My alarm went off at 5:30am. By 5:50 I was heading to a men’s Bible study at a church in Minneapolis. Over 100 men from dozens of churches turn up every week, some before the gym and some after, to encourage each other to live with integrity, authenticity, vulnerability and courage as Christian men. They’re working through the book of Job, and they check in and pray for each other. All before seven in the morning.
It was one of many things I struggled to imagine happening in Stockholm.
When it comes to church attendance, the Twin Cities sit in the middle of America. They are not the South, nor are they as secular as the coasts. But despite their historical ties to Sweden, they are nothing like Stockholm when it comes to churchgoing.
The Minneapolis–St Paul metro area has 3.7 million people, considerably more than Stockholm’s 2.45 million and roughly a third of Sweden’s population.
60% of adults in the metro area identify as Christians. The last full count of Twin Cities churches found around 760,000 people in church each week, roughly one in five of the population, spread across more than 3,300 Catholic, progressive Lutheran, prosperity and gospel-centred evangelical churches. Numbers have dropped since, but it’s still hundreds of thousands every Sunday.
That same mix of churches exists in Stockholm too. But on any given Sunday, only around 1–2% of Stockholmers are in church.
A friend in Minneapolis reckons there’s probably another 30% who used to go to church, know someone who goes, or are open to going. In Stockholm, it’s maybe another 1–2%.
- More people go to church each week in the Twin Cities than in the whole of Sweden, a country with three times the population. Even on the most generous estimate for Sweden, around 5%, that’s about 525,000 people, against roughly 760,000 in the Twin Cities at the last count.
- There are more evangelical Protestants in the Twin Cities than members of free churches in the whole of Sweden.
You could strip away two-thirds of the Twin Cities’ churches, churchgoers and ministries and still have several times the churchgoing of Stockholm. Yet if Stockholm rose to 7%, it would rank as one of the great revivals in Swedish history. Even a century ago, churchgoing in Sweden barely reached that level.
I suspect very few pastors, and even fewer Christians, in a city like Minneapolis would call their everyday reality revival. They know there’s work to do and problems to overcome, and we don’t need to be naive about that. But from here in Sweden, their everyday would be our revival.
Picture it: churches in every neighbourhood, men meeting to pray at 6 am before work, churches sending hundreds of missionaries and planting new congregations, a city engaged with the love of Jesus, and hundreds of thousands of people gathering to worship him every Sunday.
That’s what we’re working towards. It’s why we’re mobilising churches in places like Minneapolis to stand with us, and why we keep praying to the Lord of the harvest.
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