Potoroaca family and Set Free by the Truth ministry 

Potoroaca Family – Missionaries in Romania Sibiu

We are the Potoroaca family, a family of missionaries in the central area of Romania, near the city of Sibiu in Eastern Europe. We have 3 children and we serve people who suffer directly or indirectly due to drug addiction, alcohol, pornography, gambling, and other problems.

I, Madalin, grew up in a poor family with 7 brothers and a sister. Alcohol, tobacco, scandals, poverty, and immorality were a normal part of the family’s ordinary life. When I was 4 years old, my father died, and my older brother, who began to play the role of the father in my life, committed suicide a few years later. Thus I became full of hatred and bitterness towards the world and towards life itself. At an early age I began to be involved in juvenile delinquency, at the age of 14 I started abusing alcohol, and at the age of 17, I became addicted to drugs. Being an atheist, a rebel, and a slave to addictions of all kinds, I reached the end of myself and wanted to put an end to my life, but then God intervened and saved me with His wonderful love and power. After a dramatic conversion, God placed in my heart through His Word from 1 Timothy 1:15-17, a strong and special call to serve those suffering from addictions.

My wife, Agnia, grew up in a completely different family, apparently. Her father was a pastor, they went to church every week and, from the outside, everything seemed good, but the reality was very different. Her father was in fact alcoholic and a severe and proud man, which affected both Agnia’s mother and her 6 children, of which Agnia was the youngest. I met Agnia right after her mother died, and we began to talk a lot about God and what it means to be truly born again and a genuine Christian. After a while, she turned to God in repentance while she was in college, and after a few years we got married, and God blessed us with 3 children: Alethea – 10, Calvin – 8, and Adamina – 5. God put in our hearts, even before we had children, to want to homeschool them and, in these 10 years, God helped us through a lot of difficult situations, and He also gave us many joys and special moments. Also in the 15 years since I became a Christian, I have been part of 2 church plants and in the ministry with persons who have addictions or various problems, and also in the pro-Life ministry.

Set Free by the Truth – Deo Gloria Church Sibiu, Romania

I use to coordinate the Rehab Center in Orlat until February 2021. I am now free to develop an effective ministry outside the therapeutic community (Rehab Center), through prevention projects in schools and universities, through individual biblical counseling and support groups, but we also believe we are called to help the national biblical counseling movement, which is now in its infancy, by producing resources, training and collaborating with other brothers and churches to start together with them the Coalition of Biblical Counselors.

The Rehab Center in Orlat is located in a secluded area between 2 villages, surrounded by lakes. It is an area of 5.6 hectares on which there is the building of the center – where 10 to 12 men can be accommodated, has a large dining room, office, meeting room for beneficiaries, fitness room, etc. There is also a house for a family to coordinate the administrative activity of the center – where our family has been living for about 2.5 years now, and where we are now moving out of that house in April in this old house. The property also has a large workshop where men learn various trades, an animal farm, a carpentry workshop, an orchard, a vegetable solarium, and 3 fishing lakes. I am now just a volunteer at the Rehab Center.

Our Ministry, Set Free by the Truth, is based on the Scriptures approach to addiction, seeing it as idolatry, a unique model for Romania, being inspired by the ministry of rehab centers founded by Christian brothers who are part of the Biblical Counseling Movement in the USA. We use as main resources the following materials: Addiction and Crossroads by Ed Welch, The heart of Addiction by Mark Shaw, and all his materials, Self-Confrontation, etc.

We use  5 types of approaches that address the person holistically in the rehab Center, to provide help to those who are addicted. These are:

1. Developing healthy habits.
2. Occupational Therapy through daily work
3. Individual weekly biblical counseling
4. Support groups several times a week
5. Mentoring and preparing for the return to society

In the last year, God has placed on my heart the growing desire to become more involved outside the rehab center, because I have seen so many needs, but especially because there are many extraordinary opportunities for ministry. The National Government Anti-Drug Agency asked us to produce resources for prevention and to go to non-Christian high schools and universities to give presentations, and this is such a great opportunity for the Gospel! The request from the Psychiatric Hospital to start a support group within the hospital and the fact that they send their patients to us for counseling, together with the County Emergency Hospital, is again a great opportunity that God gave us. The desire of the brothers who are involved in the national biblical counseling movement to ask me to join them and to help train / supervise other counselors and to lay the foundations of the Coalition for Biblical Counseling is both an honor and a huge responsibility. The partnership with the Pro-life center MAMA that offers us the space to do biblical counseling and support groups, the desire to start the second biblical counseling center in the country with Deo Gloria Church of which we are members, and the partnership with the Christian studio Gnosis for Bethany Baptist Church – where we will produce videos to be used in counseling and prevention – are all extraordinary open doors through which God calls us to walk in faith and follow Him.

To be able to get more involved in these ministries, however, there are some challenges. First of all, we will have to move from the rehab center by 15 April, because it was a very intense spiritual warfare for our family, and we are exhausted. We bought an old house build in 1927 in the neighboring village, to be close to the center, but also that we need the financial resources to be able to renovate the house and to cover the family expenses. You can see a video from 05.03.2021 with the current situation of the house here.

If you want to support us and partner with us, below you can see what our family’s needs are and how you can support us: