Finding the Swedish Bible Belt

Since moving to Sweden, one challenge has been finding a church to attend.  In Atlanta, we had a great church that was right around the corner, had a great jazz trio that played at 10am and offered plenty of room to step away and feed / console Calvin if he decided he didn’t want to be in church at that time.  Oh, and they offered mass in English as well…

Unfortunately, it has been decidedly more difficult to find a comparable option here in Sweden.  For one thing, churches are just not as common here in agnostic (at best) northern Europe than in the Bible Belt of America.  Here, churches have partnerships, with groups of 2-4 parishes rotating who hosts the service that week.  We’ve been caught a few times
standing at one church that has its doors locked Sunday morning and debating whether we can make it to that week's service in time.

Another issue is that as baby-friendly as the rest of Sweden is, the church-going population is not generally of baby-rearing age, if you get what I mean.   We were the youngest family in there by at least a decade or two, which isn’t bad necessarily, but just means that Calvin would be the only baby/toddler in the house.  While in the states they have baby/quiet rooms or even daycares, here we were definitely on our own.  Also, the big, European cathedrals are gorgeous, but when it is only filled with 10 senior citizens, it can be a little depressing.

The language thing is also kind of a pain.  Having the service in all Swedish makes it pretty hard to pay attention the whole time, so it turns into a meditation exercise for the hour.  Again, not bad, but just not as impactful as we would have liked.  And the one English service we found only offered mass at 6pm Sunday evenings – right at Calvin’s bed time.

So needless to say, we have not been to church as often here as we had been in the past.

Our new island has two churches on it – for over 31k people by the way.  One of which is a 5 minute walk away.  After two failed attempts at going (previously mentioned church sharing, and then time misunderstanding (I think they shut down for July too…)), we had a success this week!

Based on our previous experiences, I was not expecting a lot, but it worked out WAY better than I could have hoped for.  Walking up the driveway, I was among the same demographics as previously experienced, but when we got into the church there were about 20 kids – it was crazy  (turns out it was a girls' choir concert, so not sure how it looks normally), and it was nice to see all the young families there. 

The church itself was very simple and viking-ish.  The building had plain white walls with a few very simple drawings of saints and bible pictures in between clear windows.  Behind the alter was a nice organ and there was a mural of bible scenes as well.  The roof was flat with wooden beams, and there was minimal decoration throughout the church. The whole building had maybe 15 pews on each side, and (possible due to the choir) there were maybe 50 people there, so it did not feel empty at all. 

Calvin was fantastic.  I'm not sure if it was because there were a lot of kids there or if it was almost his nap time, but he just sat on my lap and stared ahead for about 20 minutes, then turned around and cuddled me for most of the remainder of the time.  We never had to bring out kids videos I had downloaded to my phone and he only got distracted when he saw a lady walking her cat out the window and had to let the whole church know about it (I’d seen her before, but it is weird). 

Also, they had a separate kids' room, with all of the little ones leaving at some point for about 20-30 minutes – Calvin stayed in my lap though because I didn’t really know what as going on.  But good to know for next time.  Once the rest of the kids left, I felt a little more awkward about any noise that Calvin did make, but overall it was a very stress-free experience.

The downside was that the whole service was in Swedish obviously, but overall it definitely worked.  I think we will try to go more often now and get in with that community a bit.

Who knows, one day I might even find out what denomination they are…