A Short History of the Ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ in Sarajevo, Bosnia

Written for internal publication, Winter, 2005, as part of a much larger report on the condition of the ministry in Sarajevo.

History of the ministry
Practical Difficulties
The first Sarajevo stint team was due to arrive in mid-September, 2001, mere days after the tragedies of September 11th. Instead, the entire team delayed their arrival for more than a week and remained in Zagreb while they and the staff there assessed the conditions in Sarajevo following the terrorist attacks. As more than eighty percent of Sarajevo’s population is Muslim, the staff was unsure of what the local attitude might have been toward Americans and Christians in general. It was quickly determined that conditions would be safe for a STINT team, but since that time, the staff has had to deal with the presence of Islam in Sarajevo and the heightened awareness that requires at this time. Practically, Sarajevo is at least as safe as a city like Atlanta, but the international political climate and the conventional worries do not ease the mind.

Sarajevo
Sarajevo is the only major city in the Denaric region of the Balkan peninsula, with a population numbering between four hundred thousand and a half million. It is the capitol of the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also of the country’s Muslim-Croat Federation entity. Bosnia and Herzegovina comprises two such entities, similar to states in the U.S., the other being the Republika Srpska (literally, “The Serbian Republic”), whose capitol is at Banja Luka, in the north of the country. The country is home to three ethnic groups – Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks – which were all at war with one another during overlapping periods in the early 1990’s. Serbs are ethnically Serbian and culturally Orthodox Christian, but born outside of Serbia and Montenegro (formerly “Yugoslavia”); Croats are ethnically Croatian and culturally Catholic, but born outside of Croatia; Bosniaks are Muslims from Bosnia or the surrounding regions. Out of the wars that followed the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia came the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called such because it includes both the region known as Bosnia in the north and east, occupied by Muslims and Serbs, and Herzegovina in the south, occupied mostly by Croats and Muslims.
Bosnia has made mixed progress since its war for independence ended in 1996. Among its cities, the hardest hit was also the largest; Sarajevo has been rebuilding itself since its four year siege was ended, and is still protected by an international military presence, which was recently handed over to the European Union by NATO.

Svakistudent
The ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ in the city of Sarajevo began in the summer of 2001 with a Summer Project team from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Sarajevo partnership was started as a continuation of the Atlanta Metro College Ministry’s existing partnership with Nada i Život’s (Campus Crusade in Bosnia and Croatia, literally “Hope and Life”) campus ministry in the Croatian city of Split. In the fall of the same year, a STINT team of four Americans and one Croatian arrived in the city and established the first permanent presence of Campus Crusade for Christ in the city of Sarajevo.
The countries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia are directed together, as one larger country, under the ministry of Nada i Život, headquartered in Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia. For the first two and a half years of its existence, the campus ministry in Sarajevo also operated under the name “Nada i Život”, until the beginning of 2004 when the name was changed to “Svaki student” (literally, “every student” in Bosnian) to mimic its counterpart in Zagreb, which had been using the name for several years.
The Sarajevo ministry has been in the STINT phase since the fall of 2001, and has had a STINT team and a Summer Project team come every year except for 2003, when no Summer Project team came.

Phase
Staff/STINT/ICS
The STINT team was led its first two years by Neil Arner, a recent graduate of Georgia Tech and a Rhodes scholarship finalist. The other Americans were Drew Matter and Kathryn Reed, also graduates of Georgia Tech, and Maryann Woodward, the team’s Associate Leader. Joško Vukušić, a Croatian from Split, also served on that first team.
The first STINT team was followed by a second Summer Project team from the Atlanta partnership in the summer of 2002. All of the members of the first STINT team elected to stay for all or part of a second year, and the team also gained two new members: Jimmy Trent, a graduate of UNC-Charlotte, and Rachel Rollins, a former staff member in the missions department of NorthPoint Community Church.
In 2003, Neil Arner, Kathryn Reed, Jimmy Trent, and Joško Vukušić all left the Sarajevo ministry for their respective homes, and Maryann Woodward left Sarajevo to serve for a year with the staff in Split, Croatia. In the fall of 2003, the ministry, still in the STINT phase, was led by Drew Matter and Rachel Rollins, and three new STINTers joined the team – Jessica Gorny, a graduate from the Miami Metro movement, and Jonathan Trousdale and Raechel Nebergall, both from the Atlanta Metro movement.
In the fall of 2004, Drew Matter, Rachel Rollins, and Jessica Gorny left the Sarajevo ministry for their respective homes, and the ministry is now being led by Jonathan Trousdale and Lauren Tuten, a graduate of the Atlanta Metro movement. The new staff/STINT team is composed of Raechel Nebergall; new STINTer Ashley Clark from Atlanta; Chris Carter, serving a staff-STINT in his first year as new Crusade staff; and Svjetlana Brezo, the first Bosnian staff member of the Sarajevo ministry.

Outlook
As of December, 2004, the Sarajevo ministry is still very much in the STINT phase (“phase 2”), but the addition of a new national staff member is very welcome and promising. The team is currently run as one “staff” team, reporting to Zagreb and partnered with the Southeast region of the U.S. There is currently one Bosnian applicant for new staff, Bojan Dragičević, and if accepted, he will join the Sarajevo staff team in September of 2005.
There are no immediate plans for any American ICS to join the Sarajevo staff. Nada i Život as a whole is, of course, committed to the growth of the Sarajevo staff and ministry, but there are no immediate plans to send other staff to Sarajevo. This may change soon.