Locked & Loaded

Packed up for Stockholm tomorrow. Talking with friends about their vision of 20 new churches in Stockholm by 2020 to see if we can find some ways to partner.

Round Flat Tables

I'm sitting here at 05:30 waiting on my flight to Madrid for a meeting with our ReachGlobal European leadership team, and I'm thinking. One statement that I've made is that we in RG Europe want to help create 'round, flat tables' for partnership. Round tables so that everyone can see everyone else. Flat tables because we are all equals. No one is 'above' anyone else based on money, geographic birthplace, or power. This attitude is best described in Philippians 2:5-11 and it is supernatural. As North Americans, this is counter-cultural and we're generally not very good at having this attitude. We think we have what everyone else needs to hear or have. I'm hoping that we can make some good progress this week in helping to create these tables. -it's about the glory of God

Non-competition

We’re trying to make more a point of connecting with other ministries around Europe. Part of that is meeting with guys who are roles similar to mine. There are a pile of people here in Budapest who have regional roles. We’ve talked about doing this for a while, and today is the first whack at it. Please pray for us that we would be able to figure out how we can cooperate better for the Kingdom.

UPDATE:
Not everyone we were hoping to see was able to come to the meeting. Four organizations were represented and we're hoping to see at least two or three more take part as this develops. It was a good time of getting to know each other and starting to see what it might look like. This was a small taste and now we have a developing thirst to see God move among us.

Seventy new ones

The EFK is an exciting group in Sweden. I know the picture doesn’t exactly convey the electricity in the room, but that was because this was at the end of the day, following a lunch and we hadn’t been properly re-caffeinated.

A vision to start 70 new churches in Sweden before 2020 is inspiring. The sad reality is that by their estimation, that only slows the decline in the number of believers in Sweden. They told us how they close churches every year and hope to start new ones to replace them in growing areas of Sweden, but it’s difficult to keep up.

I should mention that there were more people at the meeting earlier, but I was too engaged in the conversation to think about getting a good group shot. Regardless, it was an encouraging day as they expressed their desire to help as many people as possible start as many new churches as possible. And they asked us to help.

Later today we hop over to Tallinn, Estonia for 48 hours to check in with Argo, a church planter there. No updates for a bit, because I’m not taking my computer. Pray that we can be an encouragement like we’ve been encouraged here.

Learning about New Life

Today James and I were with the staff from New Life Church all day. It was a very good day. We shared blessings and needs then spent time praising our Father and asking Him for help. James sat in on their staff meeting while I met with the pastor of Tomaskyrkan, another Evangelical Free Church of Sweden (EFK) partnering with New Life. I think we both learned a lot today about Stockholm, these churches, and what partnering with them might look like.

Here are some things we learned:

Tomaskyrkan and New Life are working hard to connect artists with the Gospel through Synergy.

New Life wants to be a part of starting 20 new churches in Stockholm by 2020. (Stockholm 2020 is aiming for 50)

About 1% of youth in Sweden have any contact with a church or youth group.

God is working here.

Bosse in Stockholm

Stockholm is a city of almost 2 million people.  James Lauderdale, my co-worker, and I are here learning as much as we can about Stockholm and a group with which we’d like to partner. We were told that the Stockholm of today is significantly different than the Stockholm of 20 years ago. Over 35000 immigrants each year settle in Stockholm. Most of the Swedes aren’t attending any church at all.

Bosse is a retired architect who gives his time to New Life Church. He started attending New Life two years ago after his wife died of cancer. He wanted to make a new start, so the EFK (Evangelical Free Church of Sweden) church he was attending blessed him and sent him to New Life to serve this Swedish church with a strong international profile. Bosse says, “I have a new life at New Life!”

We attended the coffee house they have on Monday nights at the rented facilities where they meet. It’s how they welcome new people to their community. It was exciting to see how this group of about 30 (primarily Russian speakers) were encouraging each other.

New Life is a church of about 600 people representing about 50 different countries. They have a vision to start 10 more churches in the Stockholm area in the next ten years. James and I are hoping to learn a lot this week.

My Boss Speaking at Cape Town 2010

Two false notions American churches should reject about global ministry

Pastor Chris Brauns gets the hat tip for this post. Seriously good stuff to keep in mind as you are partnering with the Church in Europe or anywhere for that matter. Thanks Chris!

Leading From the Sandbox: Seven Questions for every ministry

This is the kind of stuff we got at LeadTeam.

These are questions I'm trying to ask myself every day.

