Berlin Trip - Cell Church Conference

Our group standing with our speaker Joel Comiskey at the end of the conference. We really bonded with him and appreciate all he did to help us. (Left to right: Roger, Joel, James, Damir, Andrej, Goran)

Joel speaking to us. Our group is seen up in the front couple of rows.

Here we are in our modest little apartment we rented in Berlin enjoying our muesli and coffee breakfast.

Here we are processing some of the things Joel had just finished speaking about and discovering how we can apply this in our church.

Andrej standing in front of one of the only pieces of the Berlin Wall left

Self portrait in front of Brandenburg Gate - this was the old Prussian entrance to the city.

Andrej and Roger in front of Brandenburg Gate

Self portrait of Andrej and Roger on the bus on our one sight-seeing day

Andrej in the U-bahn station. We took Berlin's extensive public transport system everywhere.

Update:

So, I wanted to give you all an update from our 5 days in Berlin for the cell church conference. I want to thank many of you for praying for us! The weekend was a total success. In every way our goals were met. We thank God for this.

I'll start with how Laura and the girls did while we were gone. They were...alright. Not great. But alright. They had a bout with head lice (kids share everything...another kid came over and played...that child happen to have lice...and the madness began). This caused a good bit of extra work (laundry, hair combing, etc.) that made things difficult. Other than that, my wife is an incredible trooper and continued to keep the vision in front of her of what this trip meant to the church.

As for the trip, we had a few hiccups, but in the end everything turned out just fine. For example, Tuesday night at our worship practice (the night before we were leaving) Damir happened to look at his passport and he discovered it had expired a week before. The next morning he went straight down to the downtown police station to get an expedited passport. He actually did receive his passport in record time...but it was still too late. He was about 10 minutes too late to the airport. We were so sad to not have him with us, but he did reschedule his flight (for a small fee of 180 euros...if anyone wants to give to that cause) to Friday. In this way he and Goran (our pastor) could travel together.

The first day we met with a missionary from Antioch Community Church who has successfully planted a youth church in Berlin and is now on another team from Antioch reaching out to students and young professionals. We really reaped from his experience. This was especially helpful to Andrej who is planning to plant a youth church in Maribor, Slovenia. Their connect will be priceless in the future as Andrej and Nina have more questions.

The second day, Andrej, Roger, and I were able to look around the city a bit. In just one day we were able to see the majority of this huge city. We were fascinated with the history of this town. We're thankful for a restful day of sight-seeing.

The third through fifth day we spent in the cell conference. We had a beautiful connect with Joel Comiskey as well as the host church Berlin International Church and their pastor Steve Mack. This on top of great teaching made the conference a real joy. Our primary goal was to see Goran, Damir, and Andrej receive a huge download of vision and encouragement about what the future could hold. This goal was met with full success! At the end of the seminar and in the days following we were able to immediately apply some of the things we heard as well as ask some great questions about the future.

Again, I want to thank those of you who prayed for our trip and for the girls back in Zagreb. We were so thrilled at how well the trip went and look forward to seeing more good results from this time.