Many Seventh-day Adventists know little else about the church's 125-year presence in Norway than that the current General Conference president, Jan Paulsen, hails from there. News reports in church publications sometimes leave the impression that the church there is either experimenting with edgy outreach, or else in serious decline. Adventist Review associate editor Bill Knott recently spent a week visiting with church leaders and members across the southern portion of the country. He sat down for an hour with the president of the Norwegian Union Conference, Pastor Tor Tjeransen, at the church's headquarters northwest of Oslo.—Editors.

BK: You've set aside part of a busy workday to talk with me about the situation of the church in Norway. What will you go back to when we finish talking? What are the challenges that are most pressing to you just now?
TT: Probably the greatest challenge to the church in Norway is the lack of enthusiasm for our own message among some of our members. I think we've come to the stage where many Adventists will say, "It's very nice to be an Adventist, but maybe not so nice that I want to ask my neighbor to be one as well." The church is certainly struggling with the fact that religion is now thought of as a very private thing in this culture.

Is that a new development for the church in Norway?
I'm sure it's hard for others to appreciate the enormous change that has taken place in Norwegian society in less than 50 years. Even though much of Norway is rural, people behave as if we're all in an urban environment. There's an urban mind-set throughout the country. And the advent of the satellite dish has made everyone a part of a global environment as well. All the influences of globalization are right here. That makes it very, very difficult to attract people out of their homes, particularly for something like an evangelistic meeting. It's not something that we're very successful in doing. Routines in this culture keep most people in a very limited range—it's difficult to get people to do something else.

You've obviously been thinking about this problem a great deal.
Quite simply, we have to build relationships in order to grow the church—good, caring friendships of the kind we would want for ourselves. We have to make sure that people trust us before we can bring them to a church event. We've learned the truth of what Ellen White writes in The Ministry of Healing: "Christ's method alone will give true success." And He mingled. I don't think we do enough mingling.

For those who are very private with their own faith, mingling isn't usually a favorite activity.
No, it isn't. And we have had the situation in Norway in which the act of becoming an Adventist meant cutting off relationships with others—

Where you were told to "separate yourself from the unclean thing"?
Exactly. Now, social relationships are the church's best opportunity to fulfill its mission. But when I go to churches and say, "Folks, we need to mingle," they typically say, "Tor, this is very different from what we have been told previously." The privatization of faith and the urbanization of our culture have made it doubly difficult for the church in Norway. I really believe that Adventists live a higher quality of life than others do, but we need to convince more of our own members to share that good news in their relationships, not simply to enjoy it for themselves. And we've got to do a better job convincing our members about mingling with others. We need to be much more in touch with other people socially.

What would the typical Adventist believer in Norway think about your call to build new friendships? Would they say, "Oh, that's just the latest fad: that's what they're pushing this year?" Or would they be energized? Where would they get the new skills?
I think members are definitely interested, but both leaders and members need a change of mind-set. Sometimes leaders assume that the skills needed are already present, while members urgently need more training. We haven't done enough to provide those skills, and it certainly takes time to do it well. And then there's the frustration factor: for many years we've been experimenting with new approaches. Members want to know—"When are we going to do it, not just teach it and learn it? When are we actually going to practice?" Friendship evangelism is a very different kind of outreach than Adventists have traditionally used in Norway.

Give me a sketch of the outreach efforts of a typical Adventist church in Norway.
The regular scene for Adventists in Norway is a church of 40 to 50 members who meet on the Sabbath. They sing out of the hymnbook: they have a worship service that would be very familiar. Some of the images of Scandinavian Adventism that have gone to the world church in recent years have left the impression that we're all either very progressive, or else we're attending dying congregations. But that's not a true picture. We have only one café-style church in Norway (see "God Shows No Partiality," pages 10, 11), and I think we have one in Denmark. We have hybrid kinds of congregations in some places, but that's not a wide movement. And hear me clearly—it's a good church life, and appreciated by most of our members. The major problem is the time squeeze: our ambitions to grow aren't being met with the corresponding time to do what it takes to grow. We have very dedicated members who are putting a whole lot of hours into maintaining the church program. The problem is that much of it is not really producing the results that we would like to see.

