Monica Cleve

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is a long established traditional ministry-based church organisation with ministry activities dominated by the clergy. Small groups at the congregation of St Marc in Helsinki are relatively new. They are a powerful and exciting testimony of laymen on fire for Christ and committed to take the Great Commission seriously

The vision for a small groups based church started to move ahead in early 2005 through the blessings of our former Head of Congregation. The minister of our congregation had been waiting for the Holy Spirit to move at the grass-roots level of the church. At an early stage of implementation he named the small groups in our church “mobile spiritual field clinics”.

Pastor Bill Joukhadar came and explained the small group development plan to us – which helped us to see the ultimate model to inspire the small group work in Helsinki. The Small Groups Development manual and training resources were subsuequently translated into Swedish.

This exciting work of God has already started to spread to other Swedish speaking congregations in the Helsinki area, with priests from a number of churches showing keen interest in the adoption of small groups in their churches.

In 2006, a Christian summer camp, with participants from all over Finland, enabled the small groups model to be further known and applied nationwide. The following feedback has been received from people who have experienced small group pastors training: