Since I started blogging for more than two years ago I have had the privilege of connecting with many new wonderful people. Some of these people I have never met in person but only communicated with through the Internet, giving and receiving comments at blogs, receiving and responding to e-mails, and sometimes even meeting people eye to eye in the real flesh and blood world.

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We are just home from a celebration at one of the hotels in Bergen. A new church was officially established tonight at the presence of a large group of the pastors of our city. The church-planting initiative comes from Øystein Gjerme, who up to now was the youth pastor of the Pentecostal church Tabernaklet. The senior pastor, Osvald Instebø, has shown a tremendous generosity and wisdom in the way he has handled this church-plant. In fact both of them have been an example for many ton follow in the way they have worked everything out between them.
The new church, Bergenskirken, will be led by Øystein Gjerme and Øyvind Haugland. They are very gifted young people with a great potential. We all want them to succeed to be a new church for a new generation. We will be praying for them that they will be able to realise all their dreams and see many people come to Christ, and eventually help many new churches to be born.

Yesterday I was teaching all morning the new batch at Bergen Bible School. My present subject is about hermeneutic, how to interpret and understand the Bible. I started to give some very fancy interpretations of some simple stories. Every year the students are impressed with the fanciful explanations, only a few have some objections. After impressing them with this “deep insight” I tell them to scrap all their notes and forget everything I have said. In doing so I am in the danger of making them mistrust me and listen with a lot of scepticism when I teach. However, that is a price I am willing to pay to make them think for themselves and not only accept everything that comes from a pulpit, but rather go to the Bible and let it speak for itself.

Today I participated in my first virtual prayer meeting. It was a most wonderful experience! Juha-Matthi and Toni work at the e-learning department of the big Finnish company Kone. They are using the Centra software for online communication and instruction and had the permission from their company to introduce it to us.

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Yesterday I was at the opening ceremony of the Bible School. This year we have more than thirty students in the batch. Most of them were gathered for the first session while some will arrive later this week. It was a very young batch, the youngest we have had, I think. I look forward spending time with them and count it a great privilege to be able to teach them the word of God!