Report on the Zurich Meeting
October 8-10, 2004

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard (Acts 4:20)

When the apostles thought about the work of God that was done before their very eyes, they were filled with the desire to share what God has done. This is the feeling with which we would like to share about our recent meeting in Zurich. God has done amazing things, that I want to report to all of you.

Over the course of the last 18 months since the breakdown of the ICOC organizational structure we (that is Christian Herbst, Mirko Russo, Thierry Fender and Peter Szabad) have been trying to keep the European churches connected by calling and visiting churches, organizing meetings and conferences of all types. We are very grateful that there are many others who have done a lot for the unity of our movement through these challenging months. May God bless you all for your efforts and hearts. In the summer we thought about a plan to bring the leadership of the bigger or older churches (Budapest, Zurich and Geneva, Berlin and Munich, Amsterdam plus leaders from Scandinavia) together for a meeting that will enable us to have some great discussions with the brothers to see how we can enhance cooperation and to find a common vision for Christ’s church in Europe. We have also been in more frequent contact with the Scandinavian churches so we’ve invited Christopher Lindfeldt and other leaders. Most of the people who came were non-full-time leaders, many of them took a day off from work to be able to attend. We really appreciate their desire and sacrifice to be a part of the meeting. The Zurich church was a phenomenal host and has made the meeting unforgettable. Regarding those churches that were not invited, we really hope that this meeting doesn’t make any of you feel left out. That wasn’t our goal at all. We would have loved to involve more people in the discussions but still had to keep it small enough for it to be effective. That’s why we’ve only invited a couple of churches.

We’ve had many ideas and saw many common needs in the group, but the Spirit led us to a great discussion on what our vision is for Europe and what are some strategies to see that come true. As hard as it is to come up with a one-sentence vision statement, when the participants shared their vision for Europe, it resonated with all of us: We all want to be and stay together, we realized that the individual congregations in Europe are a part of the body of Christ, therefore we clearly see the need for ligaments to hold the body together! Restoration was also a word that came up frequently in our conversations, meaning that we need to continue to look into the Bible for God to reveal his vision and plan for us.

One idea we had is for the “stronger” churches or the churches with more resources help the ones that are more in need. Which is definitely not a bad idea (sharing to have equality is quite biblical – 2Cor 8:12-15, also having the spiritual parents provide for the children - 2Cor 12,14), but the Spirit led us to a realization – through the preaching of Christopher Lindfeldt and the following discussion – that even with our gifts and strength we still all need to be humble and get help, not only the supposedly weak for now. The ligaments of humility will build up the body of Christ because it will lead all of us to ask for help from each other. This realization made us all rejoice and we thanked God for helping us realize his plan for a humble unity.

Having said this, we in Berlin would like to confirm that we want and need your help. We want and need relationships outside of our city. We want and need your spiritual input and advice. We need you to come to Berlin to visit us, learn what you need to learn and show us what we need to learn. And we want to keep on visiting other churches in order to learn from you.
The above mentioned brothers want to continue to serve you in providing the infrastructure that is needed for the ligaments to be created and grown between the churches. We want to create a European church directory (maybe even a home page) where we can easily get in touch with each other and locate a church in one of the 41 cities of Europe where we have churches. We also want to continue to facilitate relationships by organizing meetings and conferences in the future. The next one of those would be a European Leaders Meeting in Munich for all the European churches in December (just like we had in Dec 2003 in Budapest).
Please, pray for us and that God would continue to lead us towards the unity Jesus prayed about in John 17.

With brotherly love,

Christian Herbst
Mirko Russo