Leading From the Sandbox: Seven Questions for every ministry

LeadTeam Report

LeadTeam was pretty good. Ok, I think it was the best so far. We had a great start with the Quiet Waters Retreat where we spent the day in fasting and prayer. We got a significant amount of time with our leadership where they were transparent in sharing their heart for the vision to which God is calling us.

I have a few questions that I'm planning on reviewing regularly:

• Am I thinking too small?
• Am I underestimating the power of the Gospel?
• Am I underestimating God's power within me?
• Am I thinking too narrowly?
• Am I working too independently of others?

Here is how I'll be describing RG when I'm meeting with partners in the US & Europe:

We are a Gospel-centered movement

transforming lives, communities and institutions world wide

in the power of God's Spirit

I'm excited about where RG is going.

LeadTeam

LeadTeam has been great. We started off with a day of fasting and prayer. I appreciate that ReachGlobal considers this important enough to begin our major leadership events with seeking God together.

Today, I had the privilege of sitting on a panel of guys involved in developing partnerships around the world. I was definitely the one who least deserved to be on the panel, but it was a good experience for me.

Our team from Europe challenged the rest of the world to a streetball game tonight. I'm interested to see if anyone takes up our challenge. It's great to be with these people, to be pushed and sharpened in our thinking and actions.

Leadership Meetings & My Role

January is the beginning of travel season for me. January 21 marked the beginning of 8 days of meetings with the Europe Leadership Team. It was an encouraging time. There has been a lot of transition since Rick Burke left as International Leader for Europe. We spent some time working on organizing ourselves so that we are covering all the important areas.

I was affirmed in my role of 'partnership strategist' or something like that. Basically, I work where we don't have RG staff to mobilize movements. What does that mean? I do a lot of meeting people to figure out who might be like-minded partners. I talk a lot about the RG Sandbox (an illustration which describes how we operate). I try to connect people who I think might help each other. I ask questions to help people think about their strategy and come up with good ideas. I encourage/teach principles of church-based leadership development.

Next post will be explaining a bit about how all that happened on my trip to Albania. First, I've got to shave Nate & John's heads for Crazy Hair Day at school.

Four principles from 2 Cor 8

v. 5 Giving to God, then to each other
v. 8 Not as those who give orders, but those who serve
v. 9 Not as those who own, but as those who give
v.14 Mutual benefit and equal worth

David loaded us down with quite a bit there. I'm loving it.

Question to ruminate on:
Where have I been challenged today in my thinking?
hmm...I hope I can get it all into words in the next couple of days.

Thanks for being a part of my first live blogging experience. I hope it was as exciting to you as it was exhausting to me.

Looking at Structures

David is talking about the beginnings of COMIBAM and how it was organized. It was a cooperative structure in a country between Pastors & Churches, Missions Agencies, and Network of Training Centers which all came together in a network called the National Missionary Movement.

COMIBAM became a catalyst in that structure.

Research is required to figure out who all the players are so they can begin to network together.

After relationships and some level of trust is established 'action networks' can be established to accomplish tasks through voluntary cooperation. As tasks are undertaken together, trust grows and stronger, closer relationships are established .

Cooperation is the starting point for mission. Interesting...

Another finger break...

Causes of spiritual and missionary growth

A strong national leadership, committed to the mission of the church.

The church involved all its members in its mobilizing strategy.

Significant use of media contributed to the presence of the church in society.

A biblical and church-centered missiology is emerging in Latin America. (I think we need that in North America and Europe, too.)

A life time commitment of missionaries is natural. 74% of missionaires sent from Latin America are long term.

'From Field to Missions Force' - tag line from COMIBAM, we need to have that in Central Europe.

The Mission Force

Latin America, Africa and Asia are sending as many missionaries as Europe and North America. We are at the point where those three continents are passing the West in numbers of missionaries being sent out.

There has been a dramatic spike in missionaries sent out since 1990. Mongolia is the most effecient missionary sending church (222 believers to 1 missionary).

I should have tried this live blogging with a slow speaking German. This is a lot of work.

The local church is at the center of the mission process. However, many local churches don't have a biblical understanding of their role.

They were able to create National Mission Movements to help coordinate the recruitment, training and placement of missionaries from each Latin American country.

This helped coordinate the receiving of missionaries in various countries around the world as well.

It is necessary to define what we mean by the word 'resources.' Actually, a lot of terminology needs to be defined in these types of relationships.

National movements create opportunity for cooperation on training.

Giving my fingers a rest for a minute.

Where in the World is the Majority World?

A few quotes from David Ruiz:

The world is upside down.

The shoe sizes of the missionaries have shrunk.

The church is from everywhere and going everywhere.

By 2025 Africa and Latin America will vie for the title of the most Christian Continent.

