They came from across Europe, landed at an airport fifteen minutes from the city centre, and found their way to a place called Jesus Haus.
Over three days in March 2026, something happened there that is difficult to reduce to a programme or a set of session titles – though the sessions were good, and the programme held together well. What happened was more like a shift in the room. Young leaders who had arrived carrying questions about calling, about whether they had what it takes, about what planting a church in their particular corner of Europe could even look like, left with something different in them.
One of them put it simply: “So now I’m really inspired to go home and… yeah, do what I can. What the Lord is telling me.”
That sentence, unpolished and entirely sincere, is probably the best summary of what a Study Trip is designed to do.
Starting Where Everything Starts
The first full day began with the Gospel itself.
Not church planting strategy, not leadership frameworks, not the mechanics of team development – though all of those had their moment. The day opened with Theo Bunescu asking the gathered participants to sit with a foundational question: what actually is the Gospel, and has it captured you personally, or is it merely the subject of your work?
It is the kind of question that can be uncomfortable in a room full of people training for ministry. The assumption is that those who are preparing to plant churches have already settled their relationship with the core message. But Theo’s point was more searching than that: you cannot give away what you have only intellectually processed. The Gospel has to have reached you before it can reach anyone else through you.
Gabriel Aron followed with a session on the heart for the lost – again, not technique but posture. Participants were invited to write down names. People they knew, in their cities and communities, who did not yet know Christ. Those names went on a map. The map covered Europe. The room went quiet in a way that maps of unreached people sometimes make rooms go quiet.
You Are Needed. Actually.
Øivind Augland’s session carried a title that sounds straightforward until you sit with it: “You are needed.”
Not “someone is needed” – which is easy to agree with while assuming the someone is probably someone else. You. The person in this room, from this nation, with this history and these doubts and this particular patch of Europe you come from and know and love and are frustrated by.
The heart of his message was deceptively simple: we are first called to be with Jesus, and from that place of belonging, we are sent. Mission is not something we do in spite of our weakness or our ordinariness – it flows from the one who sends us. You are needed not because you are exceptional, but because you have been called.
The session was followed by a panel of local voices: Joseph Nelson, Yves Bulundwe, and Dom Jon, each sharing what it actually looks like to live a missional life in a city like Düsseldorf. Not theoretical, not idealized. The kind of stories that make you think: if they can do it there, maybe I can do it here.
Breakout sessions split the group into three streams: reaching young people, intercultural mission, and neighbourhood church planting. Different contexts, different challenges, the same underlying question – how do you take what you believe and make it land somewhere real?
Call and Prayer
Day two moved into territory that M4 Ready consistently returns to because it cannot be skipped without cost: the interior life of the church planter.
Nelutu Iubas delivered the call to church planting in a session that pulled no punches about what the work actually demands. Nelutu speaks from the kind of experience that makes easy encouragement feel dishonest – over 28 churches planted, years of navigating Romania’s complex religious landscape, a deep knowledge of what it costs and what it is worth. His message was not designed to make the decision easy. It was designed to make it real.
Jana Kontermann’s session on prayer and mission anchored the final morning. The premise was that prayer is not preparation for mission and not support for mission – it is mission. A gathering of young Europeans praying together over a map of the continent is itself a Kingdom act, not merely a warm-up for one.
The ministry time that followed was long. Worship carried the room into something that is harder to describe than sessions and speakers. Several participants stayed long after it was formally over.
Nations, Plans, and What They Took Home
Woven through the whole gathering were the nation times – moments when each national group stepped away from the main hall to do the harder, slower work of applying everything to their own context. What does discipleship culture look like in our movement? Who are the lost in our region? What is our action plan for the next season?
These conversations are where Study Trips earn their value. Inspiration without a landing pad evaporates. The nation times provided the landing pad: specific, accountable, owned by the people who would have to live it out after the flights home.
By the time the final session closed and the action plans were folded into bags, something had settled in the room that was not there when the first breakfasts were being served on Thursday morning.
“Just a joy to be part of this,” one participant said. “Really, really blessed.”
Another: “Powerful.”
Another: “Great time in Düsseldorf.”
These are not complicated testimonials. But they point to something that complicated language sometimes misses – that when young leaders from a dozen nations sit together under the weight of a shared calling, pray over maps of the places they come from, hear from people who have already walked the road ahead of them, and leave with names written down and plans sketched out and a half-remembered German song stuck in their heads, something has genuinely happened.
Europe needs churches. And the people who will plant them were, for three days in March, in Düsseldorf.
M4 Ready Study Trip 2026 took place at Jesus Haus, Düsseldorf, 5-8 March. To learn more about M4 Ready and upcoming gatherings, visit m4ready.org.