Here are my thoughts:
Well, the main conference is over now and the DAWN Europe team and friends (9 of us right now) are sitting around a conference table in a Bergen hotel.
Anyway, what we saw happen at the conference was this:
After the prayer team had spent a few days in prayer (i make it seem easy by saying it that way), they shared what God was telling the Norwegian church. Other people had some bible verses for the Norwegians. One guy flew all the way from England to deliver his message. I was glad to hear all these words line up with what I had said earlier in the day and the other speakers.
At the end of all this, many of the older pastors and leaders came up the front. Many of them in tears. After weeping and repenting and getting right before God, they prayed over the younger people that God was raising up. There were about 200 in the room. Very powerful. Very cool. We all felt good about it. DAWN has a strong team in Norway which is equipped to lead these movements.
But now we are in a room, discussing the various countries in Europe, talking strategic stuff, figuring out how the change the world, starting with Europe. I like this stuff. We dont take ourselves too seriously, but we really do expect to see things change.
After the prayer team had spent a few days in prayer (i make it seem easy by saying it that way), they shared what God was telling the Norwegian church. Other people had some bible verses for the Norwegians. One guy flew all the way from England to deliver his message. I was glad to hear all these words line up with what I had said earlier in the day and the other speakers.
At the end of all this, many of the older pastors and leaders came up the front. Many of them in tears. After weeping and repenting and getting right before God, they prayed over the younger people that God was raising up. There were about 200 in the room. Very powerful. Very cool. We all felt good about it. DAWN has a strong team in Norway which is equipped to lead these movements.
But now we are in a room, discussing the various countries in Europe, talking strategic stuff, figuring out how the change the world, starting with Europe. I like this stuff. We dont take ourselves too seriously, but we really do expect to see things change.
I am sitting next to blogger Marc Van Der Woude (pictured) who blogs at Marcs Messages and Reinhold Scharnowski who heads up DAWN Europe (Discipling a Whole Nation) is an organisation and a strategy that is often [wrongly and unfairly] linked with the UBERMODERN, number-crunching, statistic-quoting, powerpoint-presenting, missionary-turned-mathematician type organizations. it is true that it was born in the 1980s, when these things were popular, but for me, DAWN is a group that holds strongly to a number of key postmodern values, and i really love working with them on projects like this.
Here are the values that appeal to me:
1. Relational Committment.
DAWN seeks out the key people that God raises up for a nation - the "John Knoxers" who cry out "Give me Scotland/China/______ or I die". They commit to people.
2. Demystification of church.
DAWN challenges people to start churches, using simple structures that can be reproduced many times over by ordinary people. I use the word demystify instead of deconstruct.
3. Focus on organic church movements. The only way to see millions of churches start very quickly, and with limited resources, is to encourage organic church movements that will not be hindered by buildings, budgets, lengthy seminary preperation, etc.
Oooh - break time - time for a coffee. let me stop this blog and minister to the coffee urn.
