Central European Staff Gathering

It has been 4 years since we last had a staff gathering in Vajta, Hungary. Because of other commitments, this time I was only minimally involved in the organisation of it - and the team did a great job! It was weird not being as involved and I realised that I had been helping to organise YWAM Central Europe events since even at the first one I attended in 2008! We met beforehand as our leadership team for the Central European Area of YWAM. There are about 20 of us on that group and it was great to get together and share and pray for our area of YWAM before the rest of the people came:

There were over 260 people at the gathering, including over 60 children and teens! We had a great children's program for the kids - where they had their own mini-conference, being challenged to go out and be world-changers.

I am also stepping down from my role in our "Core Team" for Central Europe - 4-5 of us help lead the bigger team or ACT as we call it. I have been in this role since 2015, so it is time to step down (I will still be in the ACT) and let others have a chance to lead. Below is them praying for Ema (also stepping down) and I and the gift that we were given as a "Thank-You" - a lovely wooden box with this inscription inside!

The plan is that I will stay on the core team until the end of the year and in that time continue to hand over responsibilities to the rest of the team. It hasn't been an easy decision, but I know it is the right one! I look forward to seeing what God is leading me into in this next season.

As the conference was open to all those who had ever been in YWAM in Central Europe, I encouraged my former teammate, Janet, to come along. She has been back in the UK for over 10 years now. It was great to see her again! And the best part: I decided to drive the 4 and a half hours to Vajta, Hungary, where the conference was held. It is the furthest I have driven in 2 years because of my issues with my shoulder! And praise the Lord, my shoulder did very well!  So happy!

 

Zooming around...

I have been using the Zoom meeting app for about two years already for various different meetings, but during Covid-19 everyone seemed to discover its usefulness and ability to be a platform for keeping in touch with one another when we were social distancing. I have spent soooo much time on zoom in the last two months! 

Here are some of the groups which I used to meet with regularly before Covid-19. Firstly with the guys from YWAM in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia - we meet once a month to pray together, and we met more frequently during covid-19, love these guys:

Then with the leadership team or Area Circle Team (ACT) for YWAM in Central Europe: we meet every other month or so. I also meet regularly with our "Core team" of four of us (not pictured).

Another (temporary) group has been since September as I have been involved with FOCOS coaching training which is online every month and then we had the one week intensive which was held in Budapest in January.  It has been fun to see the interaction online after the intensive as we are much more connected than before we met in person!

Another group which met before, but during Covid met more frequently is the YWAM Field Circle Team for all of Europe. As I am one of the core leaders in my Area, I am part of this group as well. It is such a privilege to be a part of this amazing group of leaders. 

I also joined the Editorial team for an initiative called the European Leaders Learning Community which we are starting up officially in September. In the meantime we have been running Facebook Live interviews with various leaders in our organisation in what we call the "leadership lounge-lockdown edition". It has been such fun working with a team of great people to put all this together... 

And yes, you guessed, we met each week on zoom to do so!

Then, we as a YWAM Central European Area decided to meet altogether on zoom. We had never done it before, but we had an amazing time together - We had about 200 people joining on 100 unique connections representing 13 of the 16 nations in Central Europe. You can read more on the ywamce.com/blog 

In order to make this meeting go smoothly we treated like an "event" and had a team to coordinate it - Great bunch of people!:

In the two hours we had many elements: A talk that I did on pruning/sabbatical: Click below to watch it :)

Two times of worship - one on the zoom meeting at the beginning, and one on Facebook live to end off with.  We shared together in small groups for some of it and also had some feedback and sharing from the audience. We saw that it was such a good thing that we believe that we will do it again in September!!

Another exciting element of zoom is the ability to run courses online for people around the world. In May, YWAM Craiova planned to have a 3 week Pioneering and Leadership course - but in the end because of corona, instead of cancelling completely, they decided to take it online. So instead of the 25-30 people who would have joined in, they had over 100 people from all over the world - I was in breakout groups with people from Brazil and Bangladesh! And over 60 of those finished the assignment that went with the course to get the credits from YWAM's University of the Nations.

I enjoyed taking part in the course and learning along with many other people. And the breakout groups were a great way to meet people (or reconnect with those we knew already) along with learning from each other. 

