Hey all – Bryan here. I’m currently serving as HOPE’s Asia and Eastern Europe regional director. Matthew did a great job describing the main purposes around the Summit as well as walking you through the best of what is currently happening in Eastern Europe with HOPE and beyond. It’s now my pleasure to walk you through what I considered to be my favorite part of the Summit —dreaming of what could be. In a world where we spend so much of our time addressing and confronting challenges and constraints, we as a team were challenged to intentionally free ourselves from them and to envision a much more fruitful future. Imagining that 10 years from now each microfinance institution in the region has become the organization of our dreams—having a huge impact for Christ—what would that look like?
While the details looked different within each program, we all dreamed of a day when our spiritual integration efforts would be Spirit-led movements with a clear goal: to make disciples who become reproductive disciple makers. The team envisioned clear, simple strategies within each of our programs. Driven by local staff, our Christian witness would be a natural outpouring for all of our staff—from loan officers to country directors. We would be taking advantage of technology to make our lending operations more efficient so that we would be able to invest more time with our clients. Our clients would be using their businesses (and profits) to change society. Churches would be embracing and promoting Kingdom business principles and valuing business people. Above anything, we would be seeing holistic healing and spiritual transformation in the lives of thousands of clients and their families. We dreamed big, but we have a big God who can do all that we could ever ask or imagine (and more)!
We left the session encouraged and hopeful, and in our next post, Matthew will describe where go from here.
Guest post by Bryan Hoppe, Asia and Eastern Europe Regional Director
