East Meets West

Paul: I've been traveling again. This time to Northampton. Nice not to have to get on a plane to go somewhere! It was a gathering of all our HR leaders from around Europe. Normally, organisationally, we split Western and Eastern Europe up, but for the first time (to my knowledge) we had 3 HR leaders from Eastern Europe come and join us. Yuri from Moldova and Sasha from the Ukraine joined John, based in Hungary. It was a fantastic time: sharing stories of the stuff that's worked and the times we've crashed and burned, getting emotionally involved in case studies and examining resources that will hopefully move us forward.

It dawned on me (as it has a habit of doing during times like this) that the role of caring for and developing missionaries is quite an isolated, misunderstood, under-equipped and under-resourced role in many of our countries around the world, and actually, Western Europe is doing pretty well when compared with so many other places around the world.

A few people have quizzed me & Lesley recently about whether there is really all this need for galavanting about so much. It's a good question and one that we wrestle with regularly, but this conference (and a number of emails I got while I was there) reinforced again the need to equip people to serve the servants of God. I do hope and pray that one day we'll have built up the competency and confidence within our ministry around the globe that my hands-on resourcing won't be needed as much (we're certainly working on some models that I hope will get us there). Until then, we'll carry on wrestling with stewarding God's resources in the best way we can, in order to see His plans accomplished.

Thanks for being part of this too.