Oral Report of Sharon Baker Bancroft to the Desert Rose Ministries-Date January 30, 1987
I've been praying about how to share this because, when you get into something like this it's volumes of things that happened and this ministry, well it grew out of the two other trips I took, but it also grew out of prayer. There was a group of people at Oral Robert's University that felt led to pray for people in the iron curtain countries and people that were in prison and so forth and so on.
There was prayer meeting started and out of that prayer meeting one of the teachers there at O. R. U. had put out a call that they felt that a trip should be taken to go and encourage believers behind the iron curtain and it sounds like -- well you went before so you went again, but each time I went was a separate call.
And the year that I went on this trip I had not planned on going on a trip--there wasn't anybody going, hadn't really thought about it---I was in this prayer group and that was about all. I was praying at Christmas time-- close to Christmas time--- about it and Gary came over--this was before we were married, before we were dating, before we planned to get married or anything like that. He was a friend of the family. He came over and somehow we ended up having a prayer time together and praying about the iron curtain ministry and the Lord gave me a vision, which was not a vision saying-- GO TO THE IRON CURTAIN COUNTRIES--it was a vision about the Lord's power. What it was, was that I had a vision of a great mountain, really like a cliff overlooking a valley and down in the valley-- it was like I was way up high up somewhere--there were people down in the valley scurrying around like little ants... they didn't know what they were doing--- they were scattered--- they were the people in the valley of decision --people with needs and I was looking at them and up on the edge of the mountain was a figure and it was a kind of nebulous figure, kind of like you might picture Moses raising up his rod and with all of his garments blowing in the wind and up above this valley was the base of what I think was the throne of God--it was like the bottom of a great chair and there were angels around it and I couldn't see any higher; it was kind of like it was over my head.
I didn't hear exactly what was said, but it was made known to me that {someone said} something, that this figure raised up the staff, and that was like the prayer going up and then it was received at the throne, and then the voice spoke and that was God speaking and that was the answer to their prayer and then there was a clap of thunder and a peal and lightning flashes just going up from the throne and angels just going out in various directions and it was like...then I knew that "Okay, that's the way a prayer gets answered and then it gets done" and then the wind and everything that was blowing on this figure that was saying the prayer would just stop and you would just wait and then look down and something would happen in the valley. The Lord gave me that vision before I went on this trip and I'll get back to that.{later}.
Basically, to make a long story short, I was working with another teacher and we started training a group of young people that wanted to go on this team and it started out big and it got narrowed down through various trials and tribulations. It got narrowed down to the people that were serious about going and {then} not very long, about 4 or 5 weeks before the group was supposed to go, this other teacher decided to drop out of the group. She said, "My health's not good and I haven't got any money and I'm really sorry you all can't go. I'm sorry this has all gone down the drain and isn't this terrible?" Then the group met together and we said OKAY... and we looked at each other and all said, "Has the Lord told us not to go?" and everybody said, "No, the Lord has told us to go! Well, then we're supposed to go," And so then we had this one certain day that we were supposed to be paying all our money. It happened that three days before that we had been up in Dallas for a retreat and Rev. Steve Bell [pastor and Desert Rose Board member] was there and ministered to the team. The team was getting some ministry, getting built up and everything, and in one of the prayer sessions the word was that "in 3 days you will cross over this Jordan" and so we took that to mean that in three days we were going to move right through. Well, this was the third day to the day. The money was due the day the lady dropped out from the team, and then she just disappeared and nobody know where she had gone to. We had to find out where she went. I didn't even know who the travel agent was. She had handled all the finances, the money and everything up until that point; so we got together and had a prayer meeting-- that was the second prayer meeting of the day and we said "Okay, Lord, you know the need."
I went into my office. I was teaching at that time. I shut the door and I was very agitated, very nervous, very upset and really carrying the burden of all this money, this $21,000 that we had to raise and everything, and I just said, "Okay, Lord, what do I do?" and I just sat there and it was like the room disappeared and the whole vision come back to me and the Lord said, "You are the figure-- raise up the staff!" And all this wind began to blow and come down on me and all this stuff was happening and I just saw myself on this cliff, and it was like in the Spirit. I don't know how I did it, but in the Spirit, I just raised up the staff and the clap went forth and the thunder went forth and God said, "It's taken care of !" and so I just said, "Okay," And I just had complete peace and a short time after that, I don't know exactly how long-- it was around three o'clock and the phone rang. And it was this lady calling up and she said, "I don't know why I'm calling you, we're not having the trip, we're not doing it and this and this and this...." and then I just took a deep breath and the Lord just spoke through me and I said, "Take me to the travel agent." And she said, "Well, you can't, we're not doing anything". And I said, "The Lord has told me that we are going." She was very insistent that she wasn't going to, but to make a long story short, she took me there and we went and everything was re-arranged. The travel agent was not able to get through to all her contacts--you see we were going to about 7 or 8 countries and she was trying to organize this whole thing. She didn't have a price... she couldn't charge us because she didn't have a price and all she needed was the down payment on the plane tickets which was just about exactly how much money we had. The other lady said that you couldn't do that because you would have to forfeit if it doesn't work out and I said, "We have all agreed and said we're putting it down." It was four thousand dollars which was how much we had raised so far out of the $21,000. We put that down and then through a series of further miracles we got all of our money. Even up to the very last day we did not have the amount of money budgeted, which I felt that to be responsible we needed to budget a certain amount.
