Zone Conferences

We just concluded two amazing Zone Conferences which were part of a mission tour by Elder Erich Kopischke of the Seventy, and a member of the European Area Presidency. He stayed with us in the mission home for 3 nights, then left right after our mission council to catch a plane to London where he had to reorganize a Stake. (And I should mention that Elder Kopischke thought Liz's breakfast Smoothies were "brilliant"---to quote the British).He taught us a lot and I think it will revolutionize our mission! We are a Preach My Gospel mission, but we learned there are some things we can still work on (when Elder Kopischke was Berlin Mission President, implimenting teach to find, and really working with members, changed it from 0.3 baptism per missionary per year to 2.0 baptism per missionary per year). So, now we start doing some of the finer points---3 short lessons a week, daily contact, pray on the first lessons (which means we'll have to stop teaching in lokale's--bar's), and teach to find. Teach to find will be a big cultural change since it's teaching from the very start when contacting, and that's not what we currently do. But the most important thing is what we need to do on the member side to have them take more responsibility for helping the missionaries with retention, teaching, and fellowshipping. Five years ago, there were 500 on average in Sacrament meeting across the mission. After baptizing maybe 700 over the past 5 years, we now have about 500 in Sacrament meeting across the mission. If we and the members don't do something differently, we'll still have about 500 in Sacrament meeting 5 years from now. (One very urgent need is to be creative in helping them with employment as we lose a lot of members to other countries seeking employment. We discussed the possibility of finding a missionary couple with experience in new business creation to be called to Albania with a "venture" fund to help some of our young people start up businesses here---anyone interested??.) We've held mission council meetings, and just yesterday, an all district leaders meeting, where we've created a vision of what we believe can be in 3 years, and a plan of what we need to do to achieve it. Everyone seems very excited about doing this, which is to have 5 units ready to be wards in 2011 so that a Stake can be formed. So, now we embark on a very aggressive training program thru the Assistants, Zone Leaders, and the District Leaders to make an already wonderful set of missionaries even better! And, Elder Newhouse and I start working with our District Presidency and the branch presidents on the member side.

One of our members is a young student at the university in Tirana who joined the church a little over a year ago. He turned his papers in to serve a mission, and was called to serve in Albania. A little over a week ago, he called me and said that he wouldn't be able to serve a mission because of family problems and that his father had left for Greece. Then just a few days ago, he came to the office and I had a chance to hear the whole story. His father had sold a little land to a very good friend, who said he'd pay him later. After some time, still no payment. A couple of weeks ago, he and his friend were in a lokale (bar) drinking, when the topic of payment came up. The friend got angry and said to stop bringing it up all the time. The argument escalated to the point that his father hit his friend over the head with a beer bottle, and sent him to the hospital. (He was in a drunken rage.) Fearing revenge, the father fled the scene to southern Albania, where he then walked for over 14 hours at night thru and over the mountains into Greece, where he's now staying illegally with relatives. But, in this country revenge can be taken out on any member of the family, so his mother and other siblings are all fearful of what may happen. I counseled and urged him that he immediately visit his father's friend in the hospital to ask forgiveness, to make restitution, to offer whatever it takes (like forgiving the debt on the land) to make things right. He just shook his head and said that it doesn't work like that in this country. I hope I can persuade him to give it a try (and that he can do it without personal risk)...otherwise, I don't know what the future is for this family.