CGK Bunde Meerssen

The church app as a connection between two cultures

Petra Suurmond-Boone explains how the church app of the Voice of the Good Shepherd (CGK Bunde Meerssen) is used to bring together the different cultures in their community.

Reading time: 5 minutes - Published: Dec 27, 2021 - Text: Joanne Wienen

Of all the groups within the church app of the Christian Community Bunde Meerssen: Voice of the Good Shepherd, the Farsi-speaking group is the most active. We spoke about it with Petra Suurmond-Boone, administrator of the municipal church app.

Interviewee: Petra Suurmond-Boone

App manager: Voice of the Good Shepherd (CGK Bunde Meerssen)

Our congregation has grown enormously in the past five years: from fifty to about one hundred and fifty members. Our Alpha courses are popular and due to the various asylum seekers' centres in the area, we also have many Farsi-speaking members. We were looking for a way to keep in touch with each other. A WhatsApp message is fun with thirty people, but with one hundred and fifty it becomes complicated. In addition, there was the need to move with the times. You can have your own opinion about it, but it is no longer the case that everyone comes to church every Sunday and receives the announcements from the church council. Congregation members are sometimes there and sometimes not for various reasons. The app is a good tool to communicate with each other and to empathise with each other. That is enormously valuable.

The app is a good tool to communicate with each other and to live with each other. That is extremely valuable.

Our Farsi-speaking app group is the most active of all. They have started sharing translated sermon summaries themselves, Bible texts and experiences are posted and the status of the various (asylum) procedures is shared among each other. This is incredibly beautiful to see. Incidentally, these messages are also shared on the general feed - that is where the most responses always come from. The asylum procedures are a constant point of prayer in our church. When good news comes, it is always a small party. But a lot is also posted in the prayer group, the crèche group, the marketplace and 'Ask God'. People can ask a question on the website vraagaangod.nl. They are then linked to a believer in their area. Sometimes these are difficult questions; in the app group, we then think together about a good answer.

We started the implementation of the app slowly. In the beginning there were only a few groups. And if people didn't want to install the app for some reason, that was fine too. In the meantime, we continued to pay structural attention to the app. Last Sunday I gave a presentation in church about digital giving and soon I will tell you something about the different groups and what happens in them. I notice that this step-by-step approach works well. Even people who initially explicitly didn't want to use the app are now curious. If you have a young church with members who are very tech-savvy, I can imagine that you have great ambitions in the field of digitalization. For a small, diverse church like ours, it worked well to lower the bar a bit. We are now reaping the benefits.


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