Yesterday we gathered around 40 people in the centre of Stockholm to worship together for the first time in around nine months. It felt good! We last had meetings during the valley you can clearly see in the image below. That period lasted from August to November 2020 and then we forced back to online only. We’re hoping that with a reasonably successful vaccination roll-out that there won’t be a third mountain this coming autumn and winter.

So just before the summer the Swedish government loosened the restrictions on how many people can meet together depending on the type of venue and the type of meeting. If we had the right type of venue we could have as many as 300 people but due to the size of our rented venue (which can take around 120) we were restricted to 50. Although we’re hoping that in the coming weeks that will change and we’ll be able to gather everyone together. All that meant we had to have a booking system to come to church which is interesting. One benefit to that is that you can see who is coming beforehand. That helps in getting people involved. It also forces people to move up the decision about whether to go to church this week from a Sunday morning to much, much earlier in the week. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

We managed to fail with the livestream (a loose microphone cable meant picture but no audio) so that needs fixing but other than that it all seemed to go OK. It was a true joy to worship Jesus alongside brothers & sisters. It was also great to meet people who we had previously only connected with online. Online is OK but it’s definitely not the same.

There was the standard confusion as to how to greet someone, ‘are we hugging or fist-bumping?’ But even so we were able to begin the process of rebuilding fellowship. I don’t think you can assume that fellowship will just happen all by itself, people have become understandably cautious and have lived in their own world for a long time. So we’ll be thinking through how we can help people renew, refresh and reconnect with each other over the coming weeks.

I spoke from Jeremiah 31:10-14 on God’s promise to bring relief and refreshment to his people, and that only in Christ do we have the stable ground to move from languishing to flourishing. It seemed to be timely.