Bloom Where You Are Planted

Our church has been participating in the Natural Church Development program, which is designed to help a healthy church assess which area is its weakest and then to develop strategies to strengthen that "weakest link." Like most Lutheran churches, our weakness is in "passionate spirituality." Lutherans, by and large, are just too reserved about their faith, deep though it certainly may be.

We've spent a year and a half on this project, meeting approximately monthly, and coming up with projects to accomplish our goal. Among them are a class on prayer, reconstitution of our Eucharistic Ministry program, a prayer shawl ministry, spiritual gifts assessment, devotional blog, efforts to bring newcomers to our worship service; there are others. Today is NCD celebration Sunday, where we rejoice in what we have accomplished, and draw all of our efforts to the attention of the rest of the congregation.
Kathleen and Joan were in charge of the celebration and came up with a "sunflower" theme, based on the piece of Scripture about a seed falling on fertile ground. They've made a banner, too, with sunflowers and amazing thready roots. I like sunflowers a lot, so I was tickled by their choice. I offered to make a prayer shawl from sunflower fabric. I finished it Friday night. You know, we don't want to let these things go until the last minute!

Comments

Juliann in WA said…
Would love to see a photo of your prayer shawl and any background on prayer shawls would be cool too.
Unknown said…
This came out so nicely. I love the sunflower fabric that shows so well when I clicked the photo and "zoomed" in.
Tanya said…
Very nice! What a nice way to weave scripture meaning into a quilt!
QuiltingFitzy said…
Would love to see the banner, is it possible? Great project.
LoieJ said…
Some Lutheran pastors could use some classes in spirituality too. I recently attended at a relative's church. It was "Evangelism Sunday." Good, I thought...But the most concrete the pastor got was to say that when the usher handed you the bulletin and smiled, that was evangelism. I'm not making that up.
Mrs. Goodneedle said…
'Bulletin' evangelism... well? Hmmm... that's a little scary. Ooops, sorry, commenting on the comment. You've made great steps toward passionate spirituality, to activate real evangelism, what's better than physically wrapping it around someone's shoulders in Christian love? You done good!;) I must have fertile soil under my birdfeeders...guess what's blooming there?