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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.

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We spent the whole day in the leadership conference at the Holy Trinity Brompton. Nicky Gumbel first spoke about the leadership example of Jesus. Nicky had some very good points there. In the afternoon there were two ‘leadership labs’. First I participated in a lab called ‘Building churches and planting churches’. Maybe not very relevant to me now but still very interesting. The second lab was about pastorates, groups of around 25-30 people. At night Nicky Gumbel interviewed bishop Sandy Miller, the former leader of HTB.

After all this all 10 of us went to a restaurant to share how everyone liked the day and what is there for us to learn.

HTB seems to be more focused on the Holy Spirit and the works of the Spirit than what’s typical in Finland. Communion doesn’t play a central role – actually no-one has even mentioned it in their talks and the Sunday ’service’ didn’t include communion. But still we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ.

Four of us still decided to walk a bit around, all the way to the Thames. We were tired already before we left, but decided to do it, after all we came all the way to London. The program we’ve had has been very intense with not much time just to walk around and see places so this was the opportunity we had to use. Let’s see how tired we’re in the last day of the conference.

Lessons Learned

Actually there’s a lot but it’s too late already.. I might add something later.

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9:30 we went to the morning service of All Souls. It was great to see all the people there worshiping God, also some of the people I met earlier. After the service we decided to go to Camden Town. First we ate at the Round House, a great place and good food! Camden town truly was a remarkable experience, I truly recommend it for anyone visiting London (at least if  you come from a place like Finland :). It requires a great mass of people for something like this to be created.

From Camden town we came down to the Hyde Park, Speaker’s Corner. A truly once-in-a-lifetime experience, Christians and Muslims arguing about their faith. I was taking photos there and listening to some of the discussion. The argumentation was generally good and made sense. I’m not sure if these kind of ‘fights’ are generating positive results but everything’s possible for God – who knows, maybe someone listening to the arguments starts to think about his own position.

After walking through Hyde Park, we went to the Holy Trinity Brompton Church and attended the service there. Nicky Gumbel was there introducing the main speaker. Nicky Gumbel and HTB is the place were the famous Alpha courses come from.

LESSONS LEARNED

• We have modern technology available. Maybe we should use it? All Souls had video inserts, lyrics of the songs on the screen and so on.
• The sermon can be split in four parts and there were hymns in between. Makes it easier to follow and process.
• People coming to welcome and greet you makes you feel a lot more welcome and safe. And it’s free.

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