New program
Yesterday I had my annual meeting with the elders, to talk about the program for the cell groups after the summer break, and about my personal program. We try to have partly a common program across the groups (a direction that we want the church as a whole to go), whilst leaving freedom for each group to fill in the rest of the program. So next year we will be looking at our responsibilities in the congregation. Each group will prepare for themselves studies in John’s letters, whilst over the summer (hopefully I will have time whilst in Australia!) I will prepare some studies on the Italian translation of the book Life in the Father’s House by Mack and Swavely, that each group will be able to use. Towards the end of 2008 I will also prepare a series on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which the groups will be able to use later on.
We then had to postpone deciding about my personal program, as there are still some doubts about the church activities. The group at Rovereto and on Wednesday nights are certain. However we don’t know yet how to organise the Youth Group (as the elder teenagers want to go up to the Young Adults, and maybe the older children in the Sunday School could move up) and the English language group (it depends if there are any English speaking students next academic year, as most come for a one year course), and there is the possibility of starting introductory meetings for new people in the church (that average about one a month at the moment). Things will be a bit clearer in a month’s time, although probably we won’t know for sure until September.
I’m not sure when I will be blogging next, but in case it is more than a week away that is a meeting next Friday evening that you can pray for. We will be having our third meeting in a sort of cultural coffee shop at Trento, with one of the elders leading a discussion on the difficulties of believing. It is very low key evangelism, but an important way of getting people to think about spiritual issues and to have a voice in the culture of the society we live in.