Israel Speaks
During 2009 the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission celebrates
its 150th anniversary around the world.
The Mission's Israel department's celebrations were held in October
in Shalhevetya in the center of Jerusalem.
The Shalhevetya center has been the Finnish Mission's
headquarters in Israel and the Middle East for 50 years.
Roy Rissanen has served in the Finnish Mission for almost 20 years.
For the last 3 years he has been the head of the Middle East department.
We have our own Messianic congregation here.
We also have accomodations for our groups and networks
who use this center for their summer camps or camps throughout the year.
We also have sanctuary accomodation for people who are in situations
where they need that kind of assistance.
This is the headquarters of all our work in the Middle East.
We also have an administrative office here as well as apartments
for our employees.
Israel is one of those fields where mission work cannot be practiced
completely freely. Sometimes it is viewed in a very negative light.
According to the law, mission work is allowed. There is freedom of
religion, but it might be more correct to say that there are
some historical strains due to which it is often not tolerated.
Our identity is, has and will always be that we are strongly
a mission organization.
Missionary work for us means something more than what is usually
associated with it in this environment, such as conversion.
We as the Finnish Evangelical Luth- eran Mission do not practice that
here or anywhere else.
We serve people and God in a comprehensive way.
We meet all the needs that people have.
We are also ready, when the opportunity comes, -
to tell about the foundations of our faith.
In general, the attitude is posi- tive. Our principle is that we can
openly present what we do and at times Jews from different backgrounds
visit here: Reform, Conservative as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Usually they feel this is like a warm family community.
It is not in our interest to judge any religion nor attack against them
nor, like I already said, convert them.
We present our faith and respect the person as a human being
irrespective of his religious views.
We believe that in relationships it is important to create genuine trust
and respect on the basis of which you can build something else.
We don't see people as just objects but we love them with the love of
God that He has shown towards us.
Tapani and Ulla Malinen have lived in Israel already for 28 years.
They work for the Mission in the Shalhevetya center.
Ever since my childhood I have been called for the mission field.
When I was 4,5 years old God told me that I would be a missionary
and a nurse. Now I am both of those.
Now to how we came here...
The current Bishop of the Jordanian Lutheran Church Munip Yunan
came to Finland when we were on a missionary course.
On the first night he came to our table and asked if we know any family
who would come to Israel to work in his church and in the student home
of Bet Sala. We said we had just been 1,5 days without a mission field.
We are both nurses and we were about to be sent to a hospital in
Pakistan, but we heard that we will not get visas to Pakistan at all.
That was how we came here.
We have done all kind of work in different congregations.
We started in the Bet Sala home in Arabic work.
As Tapani said, we are nurses and there has always been work in that
field whether amongst the Hebrew, Arabic or Chinese speaking people.
From there we moved here to work with Hebrew speaking people.
We went to a Hebrew language course, ulpan, and studied the language.
For about 4 years we served as the host couple here in the center.
Ever since the beginning of this cen- tury our work, whatever it has been, -
has included distributing Bibles.
We did that also earlier, but the work expanded in the early 90's
with the arrival of so many immigrants from Russia.
At that point also our interest in that arised and it has continued.
There are Bibles in the storage room and the purpose is to distribute them.
There is literature in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese as well.
The Bible work has always followed us.
It has also been close to our hearts.
In whatever work we do, we ask people if they already have a Bible
and then spread the same message that we once received.
In the beginning of the 1940's a pioneer missionary named Aili Havas
started the work at the center. She established a children's home
with a Hebrew school for orphans and poor children.
The school and children's work began when a baby was left
at her doorsteps without a parent.
She found the baby and adopted her.
This adopted daughter participated in today's celebrations.
This is how the Finnish Mission came to this building.
In 1958 a law was passed according to which it was not allowed to keep
children here in a Christian school, and for many years it was
a Hebrew school.
There have been Finnish missionaries here all the time.
With this law the school turned into an Arabic school.
And until today it has been the center for the Finnish Mission.
The 150th anniversary of the Finnish Lutheran Mission in Shalhevetya
Miryam Benyamin was an abandoned child whom Aili Havas adopted as
her daughter.
First of all, she was an amazing woman.
She gave all that she had for us.
First we were a small family and then the institution expanded.
She took care of all my needs and my studies.
It was very important for her that I study.
After I got married she helped us.
She gave us the furniture for our living room and kitchen.
When my firstborn daughter, Lili, was born she bought her a strolley.
She was like a mother to me.
She was a very important woman in my life.
I didn't talk about it for many years even with my daughters.
However, you cannot hide something like this.
I always said I was an orphan and when my children
became older I told them that as well.
I have a picture where my daughter Lili is sitting on aunt Aili's lap.
She was like a grandmother. She loved Lili very much.
Anna-Liisa Alkahe who lives in the "Ebenezer" eldery home in Haifa
was the hostess of the Shalhevetya center from 1956.
For 8 years she took care of the practical things in the house.
In the beginning it was hard because there was almost no money
coming in from Finland.
The Anglican Church in England supported it to some extent.
The children came there without clothes and they were hungry.
Aili Havas was the leader there. She had a great love towards
these children and families. We took in as many as possible.
I remember my first winter there. It was was very cold, snowy
and terribly windy. Many trees fell down.
The children walked with their sandals and summer socks
and they were so happy about the snow because it was so unusual.
The older people would always have wanted more and more children there
because the families had many children.
There was a family who came from Syria.
They had 4 children with them.
They had had 12 children in their home.
They had a son called Sami.
He always used to tell me how beautiful his mother was.
I was waiting to see this beautiful mother.
Then the mother came to visit.
