Bouman prayer letter July 31 2025
Dear friends,
Today I am writing with a very specific story and a very specific request for your prayers. I would like to introduce you to our friend Pamela Shammas. Pamela is from Aleppo, Syria, and she came to Budapest in the fall of 2022 to study Psychology. Almost immediately upon her arrival in Hungary, Pamela began attending our church here, St. Columba’s Scottish Presbyterian church, which made sense because she was raised in the Presbyterian Church of Aleppo. I admit that before meeting Pamela I had not known that Aleppo had a very well-established Presbyterian church. For three years now Pamela has been a leader and a participant in our weekly gatherings of a young adult Christian fellowship in our apartment. Upon her graduation a few weeks ago, Pamela invited Julie and me to attend the ceremony in place of her own parents, who could not be here. Pamela’s mother Marlen died in 2020 of cancer, and her dad Fares, lives in Aleppo. We were happy to attend the graduation, and we felt like the proud stand-in parents that we were. We also learned at about that same time that Pamela, and her Kosovar roommate Greta did not have a place to stay for the summer, so they have stayed with us in our guest room since late June. Prior to graduating, Pamela had applied and been accepted into an MA program in Budapest and was waiting for news of her financial aid scholarship. In early July she learned that she had not gotten the scholarship, and suddenly her path became quite unclear. A day before the news of the scholarship came, I had felt led by God’s Spirit to suggest that an alternative path for Pamela, in the unlikely event of not getting the scholarship, might be to join the Cohort Europe program, which still had room in it for this coming year. Suddenly only a few days later, this suggestion became a live option, and I quickly gathered some Resonate colleagues together to see what the possibilities might be. To make a long story short, Pamela very quickly went through the process of securing an appointment at the German Embassy in Budapest to be able to join our Berlin colleagues with Cohort, then applied for the Cohort Europe program, sat for an interview, was accepted into Cohort, and is now waiting for her visa application meeting at the German embassy. We believe deeply that this is God’s Spirit leading Pamela forward into ministry.
Our request is that you pray for this visa application meeting at the German Embassy on Wednesday August 6, for a positive outcome so that Pamela can join the ministry of David Kromminga and Mary Buteyn and the Welcoming Church in Berlin. Pamela’s gifts in ministry include musical skills, many years of experience in children’s ministry and teaching, a gift for learning languages, the ability to speak Arabic natively, and many more.
As we have gotten to know Pamela better this summer with her living with us, we have learned a lot about the church in Aleppo. I have watched parts of the church service there on-line, and what I have seen has amazed me in many ways. Watching this Arabic-speaking Presbyterian church feels to me like watching my own church in Grand Rapids, just in a different language. The hymn tunes are familiar, the church pews look familiar, the cadences of the liturgy – it all feels so familiar – much more like our home church Neland Avenue than even our international Presbyterian church here in Budapest, which worships in English. But I have also learned more. In 2012, the church in Aleppo, along with much of the city, was bombed by the ISIS “freedom fighters” as the struggle to overthrow the Assad regime turned into a long civil war. Pamela was sixteen when this fighting broke out, and the church building was destroyed. After this, the church community, with the financial assistance of the Hungarian Reformed church and others, rebuilt their church. They continued to worship God in devastating circumstances. Unbelievably, in 2023 another devastation came, this time an earthquake in neighboring Turkey, which once again destroyed the church building. Pamela was already studying by then in Budapest, and I remember the deep concern she and our other Syrian students were experiencing during that time. And again, the people of this congregation got to work, and they rebuilt their sanctuary, again, and kept worshipping God together week by week. War, pandemic, earthquake, political violence and turmoil, none of these have deterred this community of faith in Aleppo.
And now a daughter of this church, Pamela, is hoping and planning to be a missionary, sent from Aleppo to Berlin, with your help. Will you pray that the meeting on August 6 will result in Pamela being allowed to move at the end of August to Berlin to begin language study, to worship participation, and to many other forms of ministry with newcomers in Berlin?
Finally, we have two other amazing people for you to be aware of, as Pamela is not the only new member of Cohort Europe for the 2025-26 ministry year. We are also looking forward to working with two other new team members. Dasha Smolina, from Ukraine, just graduated in 2025 from LCC International University in Lithuania; and Justé Burneikyté, from Lithuania, also graduated from LCC in 2024 – both Dasha and Justé will serve together in Malaga, Spain this coming year. Spain is a new partner field for the Cohort Europe program, and we are eager to see how Dasha and Justé grow in their understanding of faith, by participating with the work of Resonate partner missionaries Gary and Rachel De León in welcoming refugees on Spain’s southern coast. Justé and Dasha will join Julie, Pamela and me here in Budapest next week for a time of orientation to their coming year of ministry.
We are happy to report that our fiscal year-end resulted in us reaching more than 90% of our goal for the 2024-25 fiscal year – we are so grateful for each of you who support us. We can report that each of our four years here in ministry in Hungary, our financial support has grown.
If you have been pondering a one-time, or a new monthly financial gift, we would eagerly welcome your partnership. And if your church is looking to add a ministry in Europe to those you support, we would welcome a few more churches as partners as well. Details for supporting us can be found on our Resonate webpage here. After you tap the yellow “donate” button, you will be asked if you would like to donate in USD or Canadian, and then you will land on a page where you choose an amount, and then on the drop-down menu below you will choose “Missionaries-Europe,” and below that a drop-down menu will be a list of names, and you select Jeff and Julie Bouman. Below that are instructions for entering payment information. (This same set of instructions applies for Justé’s page, Dasha’s page, and soon we should have a link to Pamela’s page for giving. Each of these new members of Cohort will be challenged to raise $10,000, and we trust God to provide for each of them as they serve.)
In the peace and hope of Christ,
Jeff and Julie Bouman
PS For a lengthier update on recent events for us, you will (soon) find an extended update in the June entry on our blog – Boumans by the Danube with details and stories about our recent bike ride around Lake Balaton, some regional trips with friends, and our upcoming visit to the US in late August.
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