Author name: Matt Eck

Like Family

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BTCP weekend class at our apartment.

The thing I like most about Bible Training Center for Pastors (BTCP) is that it is more than just a class. The shortest track is at least 400 hours of class time. When you spend that much time together it’s less like a teacher-student relationship and more like a family. We have a couple of traditions that I particularly enjoy. We always start off class with prayer. Often I am tempted to cut this time short, but I am convinced that better work is done during this time than any amount of teaching I can do. Our other tradition…which is a fairly recent addition, is a Friday-Saturday class one weekend every three months. We do this to get in the occasional “sprint” into our learning marathon so that we don’t start lagging too far behind.We make something special out of it, opening up our home and having meals together. It’s a time of fellowship mixed with teaching and though they are a lot of work for me AND for Liz, we both have come to enjoy them.
I was preparing for our latest weekend class on Thursday when I got a call from one of the students. He had called to inform me that his job did not renew his contract and since his visa was dependent on his work he was likely to have to go home for good. I asked him how he felt and he told me he wasn’t sure, yet. I was only the second person that he had called. He seemed to have a peace about moving on, even though he had been here for the last seven years. I think the two things that he most regretted leaving behind was the church that he is pastoring and our class. I was touched by his encouraging words, as I never really knew how much our class time really meant to him.
I don’t say this to brag. I say this to say thank you, all of you, who read, pray, and give so that we can be here and share life with the people that God puts in our path. And if you think about it please be in prayer for my friend and the church that he pastors.

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It takes a team: update

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Adam and Kasey with Liz at a BBQ two years ago

For those of you who remember our team braved the cold for several hours at the beginning of the year to ensure a place in the visa line for our newest team members Adam and Kasey. This month Adam has gotten confirmation that he has been approved for his visa. Kasey‘s visa situation is still a bit in limbo. She had forgotten to sign her application which means she will need to come and resign it in person. Fortunately, though it sounds like she will still get it! The plan is that they will come with the Student Ministry team from Denton Bible Church and stay. Pray for them to get the rest of their support raised, and that all the details works out for Kasey’s visa when she gets here

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A new spin on an old tradition

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Viennese Melange served on a traditional sliver platter
Coffee is a big part of Viennese Culture.  Legend has it that the first coffee houses sprung up in Vienna sometime after 1683 when the hastily retreating Turkish army left large amounts of coffee in their wake.  Since then it has been a cultural tradition to sit for hours in a coffee shop, playing cards, talking politics, and especially reading the paper. It’s no surprise then, that Christians would take advantage of the Vienna coffee culture to gather study and discuss the scriptures.  A few years ago, in fact, some friends of mine started a Bible study group in one of the Vienna Starbucks locations. In the next four years they have expanded to all but three of the eleven Vienna locations. What’s most exciting is that because of the open nature of the groups it has become a non-threatening venue for all types of people to explore the message and claims of the Bible. From time to time the SBUXfellowship has asked me to help out with teaching some of their leaders and before we had to leave Vienna for our visa purposes, Liz and I were looking at helping out with this group in some way. Just recently we had one of the leaders over at our new apartment and he mentioned that one of the three locations that they didn’t have a study was only a block from our place. I said,” That’s funny, I’ve been praying about starting a bible study.”  So since then we have been praying about starting a study at the Starbucks in Millennium City mall. I’m really looking forward to see what God will do with this. Please be praying that people who might not normally feel comfortable going to a church might come and hear what God has to say to them through His word.

