What Happens After Everyone Goes Home

The moment I remember most from Jakarta wasn’t on the schedule.

It was 2016, and I was a volunteer at the Younger Leaders Gathering—one of the people behind the scenes, printing signage and pointing lost participants toward the right rooms. On one of the final evenings, I stood at the back of the hall and watched a thousand young leaders from around the world sing together. Different languages. Different accents. One song. I remember thinking: I had no idea the church was this big. Or this young. Or this alive.

The gathering was never the point. The point is what happens after everyone goes home.

I came to that gathering to serve. I left with my heart turned inside out. The week cracked me open to the global church and to what God is doing far beyond my corner of it. I never really recovered—which is how, years later, I ended up serving with the Lausanne Movement full time.

But here’s what I’ve learned since: the gathering was never the point. The point is what happens after everyone goes home.

This year marks two anniversaries. Twenty years ago, in 2006, young leaders from around the world gathered in Malaysia. Ten years ago, they gathered in Jakarta, Indonesia. Each event lasted about a week. Then everyone got on planes, went back to their churches and jobs and villages and cities, and the real story began.

event lasted about a week. Then everyone got on planes, went back to their churches and jobs and villages and cities, and the real story began.

We’ve been collecting those stories. Here are a few of them.¹

The friends who stayed

Martha Wame went home to Papua New Guinea after Jakarta. But she didn’t go home alone—not really. At the gathering she had met a group of women in ministry from all over the world, and they kept in touch.

Eight years later, they are still praying for one another. Martha describes being out in her canoe in the middle of the day when a message arrives on WhatsApp from her friend in Trinidad and Tobago: ‘Is anyone awake? I need someone to pray with me.’

Martha Wame, Papua New Guinea

‘I cannot tell you how important that relationship with my sisters has been,’ Martha says. ‘May you also enjoy the friendship from your global family, just like I have enjoyed the friendship of my global sisters.’

Abdulkadir Adewale Adams from Nigeria tells a similar story. In Jakarta he met Dave, an American who became, in his words, ‘a friend who is more like a brother’. Years later, when Abdulkadir was invited to Lausanne’s global gathering in South Korea but couldn’t afford the flight, he had already decided not to go. Dave wouldn’t let him give up. He encouraged him, prayed with him, and then rallied his own network to raise the money for the ticket.

Abdulkadir Adewale Adams, Nigeria

A week in Indonesia became a decade of brotherhood across two continents. That’s not a conference outcome. That’s family.

The callings that surprised everyone

Not everyone leaves a gathering like this with clarity. Some leave with better questions.

In 2016, Isac Abimanyu was supervising a palm oil plantation in Papua, Indonesia—a good career, hundreds of employees, and a quiet, persistent sense that God was calling him somewhere else. He came to Jakarta wondering if he should go to seminary. During the week, someone challenged him to read a book about surrendering everything to follow Jesus. That same evening, by what he can only describe as God’s timing, he met a man connected to the book’s Indonesian edition—who handed him a copy.

‘It felt like God was speaking directly to me,’ Isac says. He enrolled in seminary the next year.

Here’s the twist: Isac was sure he was called to youth ministry. Instead, God sent him to a rural congregation where more than half the members are over sixty, many of them tobacco farmers. He now spends his days walking with people at the other end of life—and he wouldn’t trade it.

 Isac Abimanyu, Indonesia

God’s calling can change,’ he says, ‘and we must be willing to follow wherever he leads.’

Yeda Tin Yee Hong from Canada knows that surprise well. She arrived at the 2006 gathering in Malaysia expecting God to call her into full-time church ministry. Instead, she sensed him saying something she didn’t expect: stay where you are. Her office, her profession, her everyday working world—that was her mission field. Twenty years later, she’s still there. “He has placed me in a strategic position to spread the gospel,” she says.

Yeda Tin Yee Hong, Canada

The work that multiplied

Some stories you can count.

