Best Wishes

Happy Saint Andrew's Day to my Scottish friends, there in the snow!

And Happy Birthday to my Dad who'll be 82 tomorrow!

Still pouring rain here in Alhaurín - as if a dozen firemen are standing in the clouds turning their hosepipes on us. I keep expecting to see Noah's Ark float by at any minute.

Winter weather

In the Old Testament book of Proverbs, chapter six, there's a passage that encourages us to learn life lessons from the ant - because she "stores up provisions in summer" in preparation for the lean, winter season. Of course, it's referring to the fact that we should give thought not only to the present, but also to the future.

This year, however, I quite literally "stored up provisions" during the summer months - provisions of firewood for the winter season. Every time I took the dog for a walk, I took a large shopping bag with me, so that I could gather up branches and pine cones from the forest.... and by August, I already had a plentiful supply of kindling.

The winter weather is with us now in Spain, and we're very thankful now for the woodpile in our store room. There's no central heating in many Spanish homes, and so we feel blessed that we can make a roaring log fire on these colder winter evenings.

Looking at our weather forecast for the coming days (rain from now until Tuesday) I knew we'd need a good pile of wood next to our fireplace this weekend. But then I got an email from friends in Canada, saying that they couldn't go to work yesterday because of the snow.... and I see that snow is also forecast for Scotland where my parents live. Compared to that, I guess we're actually having quite "mild" weather in Alhaurin this month!!

Barcelona News

Thanks for your prayers during this weekend in Barcelona. It was a privilege to be able to share in the Lanzadera training course, where I was teaching about a Biblical perspective of the different stages of human development - from the womb until adulthood. The material was well received by the group, who were a mixture of parents and youth workers.

Then, this morning, I was invited to speak in local church, El Lokal, where I again brought a message about stages of development - but this time thinking about our spiritual growth and development as Christians. I decided to pluck up my courage and do part of the sermon in Spanish (the first time I've done that in a larger church gathering) and I was glad to have an excellent translator for the second part of the message. Afterwards, I was able to pray with some of the people and encourage them in decisions they were making about going on with God.

I stayed with friends who live in the Clot district of Barcelona (see photos above), and these are the people who took an outreach team of young people down to South Africa this summer. So I was able to see the hundreds of photos they had taken during their time there - which brought back many memories of my former home in Cape Town and the young people we'd worked with in Klipheuwel township. I even spotted my dog in some of the photos.

I'm heading back to Malaga soon, and will arrive home about midnight tonight. Next week's schedule is more flexible and not so busy as the past three weeks have been, so it will be an opportunity to catch up on some of my computer work - like LDC correspondence, and a translation that I'm doing of French family camp curriculum.

Back to Barcelona

It already seems like a long time ago since a few hundred of us gathered in Barcelona at the beginning of this month for the King's Kids European conference. The coaching seminar last week, and another gathering this week of the core team for a large training event we're planning in 2011, have meant that these past two weeks also had daily schedules that began in the early morning and continued until late at night. It's been a full, but very fruitful month so far.

I'll be heading back up to Barcelona on Friday at the crack of dawn - this time to teach in a smaller training course for child and youth workers from local churches. This seminar only lasts a couple of days, then I'll also be speaking at a Sunday morning church service, and I'll get back to Malaga on Sunday evening around midnight. Thanks for your prayers.

Coaching seminar

We're hearing great feedback and testimonies from our KKI conference in Barcelona last week: children who heard God's voice for the first time, pastors who went home energised with new vision to make changes in their church youth programmes, leaders who determined to "clear the temple of business" and return to simple worship and obedience as the centrepiece of their leadership....

In the meantime, we gathered a smaller group in Malaga over this past week for a workshop about the heart and skills of Christian leadership coaching. You may already be familiar with the concept of executive coaching or transformational life coaching. The coaching paradigm uses questions and reflection to help leaders set goals, explore options and decide on action steps that they want to implement in their business or ministry.

This seminar was part of a year-long intensive training programme in leadership coaching for ministry and missions. After a week of learning and practising these coaching skills, our next step is to begin putting them into practice by actually coaching other leaders over the months that lie ahead. For me personally, this involves connecting by skype with former LDC and PCYM students - coaching and supporting them in different areas of their ministry leadership and personal development.

November weather can be changeable in Spain, but we were blessed to have a beautiful sunny week that allowed us to eat our meals and hold some of our practice sessions outdoors (see photos.)

As one group of people leaves us this weekend, another group will be arriving for the next event in the diary: a meeting of the steering group that will be planning a Europe-wide training event in Austria next summer. So today we'll be doing a lot of airport drop-offs, and tomorrow we'll begin with airport pick-ups again. The planning meetings begin on Monday afternoon.

F7 Conference

After two days of meeting as a European leadership team, the time has arrived for our all-Europe KKI conference to begin. People have already begun arriving from all over Europe: from Finland and Latvia in the north, and from Spain and Portugal in the south; from France and Germany in the west, and from Romania and Albania in the east. In fact, they're coming from around 22 countries in total.

We've been calling this the F7 conference. Barcelona and Spain are well known internationally for Football, Fiesta and Food. When praying and preparing the conference, we felt that God drew our attention to other "F words" for this time: words like Family, Friends, Fellowship and Future. The conference will mark a leadership transition within the KKI ministry across the continent. The regional directors for Western/Northern Europe and the regional directors for Central/Eastern Europe are both stepping down from their roles and being replaced by new leadership teams in those regions. The conference will be a time of transitioning from what was past and looking forward to what God has for us in the future.

We'll also be focusing our attention on three "passion points" that God has given us for the continent:

1. that every child and young person in Europe should have an opportunity to hear the gospel message about Jesus
2. that Christian young people from Europe should be mobilised afresh to take the love of God into the whole world
3. that families should be strengthened to love and serve God together.

The conference will include times of worship and celebration with all ages together, times of workshops for the adults, an outing for the teenagers, and also a special programme for the thirty children who will be with us. Thanks for your prayers.

A month of gatherings

This has been a holiday weekend in Spain - not a particularly cheery one, though, as 1st November is All Saints' Day - the time when Spaniards take bunches of flowers to the graves of dead relatives. Yesterday at church, we came in the opposite spirit by holding a special family service that celebrated the life and power of God. Adults and children alike enjoyed making the armour of God (see Ephesians chapter 6) and dressing someone up with the belt of truth, the helmet of salavation and the shield of faith, etc

November is going to be a month of seminars and conferences for me, starting this week with our all-Europe KKI staff and leadership conference in Barcelona. I fly up to Barcelona tomorrow for some days of meeting with the European Leadership Team (ELT) and then the conference itself will run from Thursday till Sunday. Nearly 400 people from all over Europe will be joining us for that time, a time of tapping into God's heart for the children, youth and families of this continent. We've found an excellent facility very close to Barcelona airport for this event.

I'll get back to Malaga next weekend, just in time for a week-long training seminar we're running on the topic of Christian leadership coaching. This will be with a much smaller group than the Barcelona gathering, but people are coming from as far afield as Scotland, Latvia and Romania for that week.

Then, in the third week of November, we'll be gathering together in Malaga as the steering group for a training event that we're holding in Austria next summer..... and the following weekend I head back to Barcelona again to teach on a PCYM training seminar for child and youth workers.

All in all, a busy month of leadership gatherings, conferences and seminars. Thanks for your prayers during these weeks of travelling and meetings.