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!