Francis Osteen from Ghana attended that same 2006 gathering in Malaysia. What he learned there redirected his whole life toward missions in East Africa. In the twenty years since, he and his teams have planted more than 25 churches in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, in communities where the good news of Jesus had never taken root before.

 Francis Osteen, Ghana

“Through the young leadership training,” he says simply, “I am now the missionary that I am.”

Sam Monono from Cameroon came to Jakarta in 2016 and joined a track on leadership development. He went home and started pouring what he’d learned into other leaders—who poured it into others. “Many can testify,” he says, that what he received, he has been able to pass on “to many who have come across my path.” One week of training became a chain reaction across a nation walking through years of crisis.

Sam Monono, Cameroon

And then there’s Daniel Thomas from Jamaica, who spent his first days in Jakarta wondering if he even belonged there. “I didn’t really feel a hundred percent in place,” he admits. But through the relationships and support that followed—including a scholarship that funded his master’s degree in leadership—he grew into the leader of a national youth movement. Today his organization walks alongside women facing crisis pregnancies, supporting them practically and spiritually. He recently woke up to a message that another baby had been born to a mother his team had cared for.

Daniel Thomas, Jamaica

“I’ve felt alone so many times,” Daniel says. “And Lausanne has been a place where I’ve gotten so much encouragement and strengthening.”

Why I’m telling you this now

Next March, it happens again.

From 16–22 March 2027, around 1,200 emerging leaders—ages 25 to 35, from nearly every country on earth—will gather in São Paulo State, Brazil, with hundreds more joining online, for the Fourth Younger Leaders Gathering (YLG 4). And it isn’t designed to be a one-week experience. It’s the launch of a ten-year journey of mentoring, friendship, and shared mission.

But the greatest results of YLG 4 may not be visible in March 2027. They may become visible in 2037 or 2047.

A conversation in Brazil may help someone recognize God’s call. A friendship may sustain a leader through a future crisis. A mentor’s words may prevent someone from giving up. A young professional may return home with a new vision for their workplace. A ministry partnership may begin over a meal. A future church, movement, school, business, or community project may trace part of its story back to one week in Brazil.

We cannot predict exactly what God will do when younger leaders from around the world meet one another. The stories of 2006 and 2016 tell us that we should expect the impact to travel further than we can see.

If you’re a younger leader heading to Brazil: I was where you are. You may arrive feeling out of place, like Daniel did. You may arrive with a career question burning in your chest, like Isac

Here is my promise, from someone who watched it happen from the back of the hall: the person sitting next to you at lunch might still be praying with you on WhatsApp in 2037. Walk in curious. Walk in open. God tends to do his best work in rooms like that.

And if you’re someone who gave—someone who, ten or twenty years ago, helped put a plane ticket in the hand of a young Nigerian pastor or a Ghanaian missionary or a young woman from Papua New Guinea—please hear this: your gift did not end when the closing session did. It’s still moving. It looks like 25 churches in East Africa. It looks like babies born in Jamaica. It looks like a 3am prayer circle spanning six time zones. You didn’t fund an event. You planted an orchard, and it’s bearing fruit you may never fully see this side of heaven.

Your turn

These seven stories are just the beginning—we have dozens more, and we suspect you might be holding one yourself.

Did a Younger Leaders Gathering in 1987, 2006, or 2016 change your direction, your calling, or your friendships? We would love to hear it. Share your story with us here. Your story might be exactly the encouragement a nervous 26-year-old needs as they board a plane to Brazil next March.

 The gathering is only ever the beginning. The story is what happens after everyone goes home.

Because the gathering is only ever the beginning. The story is what happens after everyone goes home.

Endnote

1. Editor’s Note: The stories presented in this article were recorded in the Storytelling Booths at the Fourth Lausanne Congress in Incheon, South Korea, in September 2024. These booths served as a sacred space for global participants to share testimonies, prayer requests, and offer ministry insights from their unique contexts, as well as their journey with Lausanne. We are honoured to pass these along as glimpses of how God continues to work in and through his people.