Above: a cross above Larnaca, where the Elys live and serve the church family at the Greek Evangelical Church.
We moved to Cyprus at the start of 2022. Margarita is Cypriot, but I (David) am English, so it’s definitely been a cultural adjustment. In our first twelve months here, we’ve found that trying to reach Cyprus with the gospel requires us to reject light and speedy ‘strategies’. Instead, we need to invest heartily in the means God has always appointed for reaching the world: his church and her ministry. There are a couple of cultural factors that have made that particularly clear to us in Cyprus.
Firstly, Cyprus has been shaped by the waves of secularist-nationalism that swept over Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To the great harm of Cypriots, Christ and his church have been steadily and purposely removed from everyday life.
Yet, secondly, the Orthodox Church still holds a deeply rooted place in the Cypriot cultural imagination. Though it has clearly failed to teach God’s word with clarity and its worship patterns are heavily compromised, it has retained something of the gravity of its call to be the pillar and buttress of the truth. Ancient, substantial and weighty, it binds generations and communities together – once with the rich glories of God’s truth, but now with traditions and history.
In comparison, the evangelical church seems flimsy and ‘new’ – a superficial import from abroad.
It shouldn’t be that way. The inheritance of the reformation is also rich in history and weighty in worship. And beyond that, reformed evangelical Christians have historically been strong in bringing God’s truth into every part of life, which Cyprus has needed for a long time. The evangelical church has the potential to be powerful in reaching the island of Cyprus with the gospel of freedom, truth and community with a purpose.
Bearing that in mind, here are the broad brush-strokes of reaching Cyprus in its cultural context:
- We aim to strengthen and prioritise the local church, and want everything we do to make much of her. We make sure our ministry is under the authority and oversight of the elders, and that nothing we do takes away from the week-in week-out life of the church.
- We aim to connect the church’s ministry with our day-to-day lives so that our gospel proclamation is accompanied by rich, full, inter-generational community. This means things like:
- Abundant hospitality in joy and in sorrow: we try to open our home as much as we can, to share tears and laughter over food and to be generous with our time.
- Raising children in the fear and nurture of the Lord: we want our upbringing of our children to be a distinctive witness of how seriously we trust the promises of the Lord.
- Informal meals and events which bring all ages together, as well as things like mums’ and toddlers’ groups, men’s breakfasts, women’s coffee mornings, seniors‘ Bible studies and youth groups. We want to adapt well to Cyprus’ family-orientated culture.
- We want to fill churches with the knowledge of God by teaching the Bible in a way that connects believers here to believers elsewhere (both geographically and historically) through formal and informal theological training, which we’re beginning to develop.
These things – making much of God’s word and God’s church – were not extraordinary in the past. We pray they will be increasingly ordinary in the future. We long for a church in Cyprus that is joyfully Cypriot in culture, with the gospel at its heart and that boldly, faithfully and beautifully declares the truth from generation to generation until Christ returns.