Oklahoma Christian University alumni Will and Holly Kooi have spent the last six years participating in mission work in Vienna, Austria. The couple is currently back in Edmond, OK on furlough for three more weeks visiting family and sharing their work in Vienna with the community.
Will and Holly began their mission work as interns with the HIM program at Memorial Road Church of Christ. After spending two years working abroad as helpers in missions, they decided to extend their stay and become full-time missionaries.
According to Will, their main mission in Vienna is to build relationships with the people of the church and community, and create a welcoming church for members and visitors to congregate.
“In 2007, there was a church plant, and we have been working specifically to grow that church,” Will said. “We do a house church where we sit in a circle and enjoy meals together. We do it that way because we tend to have people coming who have grown up Catholic and want to get away from the formal coldness of Catholicism that they generally experience in the religion.”
According to the Koois, there has been a refugee crisis sweeping across Europe, with thousands of immigrants staying in Austria to start a new life. The church plant has made a direct point of reaching out to them over the past three years.
“There is a couple from Iran that has a pretty difficult background—their family are devout Muslims and they were not so much into it,” Will said. “They still believed there is a higher power out there, they just didn’t think it was the way they had been taught. They learned about Christianity, and a friend told them about an underground house church. They studied there for a few months until the government raided it, and they had to run away and leave with only the clothes on their backs.”
Will said when the couple fled Iran and came to Vienna, they were connected to the church plant through another person and have been studying the Bible ever since.
“It has been really inspirational to me that, despite all the really difficult things they’ve gone through, they’ve been disowned by their families, they had to leave everything they knew, and through all that, they are so wonderful, happy all the time and eager to always learn more,” Will said.
In recent months, Holly has been developing the U!Shine program in Vienna. U!Shine has impacted the Oklahoma Christian University community and Holly said she wants to share the program with others on the other side of the world.
“U!Shine did the event called ‘You Blew It,’ where people are telling stories, and that really caught my eye of something that could work in Vienna, because Vienna right now is really into story telling,” Holly said.
Holly said they are still forming the ground work for bringing U!Shine to Vienna. The early stages of social media, finding people to work with and getting the program ready for the group is still ongoing.
As the Koois continue to share their experiences with the Edmond community, they said living and working in a different country has been a blessing but has also proven to be a challenge at times.
“As we got older, worked there longer and had kids, different struggles started to happen,” Holly said. “For example, if you take your kids to the park in Edmond versus the park in Vienna, most moms stay to themselves and there’s really no conversation, whereas in Edmond so far, in the short time I’ve been here, I have talked to probably 10 different moms about life.”
The missionaries in Vienna are always looking for interns to join them every summer. Anyone interested can apply to join the Koois and their team online.
“We’re always looking for interns, people to come work with us, and one of the perks is you get to live with us,” Holly said.
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