She was a mother who had had 12 children and who had lived in misery
and worked in hard labour.
The son's love towards his mother was so great.
He was a special boy.
He grew up and became some kind of an electrician.
Then the Yom Kippur war broke out and he was in it.
At that time the army didn't have phones, but they used wires that
went on the ground.
His unit was completely surrounded.
The chief said: "If one of you dares to go and try to fix the wires, -
there is not much hope of coming back."
Sami had said: "We are 12 children. If one is missing, it's not much."
He went and fixed the wire, but he never came back.
Many of them had a rich childhood
and many of them remember Shalhevetya.
They have come back to visit and remember the old times.
It had been like a family.
Aili Havas was an amazing person, particularly, as a leader.
We had mutual prayertimes.
I had a very long working day when I had to do the laundry.
At least once a week I came to work at 4 am
to do the laundry and do other practical things around the house.
At 8 pm there was always an evening prayer at Aili's house.
We kneeled down and prayed.
I fell asleep and the others woke me up from the floor.
It was a difficult time with regards to money and work, -
but God helped and everything ended up well.
The children grew up and the blessing of God was there.
Even today Shalhevetya serves as an international meeting place
for children and youth.
King's Kids is a group that reaches out both to Jewish and Arabic youth.
David, 15, Naomi, 15, Reja 18.
Yanit 14, Shmuel 15, Yoel 15.
Tell us briefly where you are participating at the moment.
There are two King's Kids groups in Israel.
We, the Jerusalem group, are here in the Finnish school.
The group of Shefaram gathers in Shefaram.
We meet once a week or every two weeks.
We have food, worship, we practice the dances and then we perform.
It can only be done by bringing them together.
We organize camps.
They are similar young people, but with a different background.
We've seen that through creative work people's connections improve.
We dance together and do drama.
We come together and pray.
Last January a few days after the war had ended, we came to a camp
where we prayed together in mixed groups over people
that there would be no bitterness. It was an amazing situation.
We've seen the work of God and it's a blessing that we can enable them
to come together.
Young people themselves connect to one another.
My daughter who grew up in Messianic circles has a best friend
who is an Arab Christian girl. They met in the King's Kids group.
It's amazing that they can learn about each other's culture.
Above all, what unites them is their faith to Jesus.
Our goal is to reach different groups of people
and use different means of the arts to spread the gospel.
Until now we've mostly reached out to believers
by performing in congregations and other celebrations.
We have also performed abroad in schools, prisons and orphanages.
It is on my and the group's heart to reach out to the non-believers
in Israel, to go where the people are.
Two years ago we had a summer camp with Jews and Arabs.
We went to evangelize in Tel Aviv.
We had the opportunity to perform on Tel Aviv's beach boulevard
with dances and drama which had a clear evangelical message.
People were very open and we were also able to share literature.
We had to pray a lot, because often there is a lot of opposition
in this country. The atmosphere was very open there.
We want to continue this. It's easier to be free on the streets in Tel Aviv
than in Jerusalem.
An interesting experience was when we went to the Ben Yehuda street
a year ago, we faced a lot of opposition.
The religious Jews knocked off our stereo several meters away.
We tried to be very careful with our program.
You can sense it in the spiritual world.
For the youth an interesting perfor- mance took place in Canada a year ago.
We visited a youth prison which had 12-18 year-olds.
God opened an amazing connection between the prisoners and our group.
Our young people were very excited and scared, -
but God opened the doors.
Afterwards we heard that 2 prisoners became believers after our visit.
It was an amazing gift and fruit from God.
One of the most important goals of the Finnish Mission, however, is
the distribution of the Bible and, particularly, the New Testament.
This might be very hard in Israel.
We have many experiences in the distribution of Bibles and
in evangelical work among the Arabic and Hebrew speaking populations.
The most difficult ones have been in evangelical campaigns in Tel Aviv, -
Haifa and elsewhere.
There have been misunderstandings. Our job is to offer the gospel to both
Jews and Arabs, but not everyone is ready to receive.
Sometimes we've had to go to the police station.
They give us the speed but we determine the direction
in these difficult situations.
We've been beaten, spit at and kicked while doing our work in this country.
I am always trying to ask myself why I am here and what my purpose is.
When giving out Bibles we have had negative responses.
"Why are you giving this to me? I don't read this!"
There we can give the testimony that this book is for everyone.
This message belongs to everyone.
Many don't know what is written in the Old and New Testaments.
The greatest thing has been to be able to cooperate with
the Messianic congregations.
I have many professions and I have been instructing craftsworks
in the summer camps and leading clubs for adults, youth and children.
It's always the work of God when a person becomes a believer in Jesus.
God should be given the glory, because we don't do the work.
Working with the Messianic Jews is very fruitful nowadays.
I believe in what it says in 2. Corinthians 3:15
that a veil lies over their heart, but whenever a person turns to
the Lord, the veil is taken away.
We are now living in this time and I believe in the end times as well
in a way that when the second coming of Jesus draws closer, -
the Holy Spirit works in people.
I have talked to people who have seen Jesus in a vision, heard voices
of the Bible and begun reading.
When they begin to read the New Testament, the word works in them
whether they are Jews, Arabs, Druze, Bedouins or foreign workers.
John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son
that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."
Usually I ask people to put their own names in the verses.
For example: For God so loved Tapani that He gave His only Son
that Tapani who believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.
We ask if they want to receive Jesus as their personal Saviour
whether they are Chinese, Thai, Druze, Bedouin, Jew or Arab.
In this way God works in people.
"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations." - Matt. 28:19
Translation: Sonja Mattayev