President of the Helsinki YMCA Bishop Teemu Laajasalo’s greeting at the Secretary Generals’ Day of the YMCA Federations at the Helsinki YMCA Hotel Arthur, Helsinki, 10.11.2025, 6 pm.

Minister, Secretary General of YMCA Europe, ladies and gentlemen,

I wish you all a warm welcome to the evocative premises of the Helsinki YMCA. It is a special joy to have you here as our guests. Thank you for your leadership and thank you for your work – for all our work and fellowship together! A warm welcome to Helsinki! Today, it is my particular pleasure to welcome the new Secretary General of YMCA Ukraine, Victoria Trofimova. We stand with you, we want to support you, and we pray for you.

As the proud chair of the Helsinki YMCA, I should first tell you a little about the place you have come to. I should also thank and praise the Helsinki YMCA’s management and workers.

The Helsinki YMCA accounts for around half of all Finnish local YMCA associations. We have 135 full-time workers, 1,600 basketball enthusiasts, nearly 9,000 regular weekly participants, around 20,000 involved more broadly in activities, and more than half a million encounters with different people every year.

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Ladies and gentlemen,

Finland and the whole of Europe have awoken to a new reality. Children and young people are anxious and depressed. By many measures they should enjoy much better life opportunities than previous generations, but anxiety and depression are on the rise, especially among young people. Explanations are being sought by experts. One explanation, of course, is a lack of hope. Children and young people are constantly hearing news about climate concerns, the pandemic, ongoing wars both near and far away, and the threat of world war. At the same time demands for responsibility seem always to be increasing, and especially for younger people.

This reality of hopelessness and loss of control serves as a reminder of the YMCA’s mission. It is our mission to strengthen people not only physically but also mentally and spiritually. The best resource for mental resilience is hope.

Those of us who are adults, who have a longer perspective on life than children and young people, must focus on maintaining hope. Our present struggles are not permanent. We will overcome these difficulties, just as previous generations have overcome their own crises. Joy and light await us in the future. So we must always proclaim the Gospel more than the Law. So we must always proclaim more grace than demands. So we must proclaim life more than we do death.

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Dear guests,

Hope is a gift and a mission for the Christian. A gift and a mission. And it is that kind of hope that is always present in the YMCA’s activities.

The concept of hope as God’s gift is connected with the idea that even if we neither see nor feel any human hope, human beings are still allowed to hope because Christ himself is hope. When we rely on him, we can receive hope as a loan from heaven.

Because of this gift of hope, human beings have the miraculous ability to see hope even when it is in fact absent. Even when a situation seems hopeless at a cognitive level, and all hope has vanished at an emotional level, we have the ability to wonder if it can ever be better. Hope allows us to think that it will all work out.

How Christians speak of hope as a gift tells us that the hope that Christ gives is something this world can never give. But it is also the kind of hope that this world can never take away from us. Hope lives even amidst hopelessness, even when we cannot properly feel it.

As a mission, hope means that despite everything, we must try to maintain an atmosphere of hope and bring help, comfort and new opportunities to our neighbours’ hopelessness. We must support those who stumble, raise up the fallen, and have mercy on the afflicted.

Hope is not a calculation about probabilities. Hope isn’t just a sense of optimism. Hope is a mission that is given to us. Martin Luther expresses it like this at the beginning of his Table Talk. “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” (“Alles, was in der Welt erreicht wurde, wurde aus Hoffnung getan.”) It is our mission in the YMCA to resist gloom and hopelessness, to encourage our neighbours, and to reassure them that all shall be well again.

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The YMCA builds hope. The YMCA builds new beginnings and horizons for people, whatever difficulties they face. At the same time the YMCA is founded on the idea that hope is never ours alone.

That is something we, as leaders serving in this incomplete world, can count on, grateful in our successes and comforted when we fail.

May God bless you all. May God bless the work of each of you and these days together in Helsinki!