What a crew!

The subways in Prague are pretty cool. Some go pretty deep under the city, but they all seem to take us to some interesting spots. Tonight we visited the Prague city museum, a memorial for Holocost survivors, and we got a good look at the castle. That ended up producing some marginal pictures I might share later. All in all, it's not bad kicking around Prague with this crew. We are all pretty different, but we have learned to work well together as a team. We have great relationships, personal and working, and we have learned how to play off one another's strengths. Well, we're still learning that last one. I think that is one of the most important aspects of what we do together. Rick has put together a pretty good team which is better than the sum of it's parts. Today we worked on some philosophical questions which will help move us through the rest of our time together. Tomorrow we start tackling some of the 'big rocks' we identified late last year. These 'big rocks' are the items or issues we believe are going to make the most impact or are the most important to address over the coming year.
I've been trying to get you caught up with what has happened over the past couple of months in each of these blog posts. In this one, I'll give you a couple of my big rocks for 2008. I'm focusing my energies into the area of church based leadership development this year. Most churches need more people to take more responsibility in the week to week life of the church. I was looking at a picture from 3 years ago of the leaders of the Hungarian church we attend. For various reasons, good and bad, less than half of those men are still in leadership. There are some new faces replacing the old ones today. The leadership of a church is not static. It is always changing and growing. I want to help churches in Europe (and in the US) think about who their next generation of leaders are and how they are training them to be people who take more responsibility in the church. One way of addressing the issue is to help the churches develop their own 'program' for developing these people, church based leadership development. I am also focusing my efforts in a few countries where we don't currently have staff in the field: Slovakia, Moldova and Albania. I'll be making a trip to Albania at the end of February to get to know some of the pastors there and begin to sort out what role God might have for our mission there.
Time for bed. Tomorrow will bring quite a bit of robust dialogue with some of the best men I know.