When Darius Bocsa asked Bia Olcoski out for a first date, he brought along a piece of paper with these three sentences scrawled across it:

• I’m not just looking for a girlfriend; I like you for “you.”
• I’m committed to going into ministry of some kind.

• I’m going back to Romania when I graduate from Moody.

Darius shakes his head in humorous disbelief when he thinks back to that moment. “A piece of paper with three things written on it. Sounds like a great date, right?” he says.

Bia came to Moody in 2012 from her home country of Brazil after transferring from another Bible school in the US. Darius arrived from his Romanian homeland in 2010. Though they had met at a few get-togethers for international students, they didn’t really connect until after Founder’s Week in 2014.

Darius asked Bia to dinner at Iguana Café because it offered a little taste of Eastern Europe. He brought along his three-point paper.

As they talked over dinner, they realized they had a lot in common, particularly their shared desire to serve the Lord outside of the US, but neither was sure what that would look like.

It was Darius’ last semester at Moody and Bia’s next-to-last. She had been asking God to help her find the path He had for her.

She majored in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and felt a strong call to both missions and to teaching English as a tool to build relationships.

God had used missionaries to draw a young Darius to Himself, and Darius had always felt called to some kind of ministry to youth. At Moody, he took an unconventional path to get there.

“Although I knew I was going to work with youth, I studied historical theology at Moody,” Darius says.

Europe is very connected with church history. I wanted to know more about why people are the way they are, why people think the way they think theologically, and how that theological thought developed.”

Bia’s roommate had told her about a European-based organization, Josiah Venture, through which her parents served in Slovakia. The organization’s unique mission was to equip young leaders in Central and Eastern Europe to share the gospel and make disciples through strong connections with the local church.

As Darius and Bia continued getting to know each other, Bia discovered that Darius was already familiar with Josiah Venture. “I had been very connected to JV (Josiah Venture) since I was nine years old,” Darius says. “That’s how I met Todd Morr, my mentor. He was a JV missionary and the director of summer ministries to Romania.”

“After the fall of communism, Romania was very open to missionaries,” Darius explains. “My parents were very hospitable people, so we had a lot of missionaries come to our house, many that had graduated from Moody. Todd Morr had gone to Moody, and over the years a lot of Moodies came to Romania and either did internships with Josiah Venture or were part of short-term teams that came for camps.”

As a teen, Darius attended some of those camps and also went to conferences hosted by Josiah Venture. Both Darius and Bia soon came to feel that they had found their soulmates in each other. They married in 2015 and settled in Romania, still waiting for God’s specific call on their lives. Darius interned as a pastor for a while, then worked for an apologetics ministry

Darius Bocsa leads Romanian teens at Josiah Venture camp in 2023.

In 2017, a phone call opened the door to a new opportunity for the couple. A JV representative called and offered Darius the position of summer camps director for Josiah Venture in Romania—the same position that Darius’s mentor had held many years before.

Summer camps with Josiah Venture are uniquely geared toward sharing the gospel with kids who don’t have a relationship with Jesus. Some of the camps teach English to speakers of other languages, a perfect opportunity for Bia to use the skills she developed a Moody.

“The TESOL program at Moody helped me design some of the English curriculum for JV camps, which was an awesome tool,” Bia says.

“We use English-teaching camps, and we use all kinds of workshop camps,” says Darius. “Basically, it doesn't matter what type of camp it is as long as the purpose is evangelism. We build a program where the activities, the talks, the theme—everything points to Jesus.”

Connecting with local churches is a priority for Josiah Venture camps. “JV comes in and helps. We come alongside each church,” Darius says. “We equip youth leaders, and we give them resources. We recently had a training with 35 youth leaders from three different counties in Romania.”

Darius and Bia now have two children of their own and live in Hateg, a town of about 10,000 in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. And reaching teens with the gospel isn’t just a summertime gig for the Bocsas.

“We have about 40 to 70 youth that come to our youth group every Friday at Quovadis Baptist Church,” Darius says. “About 70 percent are non-believers. We started in 2023 with seven youth, and then just by word of mouth and by being consistent, we now have a lot!”

