Central European Staff Gathering

After settling in the team, it was time to head to Vajta, Hungary for our YWAM Central Europe Staff Gathering. I was on the planning team and so arrived a day early to help, and my main role was to help with the organising of the workshops in the afternoons. Here we all are: See if you can spot me! 

The main speaker in the morning, Dave Ginn, had previously worked in Romania and Hungary and he was so good. It was good to have good solid Bible teaching. In the rest of the sessions we had a variety of interesting topics and speakers, and I loved the conference overall. 

The workshops were many and varied, and everyone's main complaint was that there was too much choice! So I think I fulfilled my role well! I also ran a workshop on "Selfless Self Care" which I think everyone who came enjoyed. 

After helping to run the conferences for so many years, it was really great just to have limited responsibility, and enjoy the main fun at the gathering, which is catching up with friends from around the region - below I am with Ema from Romania and Andreja from Slovenia. I didn't get many other photos as I was too busy enjoying good conversations!! 

It is always a blast to spend time with friends and enjoy good times away from Banja Luka. And since we started going to Vajta in 2012, the distance has stayed the same, but the time travelled has changed considerably! Before, I would need to go on public transport and via Budapest where I would need to stay over on the way there and back... Now with all the newly built highways, it took me under 4 hours in the car! 

Triplet to Ireland and the UK

I was invited to go to Enniskillen in Ireland in August, to be the speaker on the YWAM Ireland gathering. I was really blown away by the invitation, but as I had already been playing around in my head with maybe making a trip to the UK to see people and also get my UK passport sorted out, it seemed like a lovely way to combine the two.

I spent 3 lovely days with the wonderful people who make up YWAM in Ireland. In reflecting for the talks I realised that my relationship with YWAM in Ireland and all the good things that have come out of it (including 5 "Faith and Conflict" conferences), started because of two conferences that I went to. One was in 2007 and on the way back from the conference I "happened" to take a train with then YWAM Ireland leader, Jonny Clark. We also happened to get lost and took the train in the wrong direction... but that is another whole story! And the other was in 2014 in Lyon when I sat next to Alex Atwell, who is now leading YWAM Enniskillen, on a flight from there to Manchester. Random? Coincidence? I think not!  

It really was a privilege to share more of my story and what the Lord has taught me along the way and I really enjoyed sharing on how to persevere and press on into what the Lord is calling you into. We are the hands and feet of Jesus here on earth which this saying from St Teresa of Avila reminds us of! 

And some other reflections the Lord has been showing me about how to bring a little bit of His joy and life and celebration even when things are not going the way we wish they did...

And a case in point - why let a little bit of rain stop us from having a fun outing to Lough Erne together... crazy people! Group pic using the car as a tripod:

Here I am warming up by the fire with my fellow South African, Musa, who was crazy enough to jump in the lough...

Along with other crazy people - Alex and Martin. In the background you can see the ruins of Devenish Island Monastery... very eerie in the fog! 

And this time a selfie-stick pic with the monastery in the background as well...

I also managed to finish up my passport by going to Belfast before the conference and fast tracking it. My old one is not up until 2026, but it is almost full! And why is it almost full?? Because silly border guards in Bosnia and Croatia mostly don't care where they put their stamps. I only have 3 in my new passport and look at how much space they already take up!! (And if I fly from Zagreb, which is my closest airport I get between 4-6 stamps each time depending on if I am going to Schengen or not!)

I used my new passport to travel to the East Midlands Airport and to hang out with my godson, Christopher and his wonderful family. 

And I say wonderful, because on the day I was supposed to get on a bus and travel on to my next place, I felt horrible and recognised the feeling from the time I had covid... and they have some old tests hanging around and I took one, and guess what!! Yip. I was positive...

Thankfully, they were ok with me staying on, and we tried to isolate me as much as possible, but Trevor and Carol had already got it from me, but luckily the kids didn't get it! So yes, not my most successful trip ever... thanks to them for being so fantastic!! 

On the day that Christopher got his A-level results, they had scones to celebrate and they sat outside in the garden and I was upstairs talking to them through the window and enjoying my portion!

Then it was time to try and figure out my further travel. I had planned on going to a few people, but with not feeling so great after covid, I just narrowed it down to my sister and her family and changed my flight to come back a bit sooner. My nephew James had returned from a gap-year trip around Asia and it was wonderful to hear all his stories in person! 

