Church guide

Due to ongoing repairs for water damage in Mariakirken, there will be no 11:00 communion service tomorrow Sunday 10 March. Mariakirken will be available for our use beginning next Sunday 17 March.

There is NO 11:00 communion service tomorrow Sunday 3 March in Mariakirken due to the water damage that occurred there yesterday. However, our Shrove (Sunday) Pancake Supper scheduled for tomorrow is STILL ON and will be held in Mariastuen (12:00-14:00). Please see the event post for the pancake supper for further details. All are welcome!

Our Sunday school teacher, Norah, successfully defended her PhD thesis yesterday in the field of space physics! We are all so proud of her at the Bergen Anglican Church. Congratulations Dr. Norah Kaggwa Kwagala on reaching this tremendous academic milestone in your life! A gift of nearly 10,000 NOK was raised for Norah to return to Uganda at Christmas to celebrate with her parents and family. Also, take a moment to read the end of her acknowledgments!

Wonderful music to be heard in Mariakirken coming up!

A great time of food and fun was had last Sunday during our fellowship lunch between the Bergen congregation and the wonderful pilgrims from down under! Many thanks to Father Peter Boyland and the Christ Church members from Australia for worshiping with us and breaking bread together after the service!

An article about the Anglican Chaplaincy in Norway was recently featured in the European Anglican:

The Bergen Anglican Church would like to invite you to visit and explore our new church website! Hip hip hooray! bergenanglicans.net Many thanks to Laura Miles, a member of our church, who has developed this beautiful and helpful website for our congregation! Many thanks also to Ana Duerr, a long time member who helped establish our previous, and first, website and had been maintaining it for the past 18 years! Our new website captures really well who we are as a congregation, what we believe, where to find us, and how to get more involved. So, please take a moment to explore our new website and learn more about our Anglican ministry to the Bergen community. Enjoy!

Congratulations to Susan Boyd who was licensed yesterday by our Bishop David as a Lay Reader for the Trondheim congregation!

The Rev'd Darren McCallig has been appointed as the new Senior Chaplain for the Anglican Chaplaincy in Norway! Rev. McCallig will also serve as the Chaplain of St. Edmund's Church in Oslo. His open letter to the entire Chaplaincy is below. To everyone at the Anglican Church in Norway, A few days ago Bishop David Hamid wrote to me to formally invite me to be the next Senior Chaplain of the Anglican Church in Norway. It is a great honour, and I am very grateful to those involved in the selection process for the trust they have placed in me. I look forward to continuing in the long line of faithful priests who have served the Anglican Church in Norway over the past decades. I have already met the Assistant Chaplains — April, Kirk and Peter — and I am looking forward to getting to know you all in the different worship locations across the country. The links between the Chaplaincy in Denmark (where I currently serve) and the Chaplaincy in Norway are many and deep. For example, the Danish-born Queen Alexandra (wife of King Edward VII of England) who was so instrumental in the building of Saint Alban’s Church in Copenhagen, was the mother of Queen Maud (wife of Haakon VII) who played such a pivotal role in the life of Saint Edmund’s Church in Oslo. I am also discovering many connections between my home country of Ireland and my future home in Norway. Apart from the Viking influence, there is also the lesser-known link through Saint Sunniva. Believed to have been the daughter of an Irish king, Sunniva settled on Selja island in Western Norway sometime in the tenth century. Later martyred for her faith, she became the patron saint of Bjørgin diocese and of Western Norway. The fact that — as far as I am aware — I will be the first Church of Ireland priest to serve as Senior Chaplain in Norway underlines just what a diverse and international Chaplaincy it has become. I am told that there are members from over thirty different countries on the books, and my hope and prayer is that we can continue to be an inclusive, Christ-centred community which reflects the generosity and unconditional love of God. I will be moving to Oslo in October and my first Sunday service at Saint Edmund’s will be on Sunday 8 October. In the meantime, I ask for your prayers as I make preparations to leave Denmark. As we say in Ireland, ”Go mbeannaí Dia sibh go léir” — “May God bless you all.” Darren.

This Sunday 4 June at the Bergen Anglican Church is Pentecost Sunday. Our service will be held at our regular time of 11:00 am in Mariakirke with a coffee hour to follow. Pentecost occurs fifty days after Easter and is the Sunday designated to celebrate God's sending of the Holy Spirit to empower the Church throughout the world. In addition, our service will be a Family Communion service. The service will follow its regular liturgical format and communion will be served, however our Lay Reader Iris will offer a Pentecost children's sermon. The children will then be given the option to stay with their parents in the sanctuary or to join our Sunday school teacher Norah who will lead them in some activities in the sacristy. It is also a custom to wear the color red to worship on Pentecost Sunday. If the Holy Spirit leads you to wear red, please do so!!!

