Tommie and Gunilla Naumann

For years now the River of Life church has supported Gunilla and I, from the time when we started church planting in Macedonia in the mid nineties. Over the years we have planted churches, started a medical clinic, businesses, preschools, done conferences, run bible schools, leadership training and so on, all of this within the region around the eastern part of the Mediterranean staying true to a word given to us “the motherlands of the gospel shall give birth again. Nowadays I am still involved in the Middle East but mostly as a trainer and a coach as I work in a team with a couple of guys in Lebanon.

Refugee work in Greece Since 2015 we have been involved with helping refugees, in the beginning it was mostly humanitarian, but then in February of 2018 it took a dramatic turn, up until then there had been a trickle of people coming to follow Jesus. Suddenly though the Lord literally dropped a few what we call persons of peace. Persons that open up their set of relations to us. We have up until now just done our absolutely best to keep up with all the connections the Lord drops in our laps.

Since 2018 in February we have baptized something like 300 to 400 people all from Muslim background. We are working predominantly with people from Iran and Syria. As I have written we can not claim to be the best evangelists, as this has truly been God opening doors. What we can take credit for is that we drive for a couple of hours to meet a new group and then we continue to do so. No one else here has done what we are doing in this respect.

We are not confrontation versus Islam but just present Jesus and never have we asked anyone to become a follower of Jesus, they come to us and say that they want to start to follow Jesus. Gunilla and I now lead a team with a core of another Swedish family and one family from Texas, three Iranian families, three Syrian families and one single Syrian guy. The work we do is very much different from traditional church work. We work with something called DBS, discovery bible studies, which is very interactive and designed to make a church planting movement possible. It creates what we could call house churches and is very simple as you will see in some pictures of our “church facilities”.