Lausanne World Pulse – LAUSANNE REPORTS – Learning from Each Other: Using New Tools

By Raphael Anzenberger
May 2009

Whenever I attend conferences outside my country, I pay close attention to new ideas and tools that can better increase the effectiveness of meetings. I must say that rarely have I seen more innovation in communication than at the 2007 Lausanne Bienniel Leadership Meeting in Budapest. Outstanding! Or, “smashing,” as the Brits would put it! Below are two innovations I took back to France and implemented during our January 2009 Evangelist Forum in Vevey, Switzerland.

As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter.

The World Café
The concept: As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build upon each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people’s capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims.

In Budapest: Young leaders from across the globe hosted conversations during three days to help the body of participants to brainstorm about the planning of the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization: Cape Town 2010. In each room, tables were set for six, and people moved from one table to another in sessions of twenty minutes each, talking and wrestling with key planning questions. Two hundred people were involved in two hundred conversations as a result.

In Vevey: We used World Café to help us brainstorm on the ministry of the evangelist in the local church. Two questions were asked at each table: (1) What must be done to better recognize the ministry of the evangelist in churches? and (2) What does the evangelist need in order to fulfill his or her ministry? Conversations ran for two hours. Coffee and cakes fueled the energy in the room. Young evangelists from France, Belgium, and Switzerland hosted the conversations, stimulating participants’ input, and synthesizing the thinking into workable solutions.

Raphael Anzenberger is serving in France as an evangelist, with a passion to raise a new generation of evangelists who will bring the message of the cross into all corners of French society. Married with four children, he lives in Tours, France. He is general secretary of France Evangelisation and author of Moi aussi je voudrais croire, mais, published by BLF Europe.