At the cross during IWMC
Over 600 servants of God who work in wholistic ministries world-wide converged on Peoria, Arizona April 28 to May 2 for the second annual International Wholistic Missions Conference. Among them were Ron and Jeannie Seck, Hessel Keuter, Laci Daroczi and Eszter Cushai from our Hungarian CHE Team and Agron Aga from the CHE Team in Tirana, Albania.
It was a stupendous week of intensive training, global and regional networking, advanced planning and vision casting.
Laci Daroczi talks with Stan Rowland, co-founder of Community Health Evangelism at this year’s IWMC.
The Hungarian Team met personally with Stan Rowland, one of the co-founders of Community Health Evangelism and spent time picking his brains about community development among Gypsies. Ron, Hessel and Laci also took his 2-day course on Neighborhood Transformation, which applies CHE principles to inner-city poor communities. Meanwhile, Eszter was receiving training on organizing and presenting the Women’s Cycle of Life Course in Roma villages.
The Team was also able to schedule a dinner meeting with Dr. John Payne, Executive Director of Medical Ambassadors, International and Terry Dalrymple, Executive Director of CHE. Dr. John and Terry were able to give some important advice on forming and funding a CHE Central Europe Coalition to better sustain and share regional community development resources.
Ron, Hessel and Agron were then privileged to be involved in the planning of a major outreach campaign to 14 countries in the Balkans and Central Europe. They met with Prakash Lal of FIDA International, Hal Jones, CEO of Global Hope Network International, Keith Holloway of World Challenge and Tom Hinton and Terry Dalrymple of CHE to lay the groundwork for a consortium on reaching the majority of the poor communities of CE and the Balkans by 2020. The consortium is to be held in April 2015 in Tirana, Albania. Please pray for this consortium and for our Team as we will play a significant role in bringing it into being.
And this all happened during the Pre-pre-conference!
A break-out group discusses empowerment skills during our workshop at the IWMC
During the Pre-Conference, Ron shared with other CHE workers, as well as possible partners, a report on CHE’s development in Central Europe over the last two years as well as a vision for the next two.
The Conference itself was packed with top-notch workshops, seminars and messages designed to give the Team encouragement in the Lord as well as practical, new tools to use in the challenging work of wholistic community development. Ron and other Team members led a CHE workshop on how to motivate community members to take part in their own community development.
We all left the IWMC feeling that we had learned much, that our network of friends and colleagues in wholistic missions had expanded globally, and that our vision had been greatly enlarged. We praise the Lord!
JustASeck 