According to Darius, the spiritual makeup of Romania is about 84 percent Eastern Orthodox.

“If you ask any Romanian if they believe in Jesus, about 90 percent of the time they will say, ‘Yes!’ But [you’ll get a different answer] if you ask them, ‘Do you have a relationship with Jesus? Is He part of your daily life?’” Darius says.

Consistency and simplicity keep the teens coming back each Friday night. “Ice breaker, game, gospel message. Very simple,” says Bia. And in a town with only one high school, “They know there’s a place that they can go, and they will see their friends.”

Darius leads a growing youth group at Quovadis Baptist Church.

Geri Feuhring and her husband, Dave, currently serve as directors of ministry partner development for Josiah Venture. Good friends of the Bocsas, Dave and Geri observed some of the same reactions while serving in Czech.

“Young people want authentic relationships that will help to counterbalance the fake (social media) ‘friends’ they have,” Geri says. “As youth connect with real people, they are willing to engage in conversations about spiritual things and very rarely will shut down those topics. Ultimately, I believe they are seeking connection and, in particular, a real connection with their Creator—though they don't know that.”

Teens who don’t claim a personal relationship with Jesus find not only the gospel message but a genuine welcome at Quovadis Baptist that they haven’t experienced elsewhere.

“One of the girls from my group—a non-believer—said that she started coming to our church because she felt welcomed,” Bia says. “There's a culture in this church of receiving them and seeing them as people that need Jesus.”

That culture of welcoming also attracts adult family members of some of the teens. “Three weeks ago at church we asked, ‘Who's new in the church?’ We had three people that were new,” Darius says. “Two women said, ‘Our nieces come here for youth group, and we just wanted to see what this church is like.’ Then another (man) said, ‘My kid came here twice a few months ago. I just wanted to check it out.’”

Though Romania has a kind of spiritual awareness, there’s an aversion to anything considered evangelical.

“Getting baptized here is very hard for many people,” Darius says. “It’s a big deal. [It’s perceived as] changing your religion.“

“You’re coming out from the Orthodox and becoming an evangelical, which is like a capital sin—like you’re leaving the religion.”

“I think one of the biggest issues is the mistrust of anything organized as a result of communism,” Geri Feuhring says.

While the Bocsas’ ministry in Romania has seen both growth and blessings, the couple has also faced deep, personal challenges. In June of 2021, Darius was diagnosed with polycythemia vera.

“It's a blood cancer that makes you have too many red blood cells. Your blood becomes thick,” he says. “(This disease means) you have a lot of blood in your body, which affects you internally. My liver and my spleen were very affected.”

Of the three hepatic veins that support the liver, Darius says, “I only have one working because the other two are clogged and fibrous. I don't know if they're ever going to work. So I have to take care of that. It's affecting my internal organs.”

Darius is no stranger to hospital stays, medical testing, and all sorts of prescriptions. But after a recent hospital stay and a change of medication, he says he’s beginning to feel a bit better.

“There's no cure medically for it, but we believe our God is a God who heals,” says Bia, who prays regularly for Darius’s health. “Our God gives us more than we can ask or imagine!”

Bia, Darius, and their two children serve with Josiah Venture in Romania, despite Darius’s health challenges.

As Romanian teens hear the Word of God, discover the love of Christ, and choose to follow Him, Josiah Venture’s vision is realized: youth sharing the gospel with other youth.

“It’s a movement,” Bia says. “But there's only so much we can do locally. We disciple and we are present with [our youth], but at the same time we equip other people from all around Romania. It’s happening everywhere. We go and we help them, but we leave. They stay.“

“The vision of JV is to equip them so they make disciples where they are.

“There is revival when the youth are awakened,” Bia continues. “The name Josiah Venture comes from the story in the Bible of King Josiah. He was a young king that changed the whole nation to worship Yahweh.“

“That’s what we want to see in Romania—a young generation that will change Romania to worship Yahweh.”