More than 100 Seventh-day Adventist church planters met in Riga, Latvia, to share their experiences and learn new ways of sharing their faith with the unchurched.
More than 100 Seventh-day Adventist church planters met in Riga, Latvia, to share their experiences and learn new ways of sharing their faith with the unchurched. Church planting teams from London and Helsinki exchanged ideas with pastors and church planting teams from the Baltic countries.
The “X-change” meetings were organized by the Adventist Church in the Baltic region and by Peter Roennfeldt, Ministerial Association secretary and Global Mission coordinator for the church in the Trans-European region.
“It is very important that we keep establishing new churches to reach new groups of people for Christ,” Roennfeldt explained, adding that, “no one church can reach every person in a city or a town. We have found that if we develop many new groups and church plants, we can reach new groups of people. We want to establish proper, viable Adventist churches through the work of church planters, therefore we examine every method, including a lot of new methods of doing this work.”
Roennfeldt continued, “‘X-Change’ is [designed] to inspire people with the idea of church planting; to train groups of people from particular areas and to prepare project plans for church planting. So it’s not just talk. It’s actually hard work, getting a plan organized.”
When asked about their learning experience at “X-Change” in Riga, Atte Helminen, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Finland, said, “A group from Hope community, London, England, inspired us with their method of being part of the community. If we cannot meet some of the needs of the community, we will not be able to meet the spiritual needs of the people. I also realize how the vision of church planting has inspired many groups in the Baltic region and they are excited about their new vision. I believe this event was an eye-opener for many new church planters present. There will be many new churches planted in the near future. The Lord is good!”
“We want to have this sort of conference in Lithuania, too,” said pastor Giedrius Rimsa, field secretary for the church in Lithuania. “This method works even in the Baltics. We not only learned about Christianity, we experienced it.”
“We had lots of inspiration. We are confident that we can actually turn new ideas into reality and reach so many people,” said Kart Vahtramae, Pathfinder leader in Tartu, Estonia.
“We can reach unchurched people only if we love them as deeply as we love Jesus,” said Bobby Bovell, member of a church planter team from the United Kingdom.
Church planting is proving effective in reaching secular people in western and northern Europe, organizers said. The church is working to provide church planters with necessary resources, such as the LIFEdevelopment.info initiative.
“LIFEdevelopment.info is a process of working with people,” explained Roennfeldt. “This is a seven-step process. It is closely tied with the kinds of strategies that many church plants have established, so we first of all meet with people, we get connected with people, we build friendships in the community, and then we have the opportunity of sharing with those people a little bit of who we are, and what we stand for, and then as time goes on, these people want to know more and more. So we have strongly promoted LIFEdevelopment.info as part of the church planting initiative in the Trans-European region.”
