans and women. And they would all be the marginalized---often gypsies who were despised by society. Unfortunately, those attitudes infiltrated the church. Sometimes we worked just to help the church recognize the needy among them and then to find people in the church who had a heart and passion for those people. And then we worked with them to see how we could care for these people. We focused on a small number of churches. Instead of going broad we decided to go deep. But it was hard because sometimes we got new team members who didn’t connect with the church we were working with. By then new churches were developing in Romania that were more attractive. But the churches that went through the revolution were the ones inviting us to work with them and some of those churches were more legalistic. So the challenge when the wall came down was for the churches to actually engage with the culture. It seemed like the whole world was suddenly coming to Romania. It was a big change. One day the TV was blasting propaganda about how wonderful Ceausescu was and the next day Dallas was on TV—and the TV was on all the time. People assumed that that was how we all lived [in North America]. So there was this inundation of western culture and pornography and every imaginable technology. They went from pre-WWII telephones to the latest technology. There was no in-between stage. Before that time they didn’t know what they were missing. Then suddenly they could see it in the stores but they couldn’t afford it.
That would have had a big impact on the church…
Right. So then a whole bunch of new churches started up that weren’t connected to denominations at all and often they were more engaged with the culture in some ways and that tended to appeal to new ITeams members who were coming from North America. So it was a challenge to continue working with the church that had originally invited us there. I’m not sure we did that well at that time. We were still learning about partnership and how to work with the local church. I think what we’re learning in Hamilton [with the TrueCity movement] is that being missional is about churches working together not just ITeams having a relationship with this church and that church. We would like to see that happening here [in Kitchener] around refugees because there’s a lot of interest from different churches in caring for refugees. But we didn’t know much about churches collaborating when we were in Romania. If I could do it over again I would do it differently in Romania.
But the churches probably have to be at that place where they’re respecting each other…
That’s right. I was just thinking that. That would have been a huge challenge. When you grow up under communism there’s a lot of mistrust. Everyone was spying on one another.
What was left behind in Romania? What’s going on there now?
Bob Fukumoto is in Cluj with the Romania Project. He’s working with orphans and there are other teams working with orphans in Timisoara where I was. But mostly now it’s Romanians running ministries in Romania. And Romanians are now thinking about global missions and where God will send them.
So how about one Bible smuggling story?
Okay, well we were crossing the border from Hungary to Czechoslovakia. I was with a female team member and we had 800 Bibles in our van hidden in compartments. Because we were arrested for camping on a secret military base our names came up. We always arrived at the border at night because we knew that the supervisors were usually at home and the guards were less picky because they were often drunk. This night they had done their check and they had our passports but we were told to wait. So we waited for 6-8 hours. Finally we were allowed to cross but we were worried about being followed. Then we saw this guy at the side of the road and it was like the Keystone Cops because it was at night and this guy was standing there wearing sunglasses. It was just ridiculous! So we drove down some remote roads and it was no surprise when they followed us. So we had no choice. We drove to Prague and became tourists because we didn’t want to lead the cops to the place where we were supposed to make the delivery. Then in Prague they were so obvious! They followed us so closely--they even followed us into the washroom! So we weren’t able to make our delivery. But leaving Czechoslovakia was just as difficult as arriving because there was a dissident group called Charter 77 who was often trying to send documents out of the country to show proof of persecution. As a result, the guards checked our vehicle just as closely when we left as when we arrived. And on this occasion we still had 800 Bibles with us. We were really worried because if you got caught not only would they take the Bibles but they would blacklist you and confiscate the van. Those vehicles took months of work to specially construct and were worth a lot of money. We didn’t want to lose a vehicle. They went over the van inch by inch, tapping on the sides and running mirrors along the bottom. They were looking for microfiche-sized things. In the end they didn’t find our 800 Bibles because they were looking for something so little that they couldn’t see the big picture. So we said to each other, well that’s God! BLM
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