Leadership, Church Planting and Church History

It has been a long time since I last posted and I have heard many of you have been wondering what I have been up to. So here we go. Prayer Points first.

Prayer Points
. We are at a maturing stage, pray this continues to happen
. Finances. We estimate roughly 4000NOK, that is roughly £417 a month for my outreach to Vienna.

. A house in Vienna City Centre that is cheap and a car for travel.

Leadership
This teaching was led by our base leader Runar. It was a very straight forward week with a very simple message what does it mean to lead? His definition of leadership was to simply lead and that leadership is less about managerial roles such as finance keeping but is more about foresight seeing the potential in things and acting on it. Which for me is a relief as I am not really great at creating complex finance charts. Part of the week also focused on what kind of leader are you, specirfically what kind of leadership giftings have you got. It was a very practical week of teaching showing us how to spot trends, potential but also the signs of ministries about to end. 

Church Planting
I really enjoyed thsi week it focused on one persons experience of chruch planting it was actually really eye opening on how we as a class defined Mission, Church and Jesus but especially our negativity towards Church. One of the most valuable things I learned was this:

Jesus + Mission = Church

Our teachers point was that nowhere in the bible does it say plant a church but it does say go out and make disciples. It is when we go we create frienships and these friendships create communities and these communities are what create a the church (the body). It is Jesus who sends us into Mission and then Church is formed but Jesus must come first. This teaching really started to challenge my views on how I view mission and my motivations for doing it, seeing it from this perspective lifts a burden and makes mission easier.

Church History
This was a lot to take in a lot of facts but was very interesting, the focus of the teaching was that where we come from, what we do,  what we study etc. forms our identity. These past 3 weeks have in many ways linked to each other, as I learned that if we want to change the future we must first find out what has happened in the past with Europe and where the Church has been in the midst of that.

I am finding that the SOE has moved into a new focus of preparing us to be pioneers for Christ, this is reflected in all this practical and factual teaching but we are also finding more opportunities to step out and take hold of leadership and use our giftings in Evangelism.