The first ever Celebrate Recovery conferences in Norway and in Finland were recently held.
On May 1st and 2nd, a team from the US and the UK travelled to Kristiansand, Norway where they conducted a 'live' CR meeting on Friday and an all day conference on Saturday. The team demonstrated what a Large group and what Open Share groups look like to a crowd of about 50 and then taught the basic instructions on how to begin and grow your CR. In Norway, there is an existing CR group which has been operating now for just under 2 years. This team has travelled to the annual CR Summit over the past few years as well as attended a CR conference in the UK and in Ireland in preparating for their launch. This same team is spearheading the initiative to translate the materials into Norwegian and are just a few months away from completing that exhaustive effort. The contact for this team is Karl Inge Thomassen karlit@c-r.no.
On May 4th, the team travelled to Helsinki, Finland where they conducted 2 different conferences. The first training took place on May 6th in Tampere, Finland at the home office of Operation Mobilization (http://www.fin.om.org/). Here the team spent all day sharing the details of what CR is and how to start the ministry. On Friday May 8th and on Saturday May 9th, the team repeated the same meeting demonstration and training that was conducted in Norway. A local church in Finland is currently taking a group of potential leaders through the Kickoff Strategy and working through the Participants Guides in preparation for a fall 09' kickoff. Since this church will be using the english version of the materials, no work is currently being done on translating into Finnish.
