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Testimonies and Updates - Europe
Alan Wharton, United Kingdom
A few of the Pastors from UK were thoroughly impacted by what they heard when they were here last year and together we planted a cell which has just multiplied.
After a Spiritual Parenting training that was conducted, one woman who was a very timid soft spoken lady in the church has become one of the most effective of Spiritual parents and has had a wonderful experience of leading a friend to Christ. A lot of people have an ingrained feeling that they can’t but Spiritual Parenting has actually demonstrated that they can as they actually do it.Another church was down to only 30 people and they appointed a lay pastor who had attended 7 Steps in Singapore 2 years ago. This is a very poor area, with a lot of unemployment but something wonderful has begun because people were prepared to pay the price. There is a 72 year-old lady in the cell who is totally blind because she was blown out of the car during the war. As a teenager, she said to her grandmother that she should have died in the explosion because her life was useless but now at 72, she understands what her purpose in life is and she is ready to be trained as a Spiritual Parent but she is already a Spiritual Parent to all the young mothers in the group.
Chua Wee Hian, United Kingdom
Looking back we see how God helped us even though there were lots of tears and struggles and we are now becoming more of a cell-based Church. We are very thankful to God for that. As I contrast this to when we first began, our people were not very keen about training. They felt that re-training was a rather humbling experience. But now that there is a new sense of values and they have seen certain cells working because they observed and applied what was taught in the GLN model, we see lots of people flocking to attend CCLT training and SP training and this is a great sign that there is a new hunger and desire to rise higher to be equipped and empowered for the task ahead.
Now for our harvest events, when it is the cells that bring their oikos to these events, the retention rate is much higher and when they make a commitment, they go back to the cells where they are cared for, nurtured and where they can grow.
Janusz Meissler, Poland
This is a very user-friendly conference and the experience of coming to Singapore a second time is very helpful because even though I may be listening to the same things, new understanding comes.
We were already a church with small groups and it took some time for the people who were used to the old model to change. But we are now more visionary and focused and the input from here has been very helpful. We have just completed Spiritual Parenting in our church and appointed almost 40 new spiritual parents which will give us a new dimension in our understanding of leadership now that our leadership base is expanding. There has been an amazing change in the people and they are now like a different group of people. However we are still undergoing of a process of value change and are laying the foundations for that.