A Multi Generational Vision
About nine years ago, I was at a prayer meeting in Amsterdam when a close friend, Onno Weststrate, shared something that has stuck with me ever since...
He talked about a very ambitious project in the Netherlands: building a deep-water port for huge cargo ships. The key point was that the people behind it knew it might take 50 years to complete - so long that they probably wouldn’t live to see the results. Still, they chose to invest their time, energy, and resources into it.
Onno used this as a lesson for us. He challenged us to think about what big, long-term goals we have for God’s Kingdom - things we can start working on now, even if we may never see them fully completed. Another friend, Vlada Stojanovic, takes this idea even further by encouraging us to think not just about the next generation, but even the third and fourth generations.
It’s an exciting way to think, but it also pushes us to focus on the long term - what God ultimately wants for our shared mission in Europe and beyond, and what we should be doing now to help make that happen.
So what does this mean in practice? It means helping prepare the next generation to continue building to the pattern as it has been handed down to us, perpetuating the authentic apostolic and prophetic culture of our relational missional life together.
For Rachel and myself, this means focusing on raising and mentoring many people in the next generation, safeguarding and propagating the apostolic values we’ve received, nurturing and multiplying our prophetic culture, and always keeping a big-picture view of the future.
Posts coming up over the next few months will shine a light on how some of this is being worked out in practice across Europe. Read on and consider for yourself, what is the part God has for you to play in his big story?
Every Blessing
Maurice
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About
We belong to the Relational Mission family of churches, which is part of Newfrontiers.
In Europe, Relational Mission has the vision to establish a network of 20 locally-led churches in every nation of Europe by 2050. Learn more about Relational Mission, its vision and values here.
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