Another use of zoom in this time was to connect with my family who are in 4 different countries - it was so great to connect with them all a couple of times... and I hope this is something we will continue in the future now that we have discovered how easy and fun it is! (this photo was taken at Easter - please note that my Mom is sitting with the Easter bunny with a mask on... what can I say?)

And then I did try to Zoom with some of my local friends, but in the end they couldn't get on, so we just did Messenger Chat which turned out to be much more fun... but would be very distracting for meetings!!

Beside all of these things, I also did sessions with 3 coaching "clients" on zoom - all to get the hours I need for the coaching course I am finishing up. Including two other local clients, I have now already done 25 sessions out of the needed 30, and so will finish up in  a couple of weeks already! I don't have any pictures of those sessions as they are all confidential :)

But I have to say that I am really enjoying doing the coaching... much more than I thought I would. I am also so glad that I decided to go ahead and get as much done while we were in lockdown as now I can relax a bit! And looking back, I don't know how I would have been able to meet the September deadline for finishing up the coaching hours without all the extra "corona time", so I am glad for the virus for that at least!

As you can see, I have definitely been zooming all over Europe and around the world over these last two and a bit months of "lockdown" - all while staying in the comfort of my own home! 

2020 started with lots of travelling...

I started mid-January in Budapest, where I was part of the week-long intensive FOCOS Foundational Coaching Skills Training. It is part of a year-long program that I am taking part in this year. There were 21 of us from all over the world learning how to be life coaches. It was a lovely group of people, and we had a great week learning together!

It was a very intensive workshop - but we did have one afternoon of seeing the beautiful city of Budapest:

Some of us went up to palace and the Castle district where I got some lovely photos:

 We also had time in the evenings to wonder around... and take in some sights:

 Or make album cover photos... (did I say this was a fun group?!)

After that, I had a week before I needed to be in Prague for a conference, so I decided to stay in Budapest for a couple of days and meet up with people there... it happened to be Edyta's birthday so I got to hang with her and Marie which was especially fun...and also got to see other fun friends there too!

Then it was time to go a bit early to Prague to spend time with David and Irena and their four girls. It was a great time to catch up with them (they used to live and work in Banja Luka), especially as it was a couple of days before David was diagnosed with Leukemia! He is busy getting treatment in hospital in Prague and the prognosis is good, but it was still a bit of a shock...for them and for me. (if you pray, please remember them in your prayers!)

Then it was time for the European Leadership Gathering - about 350 leaders from all over Europe met in Prague. Our first night we even had Loren Cunningham (below right) who is YWAM's founder. It was a privilege to hear him speak to all of us:

We also heard from all sorts of YWAM greats: here are Jeff and Romkje Fountian being interviewed on the sofa by Tove:

We also got creative: Here is Carl Tinnion (the outgoing European leader) doing a monologue as Jan Hus: a Czech theologian who was an early reformer whose thinking influenced Luther!

He was burned at the stake for his "heretical thinking": and Carl's monologue made us truly think about his premise that "Truth Prevails":

I was involved in a LOT of the behind the scenes organising but did get to be a part of the program on the last night along with Dick Brouwer, our new European Leader:

Probably my favourite moment of the whole week was when Al Akimoff (one of our long time YWAM leaders) prayed for our outgoing YWAM leader, Carl Tinnion... you can see me wiping the tears off during it, I was laughing so hard... 

During the week, I decided that we needed to get our lovely Central European area together one afternoon. It was a great time of sharing and we so enjoyed being "just us":

But my favourite part of the whole week was definitely hanging out with my buddy, Rebecca: She and I were the communication team for Central Europe for 5 years before she moved from Czech to Thailand. I recruited her to come and help at the conference and we had a great time. We also got to spend one afternoon after the conference seeing the sights of Prague:

Then it was time to head to the UK: I promised Rebecca that if she came to Prague to help we would finally make good on our promise to go visit our ex-leader (whom we worked for for those 5 years). So we went to spend a couple of days with Carmelita - we were near to Shakespeare's place of birth (Stratford-upon-Avon) so we went for the day - here we are in front of his birthplace: (not sure why I have the scrunchy face haha)

