It was good to have Steve Hill, David Schäfer, Alexander Campbell and Nico-Dirk van Loo over for one and a half day to process the development of simple church networks in Europe. It was a fruitful time in which we prayed and talked through issues related to team building, cockpit research (research as a steering instrument), communication and training.
Btw, if you need a personal prophetic word for 2008, look here.
A new generation of church planting pioneers is taking the lead in the Netherlands. On 19 January 2008 Ronald van der Molen, Stefan Paas and others will facilitate a national day for church planters, pulling a wide spectrum of the Church together. The topic is 'reproduction in church planting'. In the meanwhile Martijn Vellekoop coordinates a research project to find out how many churches have been planted in the Netherlands over the past ten years.
In this week's edition of Joel News International I focused on the question: how many people in Europe follow Jesus? Three different studies, using different definitions of 'committed Christian' and varying methodologies, came up with multiple indications: 1.1% (GEM), 3.5% (OW) and 4.2% (emRG). My colleague Andreas Wolf from Germany says he has most confidence in the higher percentage, and suggests that in God's Book of Life it might well be 10%. Wolfgang Simson disagrees with him and stresses that the issue is not about what people profess, but whether they really live surrendered lives and take their orders from Christ the King. He estimates the number of 'real Jesus followers' at just 0.1%. What is certainly clear though is that Europe is probably one of the most needy places in the world today.
The highlights of this week:
- We saw a whole series of rainbows, one after the other, when we drove through Saxony on our way to Herrnhut. Beautiful.
- Revisiting Herrnhut. Something that unintentionally happens once a year. This town holds a special place in God's story. We caught up with pastor Frank, and I was encouraged to read in the history of the Jesus Haus (the house of prayer) that God used Dutch missionaries to ignite the youth revival that touched Herrnhut in the Seventies.
- We looked at several houses in East Germany and prayerfully asked God and ourselves: could we live in this part of Europe?
- A fresh walk in the wetlands area of the Spreewald, where we saw a toilet being used as garden decoration.
- Reconnecting with friends Kerstin in Berlin, and Andreas & Christine in Magdeburg.
- A two-day DAWN team meeting in a hotel in East Berlin with an interesting view on the typical socialist-realist architecture of the Commie times.
- Meeting the wonderful Eichler family, who offered us a bed in the Christian Center in Reichenbach, and shared some of their experiences with ministry in East Germany.
Caught up by skype with DAWN colleague Alexander Campbell, who just published a progress report on organic church planting in the UK, and returned from a trip to Denver. In his view the situation in Europe is quite similar to the States. Several years ago Mike Steele of 'Organic DAWN' looked to Europe "to discover where things would head in America," but now simple church is already becoming a grassroots movement over there, while Europe is still in the beginning stages.
Lots of good connections and inspiration over the past few days. Wednesday afternoon we took a cable car up to Mürren, a car-less village built on a steep mountain overlooking the Jungfrau range (pictures here). In the evening Andrew Jones led us in an alternative 'worship by numbers' session, followed by an improvised Connect Europe team meeting in the local pub.
The main contribution to the conference came yesterday night from Florian Bärtsch, an apostolic evangelist from the Luzern area. There are not many organic church networks that are apostolic in the sense that they incorporate three elements:
1. a supernatural dimension of signs and wonders, and Spirit-led risk-taking (like we read in the book of Acts); 2. strategic focus and planning; and 3. a relaxed team learning attitude. Florian is a zealous speaker, and really got our attention. Alexander Campbell was so good to list the key lessons learnt, and also Andreas and Gabi blogged their reflections.
DAWN Europe, the network for saturation church planting, and Eurochurch, the missional church network, joined forces in a 2-day conference on 'Church Planting and the Missional Mandate', held in our familiar DAWN location, hotel Credo in Wilderswil. It's a good opportunity to meet missional network leaders from all over Europe.
The powerful notion that you can be church anywhere is inspiring more and more Christians in Europe to start and experiment with 'simple' or 'organic' expressions of church. Because most of these developments take place under the surface, we don't really have a good overview of what's happening in this area in Europe. Where are the thriving simple church networks? What is some of the best practice that's being developed? To what extent are they missional and multiplyable? How is leadership being developed, and do apostolic teams emerge?
To get a better overview of the European situation, Nico-Dirk van Loo (insert) is working on a research project, that is being supported by DAWN, Simple Church UK, emRG and several key people in the house church movement. He will try to map the simple church networks in Europe, so that by the end of 2007 we are better informed on the situation in our continent. The main aim is to cross-fertilize, learn and share training and resources, in order to help catalyze this new stream of church.
Lots of emerging and organic traffic between Australia, Europe and America these days. Ozzies Alan and Debra Hirsch are throwing a big farewell party in their hometown Melbourne before lauching out to chase their 'American dream'. Alan won't be off the radar though, as from April through to June we (DAWN Europe) are facilitating an experimental online training with 15 Europeans on Alan's book 'The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church'.
The training includes interative sessions with Alan and fellow church planters in a high-tech virtual 'classroom' on the web. We're running this pilot to find out to what extent this kind of 'education-by-extension' software could help us train and coach church planters in Europe. For a peek into the content of 'The Forgotten Ways', see my earlier posts titled 'The apostolic genius' and 'Quotes from the fringes'.
