Church Leaders Finalise BAUC Church Planting Team Contract Plan

July 24–25, 2006. Zlēkas, Latvia. The leaders of the Adventist church in the Baltic countries met together in Zlēkas to finalise BAUC church planting team contract plan. As mentioned in the previous BAUC News, the vision is to “Inspire and help our ministers and group leaders to build up the church planting movement up to the year 2010 and include it in the Strategic plans of each entity of the Baltic Union Conference”.

8 church leaders and department directors spent two days in the active and fruitful discussions finalising strategies which will be further discussed, elaborated and accepted in the Trans-European Division (TED) leadership meetings which will be held in September in Belgrad, Serbia.

“At the end of the previous session we felt the necessity of such meetings,” says Valdis Zilgalvis, BAUC president, “and we agreed to organise another meeting in Latvia, where Global Mission coordinator, Church Planting and LIFEdevelopment leaders would also be present. So we invited them to join us this time. I think that was very good decision as we got a lot of input from them.”

“We tried to use the latest collaboration technologies in our meeting too,” says Guntis Bukalders, BAUC Communication department director. “We used currently the best in the world network collaborative editing software where all participants can write the same document at the same time, and all participants see the result on their computer screens. I think that dramatically speeded up our common document development and finalisation.”

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Baltic Union Conference was represented by its president Valdis Zilgalvis, BAUC Secretary Andrejs Āriņš and LIFEdevelopment, Church Planting and Natural Church Development coordinator Guntis Bukalders;
Estonian Conference was represented by its president Tõnu Jugar and Secretary David Nōmmik;
Latvian Conference by its president Viesturs Reķis and Natural Church Development leader Ivo Roders;
Lithuanian Mission by its president Bertold Vinston Hibner.

Guntis Bukalders,
BAUC Communication Department Director