 And then we met a local who told us where to go to see his place of burial:

It was also good to meet Carmelita's husband, Derek... God told her to leave YWAM, then she met him, and got married after 50 - so there's hope for everyone! Here we are in front of the church across the street from their house: 

It was a fun couple of days of catching up and hanging out: 

Then it was time to go and visit my sister in Oxford - I did get to spend time with my niece and brother and law as well - but the only pic I got was with A in front of the Radcliffe Camera:

Then after 4 weeks, 7 different beds, a load of buses, a train, two planes, one workshop, one conference, and visiting good friends and family, it was time to head home to Banja Luka again... I love travelling, but I love my own bed just as much!! 

Ukraine meetings

In the middle of December, I travelled to Ternopil, Ukraine for meetings with the other YWAM leaders in Europe. We needed to get together to look at the next couple of years' meetings and to plan the conference we have coming up in Prague in February 2020.

It was also great to catch up with what is going on in the 6 different areas that make up the European Field. We have a great group of leaders who oversee the approximately 2500 YWAMers in our field:

There are 11 of us from 10 different nations in this group of people... and this is not everyone who belongs to this team - I think we would be about 18 from 15 different nations if we counted everyone! I love YWAM! Looking so forward to our conference in Prague - I was the one who suggested having a conference in "our" area and now it is all coming together!! 

England and Ireland trip...

In July, I went on a lovely trip around England and Ireland. I started off at two YWAM bases - one in England - YWAM Harpenden: I got to catch up with so many lovely people - but of course didn't get ANY pictures with them... here is one of some of the base:

I also spent a lovely afternoon with a family that used to be in Romania, but are now based in Harpenden... we went to the zoo! And of course this is the ONLY pic I have of them, looking at the meercats (and one of the boys is missing, oh well) 

It was a really fun afternoon - and we got to see many fun animals, including the lemurs :)

Then it was time to head over to YWAM Rostrever in Ireland, where I stayed with my friend, Belinda. Here we are in front of Inch Abbey... we took a quick selfie before the Game of Throne tour group came to see it - as it is in one of the episodes...

 We also went to a stone circle - really interesting:

 And we also went to the church which was built on the spot where St Patrick had his first church:

And here is a statue of him at the entrance of Downpatrick:

 I also got to see the Narnia trail: Rostrevor lays claim to the fact that CS Lewis said that this part of Ireland is how he imagined Narnia...

 I did it with my friend, Alex, who has come many times to Bosnia... here we are with "Aslan"

 At the same time that I was there, there were two lovely people from the YWAM Thessaloniki team who were there too: Catherine and Carrie. We went with Belinda across the lough on the ferry. A really fun evening!

 And there were some fun signs on the other side: Love the Irish sense of humour

I loved being able to be in Ireland and catching up with everyone there (not everyone is pictured!), but then it was time to fly to Newcastle and visit with the Smiths: I haven't seen Megan since she was 7 and she is now 14, so it was great to be able to catch up!

I also got to catch up with Ali Howey who took me to Belsay Hall and it was such a lovely afternoon, but of course I didn't get a photo of her and I together! But here is the Hall and the original castle:

And then I headed by bus to my godson and his family in Nottingham. I managed to be there for his 13th birthday which was really fun... And of course, I didn't get a picture with them... the only one I have is of their new kitty watching the tennis with us: It was such a fun afternoon of sport - between the amazing Wimbledon final and the England vs New Zealand cricket world cup final it was hard to know what to watch...

It was then on to All Nations College for the "Refresh" course: Easneye Hall where the college is, has a long history and the grounds and surrounds are truly lovely. It was definitely a wonderful place to enjoy a week's retreat... There were only six of us on the course and we truly became family during the week. I am so glad that I was able to be a part of this!

Then it was time for me to return back to Banja Luka... here we are coming into land at Banja Luka airport... the little hop from Belgrade is always in a propeller plane: and I just sat in the right seat to get this shot: 

I didn't manage to see my sister and her family (who live in Oxford) this trip, because she was away or busy when I could come, so that was a bummer... next time! Now it is just time to reflect on all the fun people I got to hang out with, as well as all the connections I made and meetings I managed to have along the way... such a lovely trip!!