Some blogs will be in swedish. So I will switch between english and swedish:)
2011 has started and an exciting new year is ahead. When I look back on 2010 I will especially remember the year we really connected with the ARC family in US. We had a number of Church planters round table in Europe with Rob Ketterling, Matt Fry and Greg Suratt. I missed the CPR with Greg though. But we feel that ARC has become our family now! The church here has embrased it even though it may be harder for them than it is for me who also has been over to ARC churches in US and and especially the All Access conference last year.
This year has started great. We have already had baptism, prayed with a number of people to salvation and welcomed eight people in as new members in the church. our focus this year is five areas; First the Main event ever sunday. We want to work even more to make it attractive and welcoming to new visitors especially those that has never set their foot in a church before. And we have a lot of them in Sweden today!
The second area of focus is our Life groups that we are putting a lot of energy in developing and growing it into its full potential.
The third area of focus is servolution. Last year we had tremedous results in our servolution projects. it resulted in two large articles in the local newspaper and a lot of open doors. We gave out a whole lorry full of clothes to refugees and then took them with busses to church every sunday. We had teams going out cleaning the streets, giving out coffee and buns and helping with changing into winter tires etc... This year we will go further and work with the servolution projects in the church to get it into the DNA of the church! Showing Gods love through simple act of kindness!
The forth focus area is church planting. We are continuing with our church plant in Lilla Edet and our sight pastor Daniel is doing an awesome job in connecting with the non-christian young guys who come to our services there every other week.
We will also focus on our new exciting project in planting a new church in Gothenburg (Göteborg). Gothenburg is the second largest city in Sweden. Its a vibrant city with big universities and lots of young people. We are working in building the launch team and hope to be able to launch in november this year!
The last focus is our new sanctuary that we are about to build. It will be a top modern media center that will better facilitate everything that is going on in church. we still need to raise around 400 000USD but it does getting closer to an actual building start!
