Emily Graves spoke with Matt Long to find out more about the missional community founded by Gerard and Chrissi Kelly

Bethanie
Bethanie

Bless Network are a missional community serving a network of missional churches. Started by Gerard and Chrissi Kelly in 1995 they now have a core team of 10 and are based out of Bethanie, a former cider farm in Normandy, France. Their main focus is prayer weekends, short-term mission trips and internships and Emily Graves spoke with Matt Long who is part of the leadership team at the Bless Network to find out more.

Emily: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Matt: I'm Matt. I turned 30 about two weeks ago. I live out in France with my wife Becks and my two kids Olive and Pixie and they are one and four, or they will be soon. I've been out in France for about four years; I live in a missional community in Normandy which is called Bethany. I'm working for the Bless Network. I guess my background is in youth work so I spent seven years as a youth worker in the UK, but God really called me and my wife into pursuing rhythms of prayer, living in community and mission, so four years ago we made the move out to France to pursue those things with Bless.

Emily: So what is Bless?

Matt: Well Bless is a missional movement. Our dream, our goal, is to raise up the missing generation: that generation that's missing in the Church. We want to change them to a generation who serves and lives for others. We do that in three main ways: through prayer, through mission and through creativity. We are in the process of buying this farmhouse in France as a training centre and as a base to train young people and to send them out to serve churches across Europe.

Emily: How did Bless begin?

Matt: Bless was founded by Gerard and Chrissie Kelly. Years and years ago they were out in France with YFC trying to do mission and prayer stuff and ultimately they ran out of money and so they moved back to the UK. God really stirred in them something about the importance of cross-cultural mission experience as a key to discipleship, so they decided to set up an organisation that would have links with churches across mainland Europe and they would train and send young people across from the UK into mainland Europe to serve churches and for that to be a vehicle in their discipleship. They set it up as a charity officially in 2003 and from there it's grown and developed and come to its sort of peak with trying to buy this place in Normandy.

Emily: So how are Bless making a difference across Europe?

Matt Long
Matt Long

Matt: We've got this phrase, which is like a tree with three fruits. One of them is we go and we serve churches, so we have long-term relationships with churches like, for example, a Baptist Church down in Slavonski Brod in Croatia where I've been sending teams for about 15 years to serve down there and we run kids' clubs and sports camps and we serve the church and we try and be a bit of a catalyst to get things off the ground down there. There's the fruit of what we do in Europe itself. The teams who go down there then go back to their home churches, often in the UK and then they will be able to be inspired to do similar things in their home church, so that's the second fruit. The third one is the young people themselves, the participants who go on mission and just seeing the transformation of people go out and serve on mission and they're changed by God.

Emily: How do you make that connection with the churches you work with?

Matt: Most of the connections are simply friendships; people we know or people who are friends of friends. In The Message, Eugene Peterson uses this phrase - deep, spirited friendships and we work on that basis. We do work with people that we know and it's all very relational and word-of-mouth. I guess we were just put in touch sometime with these people through people we know and we spend some time getting to know them: we may visit, we may Skype. I guess very quickly when you chat to people, you find a common ground and you know that it's going to be great working together and off the back of that we then send teams and see what happens.

Emily: What countries have Bless been working into?

Matt: Recently, last summer we sent four teams: one to Croatia, one to Rotterdam in Holland, one to Madrid in Spain and we had a team locally in France. We also have connections in Germany and previously we have worked in Bosnia. We're still a relatively small organisation, but you know we're one-by-one picking off the countries as it were.

Emily: How have you seen God work in these countries through the missions?