Helsinki, 26th August 2024

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ, dear representatives from our partner churches.

It is my great honor and pleasure to welcome you all to Finland to participate in the International Partnership Consultation. This is a unique opportunity for the Finnish church to meet you all together and have exchange of experiences and ideas. I look forward to learn a lot from you, your life and mission in your own contexts.

As you know, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland has eight official missionary organizations carrying out the concrete work of our church’s mission. This ensures that our church has constantly an open window to the world, even on the other side of the globe. Therefore, the work of our missionary organizations is of utmost importance.

Dear friends. We here in Finland need to be aware how your churches see the mission going on and what kinds of messages you bring to us here in Finland. It is most important to underline the mutual, reciprocal interaction between the churches as equal partners. The old-fashioned idea of missionary work, with only one direction: from the giver to the recipient, is absolutely out of question. This consultation is based on the conviction that we need each other and that’s why we need to listen to each other.

Without international relations there is a danger for every church to become only a strictly national and local organization without any deeper understanding of the global, or even better, of the cosmic scale of the church of Christ. We must face the challenges of changing landscapes, forget our tendency to seek refuge in our own comfortable surroundings. I am convinced that this is exactly what Jesus meant when he sent the apostles all over the world before he rose to heaven in the ascension. His servants need to face new territories, new cultures, new languages, foreign ideas and ideologies, different religions and the vast variety of human life. God’s love must become incarnate everywhere. Our Lord Jesus Christ and his resurrection need to be proclaimed and lived out everywhere in the concrete situations of everyday life. For us all, there cannot be any other way of being a church.

Dear sisters and brothers. With these words I cordially welcome you to participate in the International Mission Consultation. May God bless our being together, our discussions and encounters with each other.