Younger Leaders

Younger leaders face various challenges in life and leadership. I want to help them succeed while loving Jesus and serving him.

Aged 23, at the end of my mission studies in the Netherlands, I took some days discerning my personal mission statement.

It has helped me all those years to stay strongly focused on my main passions of investing into youth and young Europeans (defining young as people between 16-30 years of age, according to the EU).

I wrote back then: Helping younger people to discover their God given calling (and live a missional life-style). And this mission has always stayed with me, praying that young European leaders will once again stand up for godly values, that thousands of Europeans will go on cross-cultural missions, engage with the needs across Europe and bring our continent before God.

Throughout the last 10 years the burden for younger leaders became stronger and stronger, wanting to see young leaders last and finish well.

Michael Oh, Lausanne International CEO said in 2015, “60% of all leaders do not finish”. This is a huge number of people quitting, burn-out, depression etc.

I was at certain cross-roads in life, facing a crisis, and if it would not have been for senior leaders, I would not have made it until here. Therefore I invest into younger leaders, into discipleship and mentoring.

Practically it means that I have committed to three girl leaders to be their life-long friend, to some others to be their mentor for a certain time and being on the look-out to find mentors for younger leaders, dreaming for a European mentoring network.

During my nine years as a CEO of Mission-Net, I was committed to see younger leaders take on responsibility. Whoever was part of our team became a better leader through being with us. I would like to see this even more developed in new areas of ministry.

One of my commitments is to Lausanne; where I joined the Younger Leaders Generation Development team (YLGen Development) that looks after the nearly 1000 younger leaders who attended the YLG 2016 in Jakarta recently.

Since a few years I am also part of the European and German gatherings of younger leaders and we pray about our next future steps.