And also enjoy time with my sister and brother-in-law, and their wonderful garden!!

Then it was time to be back in Banja Luka, getting ready for the new school year! 

What have I been up to!?

Here is a little video which shows more of my ministry in Banja Luka, Bosnia Herzegovina and beyond... Enjoy! 

 

Global Leaders' Gathering Thailand

I travelled to Chiang Mai, Thailand to join in the Global Leadership Gathering for YWAM leaders from around the world. But on the way, I went to visit my friends, Rebecca and Eve in their new location in a village in the middle of Loei province in the mountains of Thailand that border with Laos. Here they are in their kitchen cooking up my favourite meal (ok, it was mostly Eve!)

Eve even calls me "Pad Thai" because I ate it so much last time I was in Thailand in 2018 for our Y Together gathering! So, she decided she had to make it for me: 

It was really great being able to see where they are and what they are up to in this season. I even got to help out with their kids program to the local kids - here I am reading "The Hungry Caterpillar" to them. 

 

And then it was time for the Global Leaders' Gathering... We drove together to the conference in Chiang Mai. We were 900 people from every corner of the globe. And it was fantastic to be able to see so many old friends and catch up with people I hadn't seen in years! 

One afternoon a few of us from Central Europe managed to have a lovely foot massage together... good way to relax and also catch up! 

I really was amazing to be a part of the gathering and I am also so glad that I managed to go and see where my friends are working in the middle of nowhere in Thailand. 

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!

 

European Leadership Gathering

I travelled to the UK to help with the organisation of the European Leadership Gathering in Harpenden, England. Before the conference, I managed to spend the weekend with my sister, Astrid, in Oxford. It would have been better if I hadn't caught a cold on my travel to the UK :(

At the YWAM Harpenden base, we gathered with around 300 YWAM Leaders from all over Europe. Unfortunately because I was sick, I wasn't able to take part in much of what was going on. The below is one of the official photographs of Patrick Dixon, one of our speakers, sharing on signs of the times.

I wasn't in the chapel other than when I was on the stage for two times on the first day, one was to share about the European Leaders' Learning Community (see video below) and the other was to organise the "Unconference" which was how we did our workshops and sharing times together. I just filled myself up on cold meds and made it through... but then the next day collapsed completely, oh well. I did manage to get a bit better by the end to be able to travel on to my next destination - my friends, Trevor and Carol. 

Here is the presentation that we did for the European Leaders' Learning Community! (apologies for the sound quality for me in the beginning, it does get better! And you will get to enjoy my colleagues, Laura and Johan doing some improv scenes...)

It was so sad to be at a conference and not actually be able to be there. But I am glad I was able to serve in the background a bit and I did "attend" by watching on the life stream when I wasn't sleeping the fever off. 

After the weekend with Trevor and Carol, I travelled to visit my former "boss" in YWAM, Carmelita and I was so glad to be looked after well and completely recover from my sickness so I could go back to Bosnia fighting fit! 

Roundtable meetings in Mostar

I was supposed to have a week at home between Copenhagen and my next trip to Poland, but then the opportunity came up for us to go for 3 days to Mostar to take part in a Roundtable of local pastors and missions leaders. The topic was on how to work better together as locals and foreigners. It was such a great opportunity that Sinisa, Ljilja and I decided to go together. Here we are with the 40 or so delegates: 

Even though we decided to go last minute, Sinisa and I were both asked to take part in the "panels" where we gave our thoughts and suggestions, lessons learned in a short 20 minute talk which would be the fodder for the discussions afterwards altogether and in groups. Here I am sharing:

And here is Sinisa: 

I ended up going last in my group of 3 and the others had gone long, and it was just before coffee break, so I thought "oh boy, this is going to be fun!" I had planned to do it in English, but that was being translated from the front and the translation into the local language was similtaneous into headsets, so I thought it would be better to just do it in the local language as it would give me more time... and thankfully it went way better than I thought it would... I could see people were tracking and I am so glad I had the opportunity to share my heart and contribute to this important conversation in this way! 

Thanks to the Evangelical Bible Institute in Mostar and Organisation "Good News" for organising such a great event! 

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!!