Natural beauty and spiritual processing

On Wednesday, we completed our days of preparation with the KKI core leadership team and got ready for the arrival of the other members of the ILT (international leadership team.) Amidst torrential rain, we made the drive to El Portal, the hotel and retreat centre where we're holding the rest of our meetings together. It's a spot of natural beauty, in a valley that used to be a production centre for sugar cane. With such a "rainforest" look about it, the torrential downpour seemed appropriate, but we were all hoping it wouldn't last too long. This photo, taken from the dining room where we eat our meals, shows - on the other side of the river - the little white hotel building where our bedrooms are. It's not much fun to make that walk a couple of times per day in the pouring rain, and not surprising that the centre provides big umbrellas for all guests.

On the day that our meetings began, the rain was so strong that the airport had to be closed, as no planes could land there. This meant that two of our people got stranded in Bogotá and another one had his plane rerouted to Cucuta. Fortunately, the rain stopped a little later in the evening, and they were finally able to join us around midnight. It meant that they'd missed the warm welcome from our Colombian hosts - where the KKI young people had done Colombian national dances, had shared some of the impressions they got when praying for us, and had given us small gifts that were typical of their nation. Some of the KKI staff (pictured above with some of the ILT) have also been working hard to welcome us and make our stay here go smoothly.

In fact, the weather has been mixed: the mornings cool and overcast, the early afternoons sometimes quite sunny, and the late afternoons and evenings the time for the heavy rain to start up again. This photo shows some of the ILT group, exploring the property during one of the sunny intervals. Our schedule's been fairly full, but the after lunch break coincided nicely with the sunnier time of the day, and so some have gone for long walks while others have been brave enough to go into the "natural" swimming pool which is fed by the river water that runs through it.

A main purpose of our time here was to restructure our international leadership in a way that would serve our worldwide ministry family better in the years that lie ahead. Our international leadership team had grown in recent years to a group of over twenty people as regional leaders from different parts of Africa, Asia and South America had come on board. At last year's ILT gathering, we had a sense that it was time to reevaluate this, and so we've been in a process of "preparing to restructure" for the past eight months now.  It has been a real privilege to witness how everyone approached this process with such humility and with a real desire to enter into God's best for them. There was no sense of selfish ambition, as can often be observed in the world's leadership structures; instead, there was a beautiful sense of people being diligent to seek what was on God's heart for us.

The outcome is that about half of our group made the decision to invest their time and energy more into their regional leadership role, instead of carrying responsibility year round for the international. A few others felt it was God's timing for them to move into more of an "eldership" role, and the rest of us confirmed the rightness of that. This left a more streamlined group of only ten people who felt called to step into our new international leadership team (ILT) for the coming season in order to serve the ministry worldwide and link closely with those whose primary focus will be on their regions and nations. We were able to commission this new group in prayer, and also take time to pray for all the other leaders and for the new elders.

Now that this transition has begun, we've been taking our remaining days to look at how these different kinds of leaders and leadership teams will function around the world and how we can strengthen our leaders through high quality training and leadership development initiatives. We also had a morning when we met with KKI leaders from Colombia and Venezuela, and were able to hear how God is leading them and what he's been doing in their midst over the past 25 years.

Our time is drawing to a close now. Some will be heading home within the next couple of days; others will be staying on another day or two to meet and plan further for different international initiatives. For me personally, I'll also be taking a "tourist day" to visit a national park here in the region of Bucaramanga, before heading home to Spain and arriving there next weekend. Thanks so much for your prayers during this time.