Fra Prestens Skrivebord - July 2007
The “Natural Church Development” (NCD)
survey we did in our church earlier this year brought us a lot of
information about the “temperature” of our congregation. This graph shows that
of the 8 “qualities” a church needs in order to grow, our weakest points were
“Passionate Spirituality” (our value was only 19 out of 100) and “Holistic Small
Groups” (28 of 100). This makes it clear that we at Mindekirken most of all have
to consider our spiritual life, as our prayer life and daily devotions.
For a long time the quarterly devotional
“Christ in our Home” has been available for our members to pick up. Recently we
more actively have encouraged our
congregation members to bring home a copy and use them in a daily routine.
Another thing that will probably improve
our spirituality is getting our members involved in small groups, like Bible
study groups, prayer groups, mission groups etc, that either gather in homes or
at church or any other place. Mindekirken’s planning team has been working on
finding good topics for small groups in Mindekirken. Lynn Tesch has an
article about the results of their planning that appears in this issue of
Communicator on page 3.
We believe in a variety of groups,
taking factors like interest, geography, language, age, gender or even spiritual
maturity, into consideration. So far we have had only two groups to offer, the
Bible study in Kirkestua, which meets every Tuesday when there is Tuesday
Open House, at 1:15 p.m., and then “Alle Kvinner Mission”, who have a very
interesting Bible study at their meetings that meet one Thursday of the month.
We really want to get more new groups started! We believe that the
members of such groups will enjoy
being together and getting to know each other better and better. And perhaps the
small groups can also be a blessing for the whole community, if they from time
to time do something that is visible for others.
Pastor Per Inge Vik
vik@mindekirken.org