A couple of nice pictures from our Safeguarding Training for children and vulnerable adults May 15 & 16 in Bergen. Thanks to Susan Boyd for leading us, and to the leaders in our congregation and the PTO clergy from the Church of Norway for their participation!

The Bergen Anglican Church will hold a Choral Evensong service tomorrow, Sunday 14 May at 18:00 in Mariakirken. This will be our only service tomorrow as the Norwegian congregation will have the 11:00 time slot for confirmations. For those of you who would like to help lead the congregation in the singing, we are going to put together a congregational choir for this service. This is open to everyone and it would be wonderful for you to join! I am asking those of you who would like to help lead the congregation in the singing to meet at 16:30 in Mariakirken to practice and go over the service together. For those of you unfamiliar with the Evensong service, a little information and history might be helpful. The Evensong service is the form of Evening Prayer that is distinctive to the Church of England and other Churches of the Anglican Communion. It includes elements from the medieval Latin evening services of Vespers and Compline, and has been largely unchanged since the first English-language Book of Common Prayer of 1549. The cathedrals and other great churches of the Anglican Communion maintain a strong choral tradition, of which the singing of Evensong is an important part. As is customary at choral Evensong, much of the service is sung by the a choir alone to special settings. We are all invited to make our own offering of worship in every part of the service, whether we ourselves are silent, listening, speaking or singing. The Evensong service is also considerably shorter than our regular Eucharistic service on Sunday morning as there will be no sermon or communion served. All are welcome at the Bergen Anglican Church! Please join us!

Siblings in Christ! The Transformation of the Cross at our ecumenical Easter Sunday Service! Happy Easter everyone!

Please join us tomorrow, Sunday 16 April, for our ecumenical Easter Sunday service with the Norwegian congregation in Mariakirke at 11:00. Let us gather together to celebrate with joy the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! This will be a Eucharistic service with only one sermon given by our priest Revd Kirk Weisz in English and translated into Norwegian.

Please join us tomorrow, Thursday April 13 at 18:00 in Mariastue (our fellowship hall across the street from Mariakirke) for a simple meal of soup and bread followed by a Maundy Thursday communion and foot washing service. The themes of Maundy Thursday are rich, however we will be focusing primarily upon humble Christian service expressed through Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet. All are welcome at the Bergen Anglican Church! Image by John August Swanson

This coming Sunday March 26th at 11:00 am is Mothering Sunday at the Bergen Anglican Church. Mothering Sunday is always on the 4th Sunday in Lent in the Anglican tradition. It is believed that the origins of the observance of Mothering Sunday date back to the sixteenth century, to a time when people returned to worship in their mother church (where they had been baptised) or to the mother church (cathedral) of the diocese on Laetare Sunday – the middle of Lent. It is also said that the 4th Sunday in Lent was a day on which young children working away from home as domestic servants were given the chance to spend time with their mothers and families. The children would pick wild flowers along the way to place in the church or give to their mothers. Please join us this Sunday for the lighting of a mothering candle, the giving of flowers, the Eucharist, and a Mothering Sunday message!

Tomorrow at our 11:00 service the choir will sing Thomas Morley's "Nolo mortem peccatoris" and Sir John Stainer's "God so loved the world," with a choir-led congregational Psalm 121. Come and join us!

This evening Wednesday March 1 at 18:00, the Bergen Anglican Church and the Norwegian congregation of Mariakirke will hold the first ever joint Ash Wednesday service in Mariakirke. Join us as we enter into the season of Lent with a service of penitence, which will include a short Lenten meditation (both in Norwegian and English), the Imposition of Ashes, and a small choir provided by the Bergen Anglican Church that will sing a Psalm and two anthems. All are welcome! Please join us!

Today, Sunday February 26 at 18:00 in Mariakirke there will be a joint service between the Bergen Anglican Church and the Norwegian congregation in Mariakirke. Attendees from the Porvoo conference on the Reformation who are committed to increasing ecumenical church relationships will be in attendance. The service is showcased for the conference as a good example of how a joint Porvoo service can be held between two different denominations. So, please join us for prayers, scripture readings, sermons, and the Eucharist conducted in both Norwegian and English! Then, join us for a reception in Mariastuen (fellowship hall) of delicious finger foods in a potluck style! Are are welcome!