What percentage of the church's total energy output in Norway would you estimate is largely for the consumption of Adventists on Sabbath morning or Wednesday evenings, or at Pathfinder programs?
That's a challenging question. I would say, maybe, 80 to 85 percent. It's a high percentage. A major part of that must continue: if we don't provide good-quality activities for our young people, we won't even be able to maintain our current membership numbers. But the brutal fact is that the numbers are dwindling every year. Since 1992, maybe even before that, we have lost 50 members a year on average in the Norwegian Union. We had a peak at about 5,500: now we are at just over 4,800. And that just spells danger.

Tell me more about the dangers. It sounds as though you can see the future, and you don't like it.
To simply maintain our present membership, we need to baptize 120 persons a year. And that wouldn't address our mission to take the gospel to this entire country. We all have higher ambitions for the church than baptizing 50 to 70 new persons a year, which has been the range for most of the past decade. In 2002 our members and outreach efforts significantly raised the number of baptisms. But we weren't as good in 2003, and the numbers went down. I think one of the major reasons was that the pool of our friendship circle is just not large enough.

If you have a successful year, you're baptizing most of your potential.
That's it! And you have to go get more potential. That's the major problem. There is always this haunting thought in the back of your head, that the membership curve may suddenly plunge because of the aging of Adventists in this country. And when that happens, we will be in for some very tough decisions, because the church's ability to fund its mission through tithe income will surely be affected. My colleague, who is the president in Sweden, tells me how within 10 years they lost 30 percent of their membership, 50 percent of their income. And if something like that happens, you have to totally reorient. What would the Adventist Church in Norway be like if that sort of thing happens before we start moving up again?

Is that why the church in this country is trying so many different approaches just now?
(Laughing): You've noticed the wide variety of things that we're doing! We still encourage our pastors to try public outreach in traditional evangelism and seminars where they have a good opportunity for success. This past winter one of our pastors who is normally very successful in evangelism called to report a response rate of .5 per 1,000 evangelistic brochures mailed out. And he said, "This is a total failure." He'd been used to a better response. But that tells you of the difficulty in gathering a crowd in this country. We have pastors who are able to explain the gospel, but if you have no one there to listen, the church doesn't grow.

That must be why you've experimented with television evangelism.
We're willing to try any approach that can help reach people, many of whom are spending increasing amounts of time with their TVs. We've had talk-show-style outreach programs, focusing on a variety of doctrines. We did something very simple with another televised outreach: I simply gave all my evangelistic notes to the program producer, and he asked me questions from them. It didn't seem like evangelistic preaching, but we've had a continuing favorable response on the satellite channels where it plays.

What has worked best so far?
Our most encouraging results have come from church planting and church revitalization, even though nearly 50 percent of church plants fail on average. We're focused on the 50 percent that will succeed, because they are the future of our work in Norway. In one city we have a young pastor who has been trying to replant a church that had dwindled to four elderly members.

How do you replant a dying church?
A core group of young adults has been working for three years with this project. They felt that the old, rather run-down church building wasn't suitable to reach young adults in the city, so they decided they would rent a public hall to conduct their worships in. Their intention was that their Bible study groups, small groups, would then lead people into this church plant. But attracting enough people into their small groups has been harder than they anticipated. Just a couple of months ago they asked me to come and talk to them, because now they were at odds. They thought they would have been in a totally different place by now. It's my job to encourage them—to say, "This isn't a failure yet—keep trying! Try some other methods to reach into the community. Don't just rely on a few members meeting a workmate, a housewife, a fellow student. Unless you expand your circle, the number of people you come across is just too small to be able to find that needle in the haystack."

How did replanting go over with the established congregation already there?
Those four elderly women took this very gracefully, and they joined in the circle as we discussed the shape of things to come. They know that continuing as things have been will surely mean the death of that church. But they've shown great grace—adapting to new rhythms in the music, totally new lyrics, new worship patterns and styles; all of that is very different.

Has that same graciousness and tolerance been seen in other places as well?
Where groups have worked carefully together, yes, it has. There has been strong support all over Norway for our efforts to plant new congregations and revitalize existing churches. Not everyone would choose newer worship styles or outreach methods for themselves, but I'm proud of our members who have the wisdom to support approaches different from what they're accustomed to.

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Bill Knott is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.