Church in Iceland

May 8:

Blogging from my iPhone is proving to be a challenging task, so I'm just covering tidbits for now.   Last night we had noisy neighbors who were up carousing until 6:00am, which meant that we didn't sleep well again.  We checked out of there as soon as we could and headed into Reykjavik to explore the city!  (More details and pictures to come later) 

At 1:00 the Reykjavik Branch started and we went to our very first church meeting in Icelandic!

We wore headphones while a missionary translated everything for us.  It was interesting to be a part of a Sacrament meeting in such a tiny branch, but the gospel instruction was sound and we were happy to have gone.  They didn't have any youth or primary classes, so we left after sacrament meeting.  We loved meeting some of the members and talking with the missionaries. 

Here are a few random facts we learned  about the church in Iceland:

  

1.  There is a full size Christus in the lobby of the church. It was sent to Iceland for some kind of event and then afterward they decided to just let them keep it rather than sending it back.

2.  There are only 10 full-time missionaries serving in all of Iceland.   They get called to the Denmark Copenhagen Icelandic speaking mission and spend their entire missions in the two tiny branches (and one "sacrament group") in all of Iceland.  

3. A lady had just gotten baptized that weekend and the missionaries were so excited, because  it was the first baptism they'd had in Iceland in over a year! 

4.  Icelanders in general love genealogy, so some of the senior couples there are called just to work with the national archives of Iceland to digitize  their records  for Family Search. 

After church we went on an amazing hike  ( one of our favorites ever), but I will save blogging about that for another day when I have an actual computer and access to all of my pictures. 

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