Elke Hanssmann
On Sunday the 23rd you will find me in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and in the middle of our international leader’s meetings. I serve with Operation Mobilisation (OM), a mission agency that exists to contribute to enable people who never had the opportunity to respond to Jesus’s invitation to be reconciled with God, to hear about Jesus and follow him.
For the past 35 years, I had the privilege of serving in various roles, yet the thread that is running through all of it is my desire to ensure that those who serve in the context of OM are enabled, equipped, supported and developed to flourish personally and to fulfil their responsibilities well. While mission is a noble task, it is still being done by human beings, people with different personalities, a multiplicity of stories and backgrounds, from various cultures...these people need to be trained, supported, listened to, given practical tools to fulfil their calling. That’s where God has placed me.
As an organisation, we have been called to establish vibrant communities of Jesus followers among the least reached. Vibrant communities, however, will only become a reality if those who create those communities are vibrant and healthy themselves: spiritually, emotionally, physically, relationally.
OM’s founder George Verwer has been known to share his take on “whenever two or three are together in Jesus’ name...there is usually a mess before long.” My role exists to hep minimise that this is true.
My heart and focus lie in coming alongside staff and especially leaders in many different ways. In Kuala Lumpur, I have the privilege of finishing up a training of 20 emerging leaders from across the globe who have just participated in a one-year intensive leadership development program called “Joshua Journey”. Throughout the year, they engaged with topics like Spiritual formation, their identity as a leader, finding and living out their purpose and calling, embracing pain and suffering as integral to leadership (particularly when you choose to serve among the least reached who, by nature, are in poorer and less-accessible parts of the world), building capacity and leading healthy teams and more— meeting monthly as a large group, in small groups, receiving leadership coaching and completing monthly e-modules online. Now they complete their development journey in Malaysia at our strategic leader’s meetings, to experience and participate in a global gathering. Our team has already begun another cohort of 20 young leaders and it will hard to say goodbye to those I have invested in so much over the past 12 months.
One deep joy has been to watch Shelley from the Caribbean, who has been part of the Joshua Journey in a previous cohort and has now joined the Joshua Journey leadership team. When she came on the program, she was shy and unsure of herself. She’s been given the task to establish an OM work in Guinea, but had never been in a leadership role herself. For the 12 months of the program, I had the privilege of coaching her and bring out what God had already placed in her, albeit unseen to her. In our most recent conversations I got to first-handedly witness the growth and development in this beautiful young woman. She now speaks with confidence and has moved from being on her own in Guinea to having built up and is now developing a rapidly growing team that mobilises churches across the Caribbean to put the least-reached on their map and send workers into the harvest field.
The International leaders’ meeting (ILM) brings together all our field directors of the more than 140 countries where OM is working. This provides a unique opportunity to engage with any of the leaders that I usually only see online. Especially with leaders from the non-Western world, where power cuts, cultural preferences and adverse circumstances make it harder to do things together online, these face-to-face interactions are crucial to better understand the training and development needs of those my division (leadership development) is seeking to serve. With 450 leaders and key ministry partners and donors present, my every free minute will be filled with one-on-one conversations.
Another core responsibility I hold is heading up our international leadership coaching academy that trains leadership coaches who in turn come alongside our leaders in OM at every level. The ILM is a unique opportunity to bring alumni from the academy together (all coaches we train are also missionaries who serve in a coaching capacity alongside other responsibilities) as well as connecting with leaders who have benefitted from being coached and thus are interested to be trained as coaches themselves.
Israel, our current field director in Zimbabwe, now in coach-training himself, described the impact that being coached as a leader has had on him:
“For the first time, I came to the international leader’s meeting with a sense of confidence and an understanding of seeing myself as a partner in ministry, rather than as a beggar in interactions with representatives from resourcing fields that contribute to our local ministry with funds. I am so grateful for what coaching has done for me. This is what we need in Africa now; we had a lot of mentoring but this is empowering us in a very different way.”
Sitting with Israel and many others, to better understand how we can train coaches to serve in many different languages and cultural contexts, will make a significant impact on leaders’ health and retention. Just recently, I was sitting with a new leader who burst into tears after our coaching conversation, expressing how meaningful it was for her to, right from the start, have someone who provides a listening ear, support, encouragement and coaching to help her find her feet. As she is already in her sixties, joining missions is a huge step for her and the temptation to give up has been very real.
Often when we think about missions, we only think about the moment where someone who has never heard the gospel gets to hear and respond to it. For God’s mission to be fulfilled however, there are so many mosaic pieces that need to come together. Romans 10 lays out some of the chain reaction that is so characteristic for missions:
How can they believe if they never heard? How can they hear if no one tell them? How can someone tell if no one sends them?
As I reflect on my years in mission I might add: how can they stay if no one comes alongside them? How can they grow if no one invests in them?
Riverside family, you are actively participating in making sure that the gospel of Jesus Christ is heard, understood and believed by investing in the strengthening and equipping of those whom God uses to be his hands and feet on the ground! For this, I am deeply grateful!