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It Takes a Team

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The line waiting to get into the immigration office
Earlier this month we had our new teammates, Adam Spencer and Kasey Krominga, come to Vienna and apply for their residence permits. They are still raising their support, but Lord willing they will be ready to join us sometime this year. We made sure they got started on the process early so they don’t have to go through what Liz and I did.
Having recently gone through the whole process we knew what to do to get them ready. We helped them get all of the documents together and walked them through the steps of the application process. You may remember that the residence permits that we apply for have a quota on them making them highly competitive. The competition is so fierce that you have to be here in Vienna on the first working day of the year in order to have hope of being approved. Each year there are more and more people applying and you have to get there earlier every time. The first year we did it, we showed up 2 hours before the office opened and were around number 30 and 31 in line (60 is the maximum amount of  permits that are given each year).  Last year we showed up an hour earlier and were still about at the mid-way point in the line. That year people started lining up the day before and were keeping a list to make sure that the first ones that showed up were the first ones that actually got in.
With this in mind we planned to show up at 4am  (4 hours before the office opens) to stand in line. However, since Liz and I don’t live too far from the visa office I decided to walk up there on Sunday around 3:00pm  to see if a line had already formed. Sure enough a line had formed and I asked if I could put Adam and Kasey on the list. The lawyer who was keeping the list said yes, but that someone would need to be there the whole time to stand in line for them. I quickly called the team and we organized a schedule to stand  in line for the next 17 hours! When I got Adam and Kasey on the list at 3:30 pm they were numbers 20 and 21. Adam came to relieve me at 6:30pm and by that time the number was up into the 50s. So this year the quota number of 60 was already met 12 hours before the office was scheduled to open!
Be praying that the Lord would give us wisdom as we look at the future. The good news is that this residence permit will continue to be issued, but the competition for it keeps getting stiffer each year. Pray that the Lord would grant Adam and Kasey the permit this year and that He would show us how to proceed if we add any other team members in the future.

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International Apartment Hunting 101 Part IV: Moving

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Moving options

I could probably say more about apartments and finding them here in Vienna, but this series has gone on long enough and so as promised I will share a little insight about how to (or how not to) going about getting moved here in Vienna.
When we first moved here we pretty much just brought as many bags with us as we could and then made a big IKEA run and that was it. Now that we’ve been here a couple of years we accumulated more furniture and stuff than we could manage on our own so we looked into a moving company. Though we could have rented a truck and had some friends come over and help us over a weekend, we were under a time restraint and so really didn’t have to time to find a rental truck and a weekend where everyone we knew could help. There are a good amount of companies around and they have some decent prices (most charge by the hour) but I would suggest the following to save you some money. First, have all of your furniture broken down to move. The rental company will be glad to break your furniture down for you (and put it back together) but that takes time and time is money…tick tock. Second, make sure that all of your small things are in boxes. Again for the most part we did this but we were running out of time and boxes so I started coming up with theses “ingenious” ways of packing things like throwing them in bags and taping things together. This ended up costing us space on the truck and time because it’s harder to pack and carry irregularly shaped items. Finally, I would suggest asking the company to come and give you a consultation before you move. This was a huge mistake on my part. If they have to give you an estimate then you can agree on a certain price. This keeps them from “milking” the job and taking longer than they need…which I kind of suspect happed in our case. Though, to be honest, I was glad not to have to carry all of that furniture down four floors of stairs on the hottest day in the summer!

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International Apartment Hunting 101 Part III: Private vs. Agent

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It’s time to continue my blog series on Apartment hunting in Austria. I apologize for the long hiatus, but in the mean time we found an apartment and well; it’s quite the undertaking to get moved around here. I’ll talk about that in another post but let me talk about something that you should consider way before you move, when you first start looking into an apartment.
Here in Austria we you can use a real-estate agent to help you find a rental property. This may sound strange to many of you, but renting is so much more common here and what are the real-estate agents to do? Of course, agents don’t do it for nothing, and they can really add to the expense of finding an apartment. Most apartments here require a hefty deposit up front, usually at least 3 months Kaltmiete or flat rent (without utilities or building costs). Agents usually charge another 3 months flat rent in Provision (realtor’s fee) so going with an agent can cost you 7 months’ rent up-front! Most if not all of that you will never see again (landlords are notorious here for not getting your deposit back to you-we are still waiting on ours, in fact). It’s much cheaper, then, to find an apartment through a private individual. The downside is that private offerings are much more rare and since you are likely not dealing with someone who is a real-estate professional. This means that you are subject to their schedule when it comes to viewing the apartment and much of the time this means that they will book multiple showings at a time. This gives the potential landlord a huge psychological advantage when it comes to any negotiations because group showings tend to have an auction-like atmosphere. The first one we showed up to there were at least 4 other couples there and we were the only one with a small child. It starts getting really hard to be objective in your evaluation as you start hearing others in the group getting excited about certain features in the apartment. The place we finally settled on was a private place but the landlord owns a number of apartments and we were the only ones viewing the place at the time. It was a great experience and we have a really good relationship with our landlord.

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