Movements that change the world

I took an instant liking to Manfred Rusner when I met him. He’s relational, intense and committed to mission.

Manfred heads up church planting for the Evangeliska Frikyrkan. He is our key contact in bringing together four Swedish denominations that are committed to multiplying new churches. They’ve signed up for a two-year program with us called Matrix.

Manfred became a Christian at age nineteen. While working in Vienna, Manfred was challenged to discover that the north west of the city had no evangelical church for over 250,000 people. So he planted one and discovered how effective church planting was as a strategy for evangelism.

In 1997 he returned to his native Sweden to become his movement’s director for church planting. Sweden rivals Denmark as a secular nation. It has only 5.4% of the population regularly attending church. The official Lutheran church is in serious decline.

Manfred soon implemented a strategy to inspire and equip local churches to start new churches. So far, 25 new churches have been started.

Manfred loves to connect people. He began to network with other movements in Sweden with a vision for church planting. In 1998 he held his first church planting conference. One by one other movements joined in. Each year up to 150 people from every denomination come together. There are now about 100 church planters across a nation of 9 million. There is still a long way to go, but an impressive start has been made.

Manfred uses the annual conferences to network planters with each other, to inspire them with keynote speakers who are effective church planters and to equip them through elective workshops.

We had two days with Manfred and the four Swedish teams. In addition teams from the Czech and Slovakian Republics heard of this Swedish event and asked if they could be included. Their budget was limited, so instead of flying, they drove 19 hours (1600 kms) to be with us. Most of the Swedes have English. Few of the Czechs and Slovaks do. So they brought a translator and the Swedes provided the headphones.

Our times of worship and prayer were in English, Swedish, Czech, and Slovakian languages. I’m glad God is multi-lingual!

Our job was to help them catch a vision for becoming a church planting movement. I shared what it would take: white-hot faith, commitment to a cause, contagious relationships, rapid mobilization and adaptive methods. Then we helped them build a strategy for implementation.

This is the second Matrix program we have launched in Europe. The first has now moved into the church planting phase and has 150 church plants on the go with 1000 planned for the next 5-10 years. We currently have 8 teams in the Austalian and New Zealand program.

As I got to know Manfred I discovered his vision goes beyond Sweden. He has been working closely with leaders of a national church planting movement in Norway. Together they have a heart for the whole of Scandinavia and the Baltic states.

I’m excited about continuing to work with him and the other teams over the next two years. With God anything is possible.

Thanks to everyone who prayed for us.