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Keeping Connected. Anglican-Lutheran Society Conference September 11-15 2009, Turku Jana Jeruma-Grinberga . Keeping Connected – what does this mean?. Keeping connected feeling dislocated finding new connections maintaining old ones. Christ the King Polish Congregation, March 2009.
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Keeping Connected Anglican-Lutheran Society Conference September 11-15 2009, Turku Jana Jeruma-Grinberga
Keeping Connected – what does this mean? • Keeping connected • feeling dislocated • finding new connections • maintaining old ones Christ the King Polish Congregation, March 2009
Keeping Connected - disorientation • Personal story • Frequent traveller in Europe and North America • First trip to Africa
Keeping Connected – disorientation 2 • Arrival at Dar es Salaam Airport
Keeping Connected – Disorientation 3 • Experience of first trip to DSM • feeling disorientated and lost • made me very aware that I shouldn’t get lost! or lose contact with the people looking after me: what if I had been on my own? • aware, at least to some small extent, of what my parents and their peers went through when they first arrived in UK, and of what our new members feel now
Keeping Connected – LCiGB Experience • LCiGB – church of sojourners and travellers • number of languages used in worship • history of refugee and expat status Eritrean Confirmands in London, June 09
Keeping Connected – How can we do better? • How do we find people, offer them somewhere to make connections, and integrate them within the main church? • How do we enable these lost folk to find us • website available – is that enough? What else can we do? • How do we make them feel at home? • most people don’t choose a church because of its detailed doctrinal statements – visiting with Augsburg Confession, 39 Articles, Westminster Confession or whatever in hand
Keeping Connected – Finding a Church Home Reasons for choosing churches do include • being made welcome • finding worship that they enjoy, relate to and which enables them really to worship • especially, perhaps, for Lutherans, after-service refreshments and fellowship are important – partly because people often travel long distances, so staying for a while after service is good
Keeping Connected – Finding a Church Home 2 • speaking own language, especially for those who are far from home and in exile • In general, many people look for a place that reminds them of home, of a lost childhood idyll, and that is unchanging – this is almost always a problem with exile churches • Effective Bible studies and prayer groups • house groups • Help available when needed
Keeping Connected – extending the connections • For our congregations, various forms of connections are important • within the congregation and community that surrounds it • with ‘home’, however defined • with the host community and the local church body, the LCiGB • The first two are relatively easily achieved, the last one can be harder
Keeping Connected How do we achieve all these connections? Good question!
St Anne’s Lutheran Church, London – Pastor Johann Schneider’s farewell service