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Visit From Norway Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. In February I had the pleasure to lead a group of leaders from the Lutheran Church of Norway, visiting the US to study congregational development. Our interest was to study organizations working with congregations. Our project brought us from coast to coast, starting with a visit to the Alban Institute outside Washington DC, and ending up at a CI cluster event in Portland, Oregon. Even through we met with different organizations, our main partner for the visit was Church Innovations. Between our visits to the coasts, we spent some days in St. Paul to work with the CI staff. We also participated in two different PMC cluster events. The first one was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where we met with people from the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, and learned about their experience with the Partnership process. While the people we met in Lancaster had been in the PMC process for some time, the UCC congregations in Oregon were just in the beginning of their process. We were thus able to study the program at different stages of the journey. The group was very impressed by the way CI is working with congregations. Especially we found the habit of “Dwelling in the Word” to be an effective tool. We appreciated the fact that the PMC process is an open and flexible process, without a preprogrammed output. We also appreciated the missional ecclesiology the concept is based upon. We were convinced that working with congregations in a cluster is much more effective than working with them one at a time. Presently we are reviewing our experiences from the US, discussing the possibility of establishing similar processes in our own setting. Even if our context differs substantially from the American context, many insights can be made fruitful also in our situation. We hope CI may be a partner also in this continued process. Special thanks to the staff at CI for helping us making our trip such a valuable experience! Harald
Hegstad |
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