Sweden: Locked Out

Theologically conservative seminary students in Sweden find the path to Lutheran ordination has insurmountable obstacles. Evangelical Lutheran pastors are all but locked out of senior positions in the Church of Sweden. Still, the undisputed leader of the evangelical Lutheran camp, retired Bishop Bertil Gärtner, holds firm in resisting efforts to create a new denomination for conservatives. "Not yet," he says.

The Church of Sweden (Lutheran), founded in 1527, cut its ties with the state a year ago in a historic move to secure independence from government oversight. The severance agreement between Sweden's government and the Lutheran bishops stipulated that the "open and democratic structure" of the Church of Sweden was to be maintained. In reality, this agreement means that secular political parties hold the upper hand in church affairs. "There is very little change," said Berth Löndahl, an evangelical Lutheran pastor in the southernmost city of Malmö.

Locally, regionally, and nationally, elected church councils still rule the church, which has an estimated 6.5 million adherents. "Each party freely appoints its own candidates, and candidates are only required to be baptized [as infants], not to confess Christianity in any personal way, or ever attend church," Löndahl says.

With no more than 3 percent of Swedes seeing the Bible as the reliable Word of God, the vast majority of the politicians in church governing bodies want evangelicals out of power. The Church of Sweden, a strong advocate for the ordination of women, will not allow anyone who does not support women's ordination to be ordained or to assume the office of senior pastor in any of its churches. Virtually no conservative seminarians or pastors in the Church of Sweden endorse the ordination of women. Löndahl concedes that evangelical clergy within the Church of Sweden are statistically a "doomed species."

At a November gathering in Linköping, 2,000 or more evangelical Swedish Lutherans, ranging from liturgy-minded traditionalists to charismatics, agreed on a new, unofficial declaration of faith called "Foundations and Frontiers," restating their trust in the Scriptures and their commitment to obey God rather than people. Those hoping that Gärtner, 75, would announce the foundation of a new Evangelical Lutheran Church were again disappointed.

But Gärtner, the former bishop of Gothenburg, is outspoken in his criticism of the current Church of Sweden leadership. "It is deadly to dispute the Lordship of Christ," he says, "and absurd to replace 'Lord' by 'God,' as some suggest to please the feminists. 'God' is too harmless a word, especially if you take it to mean whatever you wish it to mean, as taught by our present archbishop, K. G. Hammar.

"But for the time being, I won't found a new church," Gärtner says. "There are too many churches already."

Löndahl agrees that "staying on" in the Church of Sweden remains the best option, although many evangelical pastors have their "hands tied in different ways." Löndahl was appointed senior pastor, or vicar, of his parish in 1983, before liberals barred all evangelical pastors from leadership, and he says the local politicians do not obstruct his work. Yet he could not move to lead another parish, and there is no guarantee that local politicians won't turn against him after the next church elections.

But, Löndahl emphasizes, his "chances to reach out to normal, secular Swedes are incomparably greater than in any other denomination because the Church of Sweden is still somehow part of the picture, and that is what is keeping me. I feel responsible for my secularized people."

Löndahl describes the situation as burdensome. It is painful, he says, to hear Archbishop Hammar preach that Jesus was "theologically but not biologically" born of a virgin.

The battle between evangelicals and liberals in the Lutheran Church dates to the beginning of the 20th century but intensified in the late 1950s. Its focal point has been, and still is, the ordination of women. Equality between the sexes is a key political issue in Sweden. Many evangelical Lutherans argue that the Bible explicitly forbids women to teach or preach.

Yet both sides emphasize that more than theology or politics divides them. The ruling Socialists and Liberals brand the evangelical belief that God's Word overrides human law as dangerous "religious fundamentalism" and a threat to Swedish democracy, comparing conservatives at times with fundamentalist Muslims.

The political pressures on the evangelical Lutherans were "stepped up progressively" in the 1980s and 1990s, says Anders Lindström, former vicar of Munkedal on the west coast. A new church law in 1982 "handed the church over unreservedly to the political parties," Lindström says.

Lindström, a fourth-generation Lutheran pastor, says he "processed these changes for 20 years." Unlike Gärtner and Löndahl, he finally concluded that the Church of Sweden can "no longer be called a Christian church."

A local conflict over abortion was the "last drop." The media and local church politicians strongly attacked Lindström's decision to show a prolife video to teenagers at church youth meetings. He then resigned from his pastorate and left the Church of Sweden.

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Says Lindström, "God surely pours his grace even into unworthy vessels, but at a point he says 'no more,' like he did in Sodom."