A Finnish couple who prayed in their forties to be released from business life have poured the proceeds of selling their company into restarting a Free Church congregation that had been closed for years. Kari and Erja Ahlroth gave that prayer a name — “Projekti 50”, Project 50 — and today they lead the reborn congregation in Laukaa, a town of just under 19,000 people in central Finland, whose Free Church had been shut down in 2017.
The prayer goes back to Kari Ahlroth’s fortieth birthday, when he was a co-owner of a company and at the busiest point of family life with three children. He asked God to free him from those “whirlpools” by the age of fifty at the latest, promising to give the rest of his working life to God’s purposes. The couple kept the prayer quietly between themselves for years. Then one of Finland’s largest media houses approached the firm he part-owned, out of the blue, and bought it. Kari agreed to stay on for three more years; when that period ended he resigned, and after a six-month notice period he looked at his calendar and saw that he was 49. Erja, who had held senior roles in the IT sector, left a well-paid position at the same time. Before the new life could properly begin, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has described the years since as a test of what their calling rested on, and says she has never experienced God’s presence as strongly as she did during her treatment.
Neither of them had any particular connection to Laukaa. They had spent winters in Florida serving among Finnish visitors, and it was there they heard that the town’s Free Church had closed. Through people from their home congregation in Jyväskylä who lived in Laukaa, and who had prayed for the town for decades, a plan took shape — on deliberately modest terms. The mother congregation gave its blessing but no money and no staff: the work had to be carried by Free Church people living in Laukaa, and the Ahlroths went on giving to Jyväskylä as before. Around twenty people aged between 30 and 80 began to gather. A local landlord heard their plan and handed over the keys to a space within about twenty minutes, free of charge outside his own hours. When that space grew too small, the chair of a housing company who had been praying about his building offered them a vacant commercial unit. The congregation prayed for three signs — money for the renovation, an affordable rent and people to do the work — and reports all three being met: the mother church, having received a legacy, decided to cover the whole renovation sum rather than the half-donation, half-loan the Laukaa team had requested, and labour came partly through the RISE project, in which three professionals and a long-term prisoner worked on the premises for two months.
The vision the group wrote down after that first autumn of prayer — “a warm, genuine and inviting community, where everyone gets to be met, to serve and to grow in knowing God” — is still displayed at every gathering. Kari Ahlroth says one of the work’s guiding principles is to “fall in love with small”, and that when the early premises began to feel cramped his answer was that if Jesus were present he would happily stand in the draught lobby.
(Originally published in Finnish. Summary translated by CC / Connexion.)
Source: Suomen Vapaakirkko / Suomen Viikkolehti — svl.fi
