Risto H. Kurppa

Final day. Actually nothing else but travelling. The combination of a group ~almost always being late, London tube, British railroad, a cheap flight company and a bus strike in Finland made it almost sure that something would fail but no, nothing did. Well, we did run to the gate, but then waited there for a long time.

A great trip, thank you for everyone who was there!

Soon it’s time to go to home.. Today was the second conference day. We started it with a teaching by bishop Paul Williams with the theme ‘Building and nurturing a leadership team’. The key idea was to evaluate your team by four factors:

• Trust – do we trust each other?
• Value – for each individual and the team as whole
• Vision – what are we doing and why are we doing it?
• Joy – do we have fun in the team?

Trust is built gradually but lost in seconds so a leader better pay full attention to it, if there’s a chance of losing trust.

Vision is always leaking, it’s always forgotten and needs to be reminded about.

Making sure everyone knows everyone is valuable. This sometimes requires a bit of creativity..

Joy needs to be lead. Could the meeting be the best hours of the week?

Gary Clarke of Hillsong continued telling about their ministry.

• People come to church for various reasons but stay for only one: people.
• Church grows when someone brings a friend – are the things done so well, that people can tell their friends ‘Come to the church, it is not what you think’.

In the afternoon I listened to Nicky & Sila Lee speaking about ‘The Marriage Course’. It was nice to hear about the course and it’s content, along with the ‘The Premarital Course’.  The material has been translated also to Finnish which is good, let’s see if we can benefit from it.

After the seminar we went to Harrods for a quick walk – it’s big, it’s expensive, it’s decorated. I really didn’t feel like home there..

In the evening we had an around 3 hour session to find out the key things to take home with us. Started with Post-It notes, ending with a good discussion about almost everything. Let’s see how well we’re able to communicate these things to a broader audience in Kansanlähetys.

One of the best things of this trip has been all the ad-hoc discussions. Being away from the busy daily life together many hours every day for several days has given us the time to discuss our ministry as Kansanlähetys from several aspects.

Click on the photos to see them bigger with a description.