A superb day

I had an excellent weekend with many sincerely boosting encounters. On Saturday I travelled to Helsinki to attend "One heart and one soul" - prayer day. One of the leaders of  Swedish 24-7 prayer movement called Andreas Palm joined us over lunch. It was good to hear about mission teams  they are sending out next summer, for example one team is heading to a New Age festival to set up a prayer room there, and to several festivals like Roskilde. Andreas invited people from Finland to join in the teams, and I pray that  someone from here actually will. I love the idea, especially about ministering to New Age people! We also talked about the Swedish pioneering missionaries like Tommy Neuman, and the developments of the Swedish 24-7.

During the prayer day I attended a seminar about  mentoring and postmodernism. The mentoring part was good. Even to start discussing faith in postmodernism would take a lot of time, and prefarably a more interactive setting. But since I'm always looking for opportunities to discuss this and since those are very rare in Finland, I was happy to disturb the seminary by my constant attempts to make it more  personal  and interactive, and  point out that most of all, paradigm shift is about dying to old models (and to many personal ambitions in many cases), so to speak a slow and often painstaking process.   

During the day I met up with several friends with whom I've been processing the paradigm shift, organic church and postmodern faith as a part of informal Connect Finland journey. With Heli, Petra , Laura , Ari, Nea , and Pauli  we discussed several things, and later over dinner started to plan for the next gathering that could happen in August. I got reminded how much has happened since we last had a first gathering to process these things last May.

If we would organise a gathering  now, we could start from a different point, with our own stories, since many of us has travelled quite a journey since last May. Journey that  has been coloured by the threatening walk out of the church box and controlled seemingly safe zone, and the overwhelming joy of following Jesus in to the places and relationships he has wanted us to. In those places we have learned the meaning of sharing the journey in covenant-type relationships, and  most of all been  reminded what it means that "God so loved the WORLD ..".

The best journey this far, I'd say.