News in Brief

- Liberation Day still celebrated - New Bishop of Aalborg - Children’s Prayer survey - Parish Magazine survey

 

Liberation Day still celebrated
On May 4th 1945 the German army in Denmark surrendered to General Montgomery and the war was at last over. The day is still celebrated in a number of homes with candles being lit in the windows in the evening. Churches also hold services both to commemorate the day for old and young alike and also to maintain a local and national fellowship. Although with the years the day is becoming less and less a memorial for the whole country, in Frederiksborg Church Montgomery’s liberation message is still read aloud during the service. Pastor Anne Marie Lervad Thomsen links the past to the present: “We emphasize that everyone is the receiver of liberation – and of a liberation that is granted from outside our power.”

New Bishop of Aalborg
The new Bishop of Aalborg, Henning Toft Bro, was consecrated in Aalborg Cathedral on May 9th in the presence of Queen Margethe II who had designed the bishop’s new cape in deep red damask. In his sermon the bishop said: ”I recently attended divine service at a local church where the sound system had a loose connection. The pastor began his sermon with, ’Grace be with you… is it working?’ In fact both the loudspeaker and the Grace were!”

Children’s Prayer survey
A recent survey by Capacent Epinion found that 18% of parents pray with their children before bedtime. Roughly half of them pray the Lord’s Prayer. Even so, many children still say prayers of their own accord. For his recent book Dean Finn Dyrhagen asked young children about their ideas of God and here only 25% said that they never prayed. Lene Oestergaard, pastor and family counsellor, calls children ‘naturally religious’ and believes that the church should do more to help families and their children to develop this.

Parish Magazine survey
As part of their financial savings plan the parish council of Brabrand-Aarslev near Aarhus was considering dropping the paper parish magazine in favour of online information only. So they commissioned a survey of readership of their parish magazine by DMA/Research. The results showed that some 52% of the 8,000 parishioners do in fact read the magazine which they receive free four times a year. Parish chairman, Leif Kerstens, is positively surprised: “We’re a perfectly ordinary parish with perfectly normal church attendance, but it shows that you cannot equate interest in church attendance with church interest in general. It’s clearly not here that we should be making savings”

 

By: by Edward Broadbridge

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