Charged up Zone Leaders

We held a final Zone Leader Council here in the mission home this week.

I am impressed with this fabulous group of charged up zone leaders all ready to welcome their new mission president!

We did plenty of training and talking and scripture study (really) but the only pictures I took were when we were out and about doing fun stuff.

Tuesday afternoon the assistants organized an ultimate Frisbee leadership activity.

Here's the missionary version of 'shirts and skins'

Ties in


Ties out


A few shirts ended up out too


First they played one handed with no talking - not easy

Then they broke loose and gave it everything they had











That is exactly how these elders approach their missionary work

A few things flew out of pockets so I ended up looking at this collection




To begin the next day we hiked up to gorgeous Maracas waterfall for a morning devotional.



It was the perfect setting to talk about "living water"



and the Savior's teachings on leadership found in the Gospel of John.












Back at the mission home we started our 'Best Practices' session. It has been an extremely helpful exercise in this mission. We look for what is working well in the zones and build upon it. It is patterned after an approach to organizational evaluation called Appreciative Inquiry - developed by David Cooperider of Case Western Reserve University.

Here's what happens:

Describe - each pair of zone leaders shares something that is working best in their zone

Dream - we discuss the ideas, build upon them, encourage one another, think about how they could be applied in other settings

Design - zone leaders write down the new ideas they have and plan ways to implement them

Deliver - they go back to their zones and do it!

Best Practices is always a wonderful, energizing experience as the Spirit whispers to each zone leader the things he needs to learn and do.

A few of the ideas from this session:

• 20 male contacts daily
  
• helping missionaries find their 'happy place'
• zone activities to build unity and excitement
• preparing to feast spiritually at zone conferences
  

After quite a few hours of delivering, dreaming and designing the elders took a break to learn, by experience, about communication and delegation.

They did this by trying to keep a bunch of balls in the air at once - first without any organization at all.

It got a little wild







Then assignments were made - each person had a specific receiver and a thrower.

Did it work better?

It was still a little crazy - but there were certainly more balls moving across the circle.









The conference concluded with a powerful testimony meeting. These fine missionaries are ready and anxious to get back to their countries and help their band of brothers continue to move the work forward in the West Indies.

Trinidad

Elders Williams, Worthington, Findlay and Duncan

Islands

Elder Cronin

French

Elders Biver, Snow and Neff

Suriname

Elders Kinghorn and Riding

Guyana

Elders Packer, Tupou, Chambers, Green, Palmer, Westover, Huntsman, Barton and Elders Marshall and Scott in the front