24-7 Neubrandenburg: A Report By Ralf NeumannRalf Neumann - 3 Apr 2008

It's been more than half a year since our small 24-7 Community moved from the Ramsdorf Boiler Room to this beautiful place called Neubrandenburg in Germany. Which means it's about time to send you some news on why we’re here and how we’re doing…

In the beginning…

Let me introduce our little team to you. It consists of Basti (27), Moni (26), Zoë (2), Naomi (0), Kaddi (24) and me, Ralf, (28).  We’ve been preparing to move to Neubrandenburg, into one of the poor areas of the city for quite some time, but it’s been a struggle. We couldn’t find an affordable place that was big enough for all of us to live together so with only one week left before we were supposed to move, we didn’t have a new home. We felt a little tense, to say the least but God stepped in and gave us not only the coolest apartment that we’ve ever lived in, but also the money we needed to refurbish the place!

On August 18th in 2007, after 3 weeks of refurbishing work and many years of dreaming and planning, we finally moved into the North-Eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (try and pronounce that one!).  Our home is beautiful: wooden floors, high ceilings and a really nice living room. It's in a different part of town called Burg Stargard and it's around 10 minutes outside of Neubrandenburg town center. Right opposite our house you can see the train station, so we don’t even need a car to get into the city!

We’re finally living in the place God has been calling us to. As we moved here, we felt like Jesus was opening some huge doors for us. We really did.

First steps…

Those first weeks and months felt like a purposeful "scanning" or “scouting out the land” to us.  Our main goal up to Christmas was to "arrive" here. To get to know the city, make new friends and find out about what God is already doing here. It was a little surreal to only know about 2 people outside our community at first, but we have more friendships growing already.

We’ve introduced ourselves to different churches and even to a network that most of the local pastors belong to. We’ve found some "open hearts" among those leaders when we talked about 24-7 Prayer, our ideas and why we have come to their city. We feel like we’ve made some important connections that God might use.

We've also been using the first 6 months to try and establish our community rhythm. At the moment we pray together twice a day and have a weekly community evening as well as a community meal. We also have one-on-ones (accountability groups), different projects we work on and try and of course we make sure there is enough time to rest (a weekly Sabbath day).  Each 24-7 Community and Boiler Room lives out the six Boiler Room values of prayer, mission, mercy, creativity, hospitality and learning.  We’re working out what that means for us in our new city.

Provision

One of the special things God has been doing for us is providing part-time jobs for three of us already! You can't take that for granted in an area with an unemployment rate of more that 20%. We all work with kids in different ways, which is a great joy and for no more than 20 hours a week so we have plenty of time for the city.

Destination Datzeberg

We feel like Burg Stargard is a good place to start from, but our goal is to impact the city of Neubrandenburg more directly. Even before we moved here, God pointed out to us a part of town called Datzeberg. It's situated up on a hill, which makes it the Neubrandenburg skyline.  It's a poor, socially deprived district that consists of "Plattenbauten" - grey buildings made of plain concrete slabs. If you've ever been to Eastern Europe, you'll know what I'm talking about.

We'd love to invest ourselves into this place. To be Jesus to the many people who feel hopeless. We just started working with kids in one of the Datzeberg schools and we're about to start playing football (soccer) with some more kids on a regular basis. Some of us do want to move into this part of town eventually. We don’t know the point of time yet (among other factors, it depends on how many drivers with cars will be joining us), but hopefully we’ll be there within the next 2 years.

Good news to close off with: our small community is growing! A friend of ours called Gottfried (which means "peace of God") joined us, which is really cool! Gottfried just did a 6-month mission trip to Gambia, and he'll be with us for another 6 months.

Pray for us

Please pray for us. With everything, we totally depend on Jesus so would be grateful if you could talk to him about:

• Making Gottfried to feel welcome and at home
  
• His continued provision especially financially
  
• Clear direction – we want to hear God's voice
  
• Protection
  
• The growth of our team – we would love two more members by September
• For more friendships to be built, especially to people who don't have anything to do with Jesus and to those who live on the "Datzeberg"
  

We enjoy being here a lot! We’ve had a good beginning, and we're thankful to God for that.

Peace + love,

Basti, Moni, Zoë, Naomi, Kaddi, Gottfried and Ralf