Stake Conference in Hamburg

Happy Monday everyone!  I hope y'all had a good week.  My week was a bit anticlimactic--let me tell you about it.  See also the pictures of Bremen.

On Tuesday Elder Despain and I went to Oldenburg for district leader school.  This being my second one, it was pretty standard.  But it is always good to talk about our purpose as district leaders and get some new ideas.  The one thing that was new this time is correction.  As leaders we do have the responsibility to correct the members of our district if something wrong is going on.  That was new for me.  For the most part, everyone does what they are supposed to so I don't have to do any of that but correction in the church, specifically as a missionary is a special teaching time. 

We came home that afternoon and had a lesson with Herr Stieflea.  Marcella was the member who went with us.  We taught the third lesson, the gospel of Jesus Christ.  We wanted to commit him to baptism at the end but it just didn't fit right.  It was a good lesson but it didn't really go as planned.  Marcella said some good things; she talked about how she came to the decision to be baptized.  Herr Stieflea said he was interested and definitely looking to find out if this is the true church of Christ.  He is awesome.  He even answers the questions in the back of the brochures we give him.  I have never seen that before.  

 

Wednesday we had district meeting.  I asked the Bremen sisters to give the lesson on finding the faith to find/finding through talking about the family.  It went really well.  There was a good Spirit at the meeting and we did a good role play.  At the end I closed by talking about being bold.  

 

Thursday and Friday were supposed to be killer days.  We were supposed to have ten appointments and commit two people to baptism but only two of those appointments actually happened. Some really bad luck.

 

Saturday and Sunday we went to Hamburg for stake conference.  The Area Seventy was there.  During the adult session on Saturday night, the speakers addressed the area plan--bring one friend to church, become physically and spiritually self-reliant, and find one ancestor's name to take to the temple.  On Sunday, all of the talks focused on the importance of eternal families.  The Area Seventy got up at the end and talked about how testimony is action.  The members need to be actively sharing their testimony everyday.  

  

We came home yesterday afternoon and met with Nanakofi.  We taught him most of the commandments.  He is on board with those.  We have a few left as we queue him up for baptism on May 2nd.  We also went to see Grace last night.  She was pretty sick.  We wanted to commit her to baptism but there was just no way.  We gave her a priesthood blessing and then told her to get some rest.  Hopefully she is feeling better later this week.

 

Thursday we go to Berlin for the mission conference and the introduction of iPads. We won't have a lot of working time this week with that trip so hopefully we can see everyone and the appointments won't fall through this time!

 

Have a good week!

 

 

Love,

Elder Tanner Germann