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Cluj Studio-Café
Funding for this project will provide build-out for a building used by a WHM ministry-partner organization in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and provide an operating budget for one year in order to expand programming activities there. The studio/café will be a hospitable, inviting, practically needed space that serves and supports the local population, especially the university and artistic communities. The building will house a studio, a café, and space for lectures, film screenings and small theatre productions. The studio/café will provide a home, a kind of "living room" for members of a student "congregation," in a space that brings together Christians and atheists, church people and very secular people, cultural "elites" and people of varying levels of cultural sophistication.
In this project, members of a spiritual community in Cluj are seeking to put themselves beneath the students, academics and cultural professionals of the city, to love and serve them from the bottom up. And also to love and serve each other and other "ordinary" people of varied levels and backgrounds who will be attracted from among the general public. As diverse people are brought together in this space and see and experience the upside-down-ness of God's love, the wider Cluj community will be renewed, not only spiritually but socially and culturally as well.
The local Cluj spiritual community is also struggling for the recovery of their inheritance from the underground church of Communist Romania, an inheritance made up of "believers" and "non-believers", intellectuals and simpler people, all pierced and fed together by the same extraordinary teaching and experiences. And also fighting to regain the expression of that heritage for a time that urgently calls for the modeling of an alternative to the empty consumerism that is now becoming a kind of default "religion". This means fighting for their own spiritual renewal in the face of the fragmentation and the deadening busy-ness that attend the increasingly Western and individualistic lifestyles pervasively emerging in EU-member Romania.
One Cluj pastor says that he feels everywhere here in Cluj that the students and young people are "waiting, waiting for something" -- "something" (or "someone") that he says the churches and denominations are unable to offer. And the studio/café project's program director says that, in his work as a contemporary art curator, he has felt this "waiting" in the contemporary art community as well. And many of his peers in Romania and Europe have been concretely waiting for him as the founder of a studio/gallery which developed a strong resumé and following, to start something new after some months of inactivity. The hope is to seize the amazing opportunity that God is giving through the Cluj Studio/Café project to step in and provide a community space for those who are waiting for this "something."
DESIGNATION NUMBER: 11007
