About us
Who is Harvest Eastern Edge?
We help churches to do the things that they already are doing, but do them with just a little bit better support. We don’t try to do everything, or try to tell them everything they need to do, but we try to be with the churches and are part of them. We try not to run things. New leaders need friends, mentors and co-workers, not bosses. We are here to help and support leaders who want to know what we think about the things that they’re doing as we’ve had decades of experience.
We came to Budapest not too long after the fall of the Berlin wall and started planting churches. Those were heady times. A lot of people wanted to do something, to start a church, to start a ministry, and they really had no experience. So, we jumped in to help. Soon we were working alongside people that had a vision and wanted to do things. We supported them as friends and as mentors. We were there to help them in the process it’s become something wonderful.
Originally Harvest International was started by Dr. Kent Davis in LA. It was birthed out of a desire to go to the nations. When Katy and I became part of Harvest, the organization was active in The Philippines, South America, South Korea and Europe. The European work was led by Adrian Simila.
Based in Sweden, Adrian believed that the Iron Curtain could not last much longer. They were waiting, anticipating the fall of the Berlin wall for a couple of years before it happened. During those final Cold War years, Adrian worked in Denmark and Sweden preparing for the East Block to open.
Eastern Europe and refugee work
As Harvest International moved into Eastern Europe and set up its base in the Czech Republic, a couple of years later Katy and I moved east, initially to Bratislava, and then a year later, to Budapest and began working as Harvest Eastern Edge.We didn’t plan to become a relief agency, this has been a natural evolution, you meet needs as they arise.
Numerous crises began happening such as the Bosnia conflict. We had people who had become part of our work and our hearts in Hungary who went down there and worked in Bosnia. Then the Afghan refugee crisis took place. One of our Hungarian workers carried in funds to help the people flowing out of the Khyber Pass.
And when the Syrian refugee crisis happened, it was right in our backyard. We were building refugee camps in cornfields, just in the middle of nowhere—saying to a farmer here, your crop is worth this much, we’ll buy your crop if we can use your cornfield for a couple of months. We built from scratch, from absolute zero.
So now with the Ukrainian refugee crisis, we come into it with quite a bit more experience under our belt. Our churches have walked through some real refugee work and really understand what it’s all about.
Our Mission
At Harvest Eastern Edge, our purpose is to simply stand beside the national church and to leverage our efforts with theirs. In the first year or two that we were here, we were doing conferences and planting churches, and we were doing all kinds of direct ministry. However, we long ago stopped doing things for the Hungarian people and began to do things with our Hungarian friends—we became support and mentors. The Hungarians have been incredibly quick to learn how to do things, and to go after their own vision with a sense of purpose.
It’s a funny thing as Americans, we always get this feeling that we should go and do things for people and that’s okay, it can be a good thing. But if you ask me, I think our key achievement in Hungary is we’ve been able to stay out of the way of our Hungarian brothers and sisters and stand with them in doing things. They are way ahead of us on that front.
So we help. We help with resourcing, we help build buildings, we help do outreaches. And sometimes we offer a bit of hard-earned wisdom from our own mistakes. They love us and want us to still be here, working with them. They know we love them.
Allen and Katy Lake
