Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — His good, pleasing and perfect will. — Romans 12:2

Last Thursday and Friday here in our hall at GECHAAN we had our very first Global Leadership Summit.  You see, for many years Dan and I were privileged to be able to attend a live satellite event and spend two days focusing on building our leadership capacity and skills.

We were listening to Bill Hybels talk about “God’s big task for you” in 2011, when we realized that God was indeed asking us to move out of our comfort zones and do something different.  Dan wrote on his piece of broken pottery, “I am willing”, I wrote, “I am willing to stay or go”.  Two months later we were asked to pray about coming to Nigeria and we knew that this was where God was leading us on our “big task”.  You see the Summit experience has a very special place in our hearts and WE had experienced it before.

We assembled a team in our community to help us get the word out and invite community and church leaders to the event.  Dan worked on this for months.  We tried to explain the best we could and show our team clips from the summit.  But unless you have seen something with your own eyes and truly experienced it, it is hard to explain and equally hard to understand how you can benefit or tell anyone else how they can benefit.

Dan and I were praying for at least a hundred people.  We knew people would really benefit from listening and taking notes from such speakers as Bill Hybels, Jim Collins Horst Schulze, Albert Tate, Craig Groeschel.  This year, for the first time that we remember there was a Nigerian speaker as well, Sam Adeyemi, the Founder and Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Centre in Lagos.

Well, Thursday morning bright and  early we set up for at least a hundred people.  We knew people were really going to benefit and it is always a little interesting doing something totally new (which is the theme of our past couple of years it seems).  We started on time and throughout the morning people drifted in.  We had 37 people total attend our Global Leadership Summit in Gembu here.

Were we disappointed?  At first I think, but the response and way that the participants were so blown away by the quality of speakers and what they learned about leading in their different areas of work was so awesome!  To see heads shaking affirmatively and hear their insights was so awesome!

The biggest complaint is that they thought more people should have been there to experience this.  Our next summit will be held in November and we believe there will be many there, just from the word of mouth from the people who took our words on faith, that they would gain from this experience.

This is a report on how our first summit experience in Gembu went, but I also have a point for this week as well:  One of my favorite sayings from a talk I loved from years ago was, “Pigs don’t know pigs stink”.  Think about it, you don’t know what you don’t know!  Never take an opportunity that you have to learn for granted.  Learn all you can, take the time to process your thoughts and move forward!