The very last day we were running around town trying to buy things. "We've got to get scarves," I said, "because it's the common custom in the countries where we were going for the women to wear scarves," and they weren't in style that year-- we couldn't find any anywhere. Then this guy on the team said, "Well, I have a leading that there is this little old lady who had a scarf collection at her house that I visit over here at this retirement home" and so we went there and she donated these scarves, and her husband who she said had never donated anything to anybody up until that time, not even to the church--opened up his wallet and pulled out about $3500 and handed it to us and that was our last money--the day before we went.
Now I'll try to go through the trip and just hit the highlights. We started in Germany. It wasn't all a trip of miracles, but I'm just going to share miracles just to make it short so I can give the glory to God and show things that He can do when you can't do anything about it other than to trust the Lord. One of the main miracles of this trip was --one of the prophecies we had received back in that meeting in Dallas was that no one is going to know where you came from and no one is going to know where you go. One of the miracles of the trip was that somehow although I hadn't been the leader before and had just kind of been following along,--it's kind of like when you're riding in a car when someone else is driving, you don't necessarily see how to get there. Going back to all these places, not really knowing where they were and finding them was a real miracle. It was like God, every time, just gave me a supernatural remembrance of these places. And a lot of them were real hard to find. None of these places were real big buildings or anything like that.
When we got to Frankfurt, we had to take the train all the way to Austria, and we were trying to go to the Youth with a Mission base--it's near there. The first problem was when we got into Vienna, we tried to call them and we couldn't get them on the phone. There was a man that we had been witnessing to on the train and had spent all this time talking to him and he said, "I live here and I'll keep calling them." And he kept calling them and kept calling and we said we're just going to have to go out there--This Youth with a Mission base is way out in the country, and we were ready to get on the train and there was no train to Reichenau-Rax even though I knew that before we had gone to Reichenau--this was in Austria--that we had gotten to the train from there to go to Yugoslavia. And that it had been the same train that we had taken from Vienna into Reichenau. So here I was in Vienna and I looked on the train thing and I said, "Well, here's a train to Yugoslavia, it must stop in Reichenau." It didn't say that it did, but somehow I remembered that. There was no one around that spoke any English or German. All the guys in the train station were Yugoslavs and I couldn't talk with them. So we got on this train and everybody on there was Yugoslavian and they were all going to Yugoslavia and the team was saying--"Where are we going?" We didn't have visa to Yugoslavia. It's a communist country [which at that time you could get into a lot of trouble for trying to enter without a visa] and here we were getting on this train by faith and we didn't know if they were going to stop in Reichenau. We got on and were looking out the train window and watching to see because we didn't know if they were going to stop. I began to recognize things and saw the sign just as we were coming into the station and pulled the cord and they stopped. And there we were! This train station was about 2 miles straight down a mountain {in the Austrian Alps} from the Youth with a Mission place. And we thought--how are we going to get up there? But the man on the train had managed to get a hold of the Youth with a Mission people and they were there at the station (very late at night)!
So we stayed there with Youth With A Mission and we did some ministry there--their ministry there at that time was working with Polish refugees and we visited with a bunch of Polish refugees and really encouraged them and there was one young man that had been brought to the Lord by the Youth With Mission people and we kept encouraging him. One of things that struck me about our team was--other than me--all the people in this group had been in the church all of their lives and had slowly gotten committed and got the baptism of the Holy Spirit with no big crisis thing and they said-we don't have a real good testimony and why has God sent us on this team--but everybody we ran into we ministered to was somebody just like that. And that is how it was with the Polish guy---he had been a good Catholic all his life and found out there was a little more to it than just following the rules of the church and he had gotten saved and they witnessed to him about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That was the main thing we did there in Austria. The next thing that was real exciting to me was when we went to Czechoslovakia.
In Czechoslovakia there was another miracle. Of course we were on a tour [because to go into a communist country at that time you had to be on a registered tour sponsored by the official government tourist agency] so some of this stuff was on the tour, but most of the time we spent dodging some of the stuff the tour had planned [that] we were trying to get away from. That really wasn't our business to be tourists, but you have to be on a tour to go to a communist country.
