Welcome to 2017! I hope you made it well into the New Year, and that you have a lot of reasons to be hopeful for the future. 10 years ago we celebrated our first New Year’s Eve in Sweden. We had just moved here from Germany in order to develop new ideas and approaches for the church of the future, and coming from a tiny Bavarian village it felt as if we actually went into the future. But today I’d like to present to you ten things that did not exist 10 years ago - or at least hardly anyone was aware of them. Ten things that nowadays are a regular part of our daily life. Let’s go! 1) YouTube Actually, YouTube was already founded in 2005, but in my part of the world nobody really noticed it unit 2007. Today it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world without this video sharing site. Tutorials, trailers, vacation memories everything and way, way more is available around the clock. 2) Spotify A true Swedish invention from 2006: Music, music, and even more music. CD’s are o
The Western European Advancement Team has taken a closer look at what used to be Staff Conference and then became Connect. This big annual tradition has to serve many purposes: training, teaching, fun, international missionary relationship building, holiday/vacation, a time for supporters and board members to meet staff, in-house communication, inspiration and soul care, networking among nationals, recruiting new people to the CA “tribe”, kid and youth ministry — just to mention a few. As we considered all of the purposes we are trying to fit into a single box, we quickly concluded one single event cannot serve every single purpose well. So, we challenged ourselves to think outside the box. And we began to imagine some possibilities. What about a slimmer version of Connect that is simpler and cheaper with focus on intentional community, spirituality, and learning from each other? What if we allowed the growing annual Leadership Summit to cover some of the original purposes of Connect?