We sat down with Riste Micev, coordinator of Project Timothy, to delve a bit deeper into its ministry in Serbia.
Riste, can you tell us what Project Timothy is?
Project Timothy is a ministry that serves the evangelical church in Serbia by providing gospel-centered materials and expository preaching training to pastors, lay ministers, and students. Our mission is for the Serbian evangelical church to grow in God’s knowledge through faithful Bible preaching and building healthy local churches, and to see God’s kingdom advance throughout Serbia and the Balkans.
What is your role within Project Timothy?
My role is executive director. In practice, that looks like a whole host of different things: coordinating our workshops, teaching and training pastors, organising conferences, as well as leading our publishing activity, book advertising and distribution of books to churches across Serbia. Wonderfully, my wife Teodora is a professional translator and a great help to me in coordinating and publishing the translations. (We have a 4-year-old daughter, Ivona).
What convictions are at the heart of Project Timothy’s ministry?
We strongly believe that God speaks to us through his word, so training in Bible handling is at the centre of our work. We firmly believe that salvation, repentance and change come through the gospel, and so expository preaching of God’s word is essential for the growth and maturity of the local church. Our training, our books, and our teaching focus on emphasising this simple, yet powerful truth. We want to make Bible handling training and gospel-centred resources as accessible as possible for faithful pastors, so we work with all the existing evangelical denominations here in Serbia.
What’s the need in Serbia for a ministry like Project Timothy?
There is a great need! That’s why we cover so many areas of ministry training and life. For example, there are no other pastor training programs in expository preaching that have an established reputation for being biblically sound in Serbia. That’s a sobering ‘boast’ – I’m sure you can think of multiple ministry training options in your country.
Additionally, as a publisher, we are unique in that we are prolific but focus on solid, doctrinally sound, biblically faithful and gospel-centred books. We avoid books that are tainted by prosperity theology, legalism or liberalism. In cooperation with Baptist Theological Seminary (BTS), we aim to translate academic literature for seminaries, which are virtually non-existent in the Serbian language (or, if they are existent, they teach false doctrine). We are also pioneering the ministry apprenticeship culture in Serbia, which is now being adopted by some churches independent of us.
We believe that all these areas can bring about significant change in local churches and the advancement of God’s kingdom in Serbia.
How does Project Timothy help train pastors in preaching and teaching God’s word faithfully?
We run a four-year program called ‘Preach the Word’ (for two different groups of pastors scattered throughout the country who meet in person twice a year), a School of Bible Teaching (once a year), a Day of Exposition (four times a year and open to everyone, not just pastors) and occasional conferences for former Yugoslavian countries in association with organisations like 9Marks and The Gospel Coalition. We have also organised a pastoral family retreat every summer since 2015.
When I took over the project in 2014, I realised that the teaching resources we had in Serbian were sparse. So, in 2015 we prioritised the translation of two books for basic hermeneutics and Biblical theology: Dig Deeper by Nigel Beynon and Andrew Sach, and God’s Big Picture by Vaughan Roberts. Pastors were extremely grateful not to have to rely on English copies and since then, we have sought to translate a book in every area that we considered critical for the Serbian ministry context. Writing in 2023, we have translated a total of 56 books.
What is the impact you’ve seen from translating Christian books into Serbian?
As one person, I cannot be everywhere, but books can! And good gospel-centred books have the power to transform and reform churches and our country. Pastors tell me they now recognise false doctrine and incorrect theology. There is now a culture of reading solid Christian books in churches and people are hungry for good books; some churches have a copy of all our titles in their libraries. A seminary in Croatia recently ordered 100 copies for their library. Our books serve as textbooks for almost every course at BTS. We hear numerous testimonies of how people reached biblical convictions about different doctrines through our books. For example, people have realised that suffering does not mean they have sinned and that they need to share the gospel with non-Christians.
To end with a final example, in December 2022, we published Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund. It is currently selling fast, including in the former Yugoslavian countries where the languages are similar, and several churches have started small reading groups. Pray that these books will bring more revival and spiritual growth to the Serbian church and the Balkans.