One morning I got up and said, "Okay, I think it's this trolley right here." We were in a different hotel than we were in last time [2 years prior] and I just looked around the city and I tried to remember. We got on this trolley and I said, "We’ll just go until I see something that looks familiar." Then I saw this little street and said, "I think this is the street!" We got off and went right to the church!
There is no way in the world that I could have remembered it except for the Holy Spirit because I was in a total state of exhaustion when I had gone on the first trip two years ago. I didn't go there the second year.
When we got there it was like they were expecting us! Everywhere we went -- we had set letters -- but not one of the churches had received them-- we got no replies-- we went totally on faith with the trip -- we had contacts at some places and other places we didn't. They said things like -- "Oh, we’re glad you're here" -- "We knew you'd come back some day" and "Isn't this nice." We got to talk with the pastor. That was really neat on this trip -- before it had always been the leader that had been with the pastor and then at the last minute he brought the young people in and we sang. This time the whole group was let in on the inside story.
This man told how the communists wouldn't let him have any property and this particular church was built underground -- because they don't like big churches where they can be seen -- the communist party who ran the government was trying to propagate the idea that there's not really any big churches anywhere because Christianity is on the way out!
The congregation was planning to build a big church but they couldn't ever get the papers. They would apply and the communists [government officials] would put them down and wouldn't let them get it. Here is what they finally did--the communists had a rule that you can't build a church-- you can only use an existing building. So they bought this existing building that was like nine feet by nine feet. This was for a church of 400 people! They were going to make ‘repairs' on this building and the repairs that they had planned on this building was an architectural mock up that was this big [4 ft wide]. You know how little models are. It was an auditorium that would seat about 2,000 people-- and that was the repairs on this building. So that's how they were going to apply. They said, "we have our ways of getting around their ways of getting around us!" So they had this plan and we prayed with them that the Lord would fulfill their vision.
We were slated to speak in the service--one of the things that had really frustrated me about Eastern Europe ministry before was the amount of time you ever got to speak usually is about two minutes and you cut that in half with your interpreter. So you really pray and you really know that your word is the word of the moment for the minute. We prayed, "Lord, we are really praying that we will have more time" and that was fulfilled. We got there and we were supposed to speak and they just cut us from the program because at the last minute some guy came in from Sweden and he was a big so and so and he got up there and he talked an hour and a half. Of course their services are regulated in registered churches; the service was over and that was it.
The people knew we were there and they were waiting for us to speak when the pastor said, "That's it -- everybody go home." And everybody just sat there. Nobody moved. Then the pastor got up and said, "Okay, everybody go home". and everybody just sat there -- nobody moved.
Finally, the youth director got up and said, "We want these people to speak." [meaning us]. The pastor said "No". The youth director just stood there and looked at the people and nobody was moving. There we were and he said, "There will be a brief reception after the service in the upper room for the young people from America." And then the whole church came into this little tiny room--crammed in there-- standing room only and we all got to share our complete testimony -- I mean about twenty or thirty minutes each-- the entire group {of six people} -- took questions and answers and all kinds of things.
This youth minister was one of the young men who had gotten saved when the first team went two years before and he really was going on with God! He had been an atheist and he had gotten saved during our first ministry and we went back and he was still there and he was really on fire for God! The youth group had really grown since he had been working with them.
We also gave some books there in English to this one fellow I met there the first year and he translates them from English and then runs them off on an underground press.
I had brought some theology books to give to those people that I knew would meet the need because in Czechoslovakia, to be a minister they make you go to the seminary. And the seminary there is 100 % completely liberal. These guys were really having a tough time there-- they {being evangelicals} had to learn all this stuff although they didn't believe it in order to be able to minister in a registered church. These books that I gave to them refuted some of that.
*{I'll never forget meeting that guy with the underground press. He was a young guy about 20 or so. He met with us to receive the theology books. He told us about how they had to be so strong spiritually in their family because of all the propaganda and how they had prayer and bible reading every morning and every night for an hour at home. To him it was so important they dare not miss it, ever. He told us he had to get going because he didn't want to be late for it. He told us about how they all had regular 10-12 hour jobs and how they came home every night and took turns translating books and running them off on presses that were assembled from "spare" parts gathered from all over. He shared about his fiancé who was a beautiful girl with long brown hair and how they were going to pastor. His whole family studied hard to learn English for translation work because there were very few books in their language dealing with evangelical subjects. We asked if we could pray with him.*}*[part added to the oral report]
Then we went to Budapest.
Sharon Bancroft © 2001
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