One of the most noticeable differences for me, as a church leader in Sweden during this pandemic, is the stark difference in the emotional language that I hear my friends in the US and UK use compared with here in Sweden. Here I meet people who are cautious, people who wonder when things will return to normal and so on but we are missing that sense of being in a crisis. When I say ‘miss it’ I don’t mean we wish we had it but that’s the difference. We’re not in a crisis and no one is talking as if we were.
There is a pandemic, there are restrictions but Sweden the nation and the people who live here, by and large, are not behaving or talking as if we are in crisis. They are not being pushed towards that either because the restrictions are ones of inconvenience rather than a wholesale disturbance to a way of life.
The flip side to that Swedish society and by extension its churches are not engaging in those deeper conversations about change to the way things are done. Why would we? Yet, church leaders all over the world are considering major changes to how they lead, how they gather, how they serve, how they equip, how they do mission – everything is on the table. But maybe not in Sweden.
So I wonder whether post-pandemic, whenever that is, will Sweden miss out on the spiritual change the church here needs because it has managed this pandemic in such a way that it is not in a crisis? Sweden is deeply secular and it seems unlikely that this pandemic will alter that or the approach of the churches here in any substantial way.
Leave a Reply