Zion Lutheran to host family for Mission Sunday, April 10

by Beth Kraft

Mondovi’s Zion Lutheran Church will host a special guest in Pastor Clinton Hoff, a missionary to the Czech Republic, and his family as part of Mission Sunday celebrations this Sunday, April 10.

Pastor Hoff will preach at the 9 a.m. Sunday service followed by a PowerPoint presentation about his mission work at St. Michael Lutheran Church in Prague, Czech Republic, beginning at 10:30 a.m. A potluck lunch featuring casseroles, salads and desserts will be served at 11:30 a.m.

Members of the community are welcome to attend Mission Sunday events at Zion. The congregation from Trinity Lutheran Church in Gilmanton also plans to attend.

During his talk Pastor Hoff will share information about his work in the Czech Republic, where he has served as a missionary since December 2015.

In addition to serving as pastor at St. Michael’s, Pastor Hoff also works with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Augsburg Confession to help establish new congregations within the country.

He is currently working to move his family, including his wife, Lalita, and their seven children, to the Czech Republic permanently this summer to continue mission work.

Pastor Hoff says Zion Lutheran reached out to him to come speak to its congregation and he was excited to respond.

“We are living in Eau Claire right now before we deploy to Prague, so coming to Mondovi is a great delight since it is so close and the whole family can come,” he said via email.

Connecting with congregations in the denomination to help raise support and awareness of the mission is a constant effort for Pastor Hoff, who has made trips as far as Houston, Tex., to visit churches.

Pastor Hoff most recently served as a country church pastor at St. Matthew Lutheran in Almena, located near Rice Lake, for six years prior to taking the call from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod Office of International Missions to serve as an Evangelistic Missionary to the Czech Republic.

Having traveled overseas to the Czech Republic before, serving on a short-term mission trip in 1994 to the central European country and neighboring Slovakia—during which he met his wife, Lalita—Pastor Hoff is well aware of the cultural pressures that guide the Czech people’s faith.

“While Czech Republic has a long history of Christian preaching and practice, Communism wiped much of it out,” Pastor Hoff explained. “Now Czech Republic is a new mission field.”

Due to its Communist past, the Czech Republic is has one of the least religious populations in the world, says Pastor Hoff. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod only recently began to work in the country.

He equates being a missionary overseas to making new discoveries.

“[It] is similar to being a designer or engineer on the cutting edge of some new technology; or being a soldier on the front lines of battle; or being a pioneer heading West to a new homestead,” he said.

The greatest challenge to his work overseas is learning the Czech language, says Pastor Hoff, noting it is said to be the third-most difficult language to learn after Chinese and Finnish.

“There is a significant difference between formal and informal word forms,” he said. “And there are different word forms and structures depending on whether you are a male or female speaker, and also whether you are speaking to a male or female.”

As part of LCMS efforts to support its missionaries, Zion Lutheran’s Church Council recently agreed to join in to support Pastor Hoff’s mission work for the next year, pledging $6,000.

For more information about Pastor Clinton Hoff and his mission work, please visit www.lcms.org/hoff.