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The Secrets Of Swedish Christianity

Matthew J. Milliner has a remarkable report from a sojourn he took among Christians in Sweden. You’ve gotta read this. It’s such a different world from our own in the US. Excerpt: It is the night before my departure. After festivities elsewhere with more Swedish theologians who seamlessly shift from Swedish to perfect English when […]

Matthew J. Milliner has a remarkable report from a sojourn he took among Christians in Sweden. You’ve gotta read this. It’s such a different world from our own in the US. Excerpt:

It is the night before my departure. After festivities elsewhere with more Swedish theologians who seamlessly shift from Swedish to perfect English when the American arrives, we raise one last glass to Birgitta, and I get a ride home back to the castle. Having enjoyed some Scandinavian beer (which gives American micro-breweries a run for their money), I am all talk. My companion Simon listens as he drives. Overwhelmed by it all, I announce that whereas American Christianity is a mile wide and an inch deep, Swedish Christianity is an inch wide and a mile deep. Never have I seen ecumenical cooperation as I have here. I unfurl a grand analogy: Under secularism’s tectonic pressure, the continents of differing traditions are drifting closer together. As the landmasses merge, some jump to another side, while others remain. But the merging of continents is far more significant than isolated bounds, however athletically impressive. Personal conversions, despite the attention they can generate, are small change compared with the payoff of broader ecclesial union. And toward this goal, Sweden—thanks to the remarkable Bjärka-Säby—seems decades ahead.

Simon smiles at my theory, concedes its truth, but adds a personal dimension. He is converting to Catholicism with his fiancée this Easter, but his father—a former pastor in the holiness movement—has already refused to come to his wedding. The agony visited on this family feels like the pain of stitches necessary to heal a wound. “The mark of the Cross,” wrote John Keble in response to Newman’s conversion, “seems rather to belong to those who struggle on in a decayed and perhaps still decaying Church . . . than to those who allow their imaginations to dwell on fancied improvements and blessings to be obtained on possible changes of Communion.” Believing as I do that continental drift trumps personal satisfaction, I think Keble was on to something. But my friend Simon’s story is a reminder that there is frequently a cross for those who convert as well.

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