We were looking at a map of the world where south was on top. A very interesting perspective. Helpful for getting out of the box you don't even know that you're in.

Live blogging from EEMA: Emerging Missions

David Ruiz, former Executive Director of COMIBAM is our speaker tonight at this EEMA (European Evangelical Missionary Association) consultation. David has come to us from Guatemala to share on the issue of Learning From The Majority World. I spoke with him earlier about his involvement in Europe. He has been involved in Albania and has been instrumental in helping churches there begin to send out workers to other countries. Wow. I'm excited about what David will have to say to us tonight. I know that not too many people are actually reading this, but I thought it would be wildly exciting to try live blogging from this event.

Actually, I have had to take time each day I've been here to debrief myself. The discussions I've been a part of have stirred so many ideas that I've had to empty my head a bit between sessions. I've met quite a few interesting people here who have also provoked my thinking on many issues related to missionaries being sent out from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Right now, we're hearing about 'mission-net' which is an event aimed at inspiring a missional lifestyle among European Christian youth. Wow, more ideas...

Poland and Sweden

Aside from a little altercation in the late 1600's there isn't much to connect Poland and Sweden other than the last couple weeks of my life. We had our ReachGlobal conference for our Europe staff in Wisla, Poland and then Kristi and I went to Stockholm to meet with some church leaders and planters to talk about how ReachGlobal might possibly further the progress of the Gospel there.

Wisla is a nice ski resort in the southern part of Poland, so it makes a great place for a bunch of missionaries to go in the summer for a conference. It was great to spend a day fasting and praying together as well as reconnect with friends from around the continent. Quite a few significant conversations took place over the five days we were together. One important event was saying farewell to our International Leader, Rick Burke. I've worked with Rick almost as long as I've been in Europe and I've profited from his influence in my life over the years. He has been a great boss and an even better friend. He's taking a role as missions pastor at First Free Church in St. Louis, MO so I'm planning on staying in contact with him in the future.

Kristi and I went to Stockholm with Gary (Associate Executive Director of ReachGlobal) and his wife, Karen. We had a great time together because we match up well. Gary and I enjoyed our lengthy meetings where we were learning about what God is doing in the free churches of Sweden. Karen is an educational consultant so the conversations with Kristi were frequent and practical. We all enjoyed learning about Stockholm and the Church in Sweden. One thing we came away with was a better understanding of the decline of the local churches over the past eighty years and the need for starting new churches for this generation.

My Role

I have a job that can be nebulous. When people ask me what I do I have to decide whether to give them an answer which satisfies them or the real one. The answer which satisfies is usually ‘leadership development for our staff and partners,’ which is kinda true. The real one is more complex and either doesn’t help or baffles them into silence. I’m thinking about this because these past couple of weeks I’ve been working on my annual evaluation. That’s where I sit down to evaluate the past year, look at the role I think God is calling me to, and make some plans for the coming year. There are forms to fill out and all that, but the most important outcome for me is a fairly clear picture of my direction (and the one short sentence answer to the ‘what do you do?’ question). I’ll be working it all out on the calendar over the next few weeks, but I wanted to share some of this with you so you can get a look at what I’m going to be busy with over the next 12 to 18 months.

I have two main areas of focus: developing a network for church-based training across Europe; and oversight of unstaffed locations and in Europe.

Church-based training network
Simply put, church-based training is the local church engaging in its responsibility to equip the believers, all to maturity in Christ and some to leadership. The predominant model sends individuals from their church to a school where they study for 4 years and then they search for a church which will pay them to serve. In many parts of Europe, that model doesn’t fit the context. Individuals can’t afford to uproot their family to attend school and the local church can’t afford to pay anyone to serve. The model I’m encouraging has the local church training up people from within to serve as its leaders. There are other benefits aside from the financial aspect. The local church provides the context for spiritual and character development and the individual is developed in the ethos of the local church.

My aim in this area is to develop a network across Europe of people who understand the principles of church-based training and are involved in putting them into practice in local churches.

Unstaffed locations
Right now we don’t have any staff in Slovakia or Albania or Moldova, but we have a relationship with a local church or denomination in each of those places. I get to develop those relationships. Sometimes it’s me meeting a pastor or a group of pastors. Other times it’s meeting with denominational leaders or US partner churches. I’m asking questions, offering resources, networking connections and sometimes giving my opinion.

This next year I’ll be exploring some new locations in hopes of developing the beginnings of relationship into more practical partnership.

So, if we’re riding in an elevator somewhere and you turn to me and ask me what I do, you’ll hear one of two things:

I work with pastors and local churches to help them be healthier
or...
Read my blog