First time Alpha ESOL in Hungary

I wanted to give you a little update on the Alpha ESOL course John and I are part of. The course has been going really well, with 70 attendees at the beginning and 50-40 who became regular participants. This is a pretty large group for an Alpha course. We have a nice group of leaders (host in the Alpha vocabulary) and it has been fun to meet with them every week to prepare. Since the city, where the course takes place, is a little bit over an hour away from where we live, Alpha also has enabled me and John to have some nice car dates. :-)

The course is a blessing to me. I have grown to really like the people who are in my discussion group and the team we are working with. We are still just half way through the course but I am sure it will be hard to say good-bye at the end. I am hoping so much that those who are just getting to know Christianity through the course will have a very positive experience and will take their firsts steps in their journey with Christ. Thank you all who have been praying for us and the course. It definitely feels like we have God's blessing over us and we are very thankful for the fruits we have already seen and full of anticipation for what is still ahead.

The Alpha course this Tuesday evening.

John's group. John seems to be very relaxed in this picture. :-)

This is our -Alpha for ESOL Course Testing Team- shirt. Quite a mouth full, don't you think? :-)

Strategic Planning

Have you ever taken some time to sit down and write out a vision statement for you life?  Yesterday, Zsofi and I wrote six.  That's because we have six competing visions for our lives.  No, not really.  We actually just enjoyed the process so much that we couldn't stop with just one...

Why all the vision statements?  Well, one of the exciting developments this past year has been the addition of Chad & Serina Hollowell to the UWM team here in Europe (see a picture of their family on the right).  Chad will be serving as UWM's Area Director for Central and Eastern Europe, and one of the first projects he initiated was to come up with a team vision statement for Hungary.  Hence, Zsofi and my devolution into vision statement writing craziness...

The truth is, however, that Zsofi was right.  We began by each of us composing a kind of vision statement for our lives--i.e. what we would like for our lives to have consisted of if we were to look back over it when we are 80 years old--along with 5-8 of our core values.  From those two individual documents we forged a "joint" vision statement for our lives.  This process, though not revealing anything that we didn't already know (at least in the abstract), was nonetheless really interesting to see on paper--especially in drafting the joint vision statement which is essentially our long-term goals for our marriage.

Now to the ordinary person, three vision statements in one day would be sufficient.  Not for us!  From our two individual personal vision statements, we each drafted individual ministry vision statements.  And then from those two individual ministry vision statements, we forged a draft joint ministry vision statement.  Once again, nothing terribly surprising or new to us if we would have spent some time thinking about it, but codifying it on paper turned out to be a really interesting/valuable process.

In the end, when we sat down with Chad on Wednesday to go over our (draft) ministry vision statement, I think he was a bit shocked to discover that we actually had six.  :-)  But I suppose it means that at least we are not people who lack vision...

For any of you who are interested, the final version(s!) should be ready in a couple weeks and we would be happy to send you a copy.