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Sep 16, 2016

Sweden: Who Do Christian Leaders Serve?

by Nima Gholam Ali Pour
September 13, 2016 at 5:30 am

Christianity is a universal religion, therefore Christianity in Sweden should have many similarities with Christianity in other countries.

If Christianity in Sweden begins to embrace a doctrine that has nothing to do with the universal world religion of Christianity, Sweden has then invented a new religion.

If you look at how Christianity has developed in Sweden today, it seems that this is what Sweden is about to get.

Stefan Swärd is an influential Christian pastor in Sweden with a background in the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden. In an op-ed from September 2014, Swärd describes Christianity the following way:

“When congregations in Sweden meet in diversity and integration and integrate Africans, Chinese and Latin Americans, they express the very essence of the Christian community’s being.”

He continues,

“As Christians, we should work for a generous refugee policy. We will work so our churches and congregations become good examples of functioning integration, where people of different backgrounds can come together in a common life.”

In December 2014, he gathered 380 Swedish ministers from the Pentecostal movement, the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden, the Uniting Church in Sweden, the Salvation Army, Word of Faith Movement and the Swedish Alliance Mission, as well as several other churches, to sign a petition, which declared, among other things, that these denominations do not believe that Sweden applies a refugee policy that is too generous. This was written before the migration crisis in 2015, when Sweden already had the most liberal immigration policy in Europe and gave all Syrians permanent residence in Sweden.

To those concerned about the future of Sweden, where many new migrants might not be able to be assimilated or might not want to be assimilated, Swärd is regarded as misusing Christianity to argue for a liberal immigration policy.

In his recent book, Jesus Was Also a Refugee (Jesus var också flykting), Swärd and his co-author, Micael Grenholm, try to answer the following question: “What does God think about the global refugee crisis and Swedish migration policy?” The answer that the book gives is that there should be no immigration restrictions at all and that rich countries have to open their borders simply because they are rich countries.

Swärd and his coalition of ministers are not an anomaly in Swedish Christianity. They represent the norm for what much of Swedish Christianity preaches nowadays. Antje Jackelén, the archbishop of Sweden’s largest denomination, the Church of Sweden, said in an interview from January 9, 2016 that Jesus would not approve of the Swedish government’s new restrictive migration policies, which the government was forced to implement because of the migration crisis. Archbishop Jackelén stated:

“The Bible is full of stories of refugees. Jesus himself was a refugee in his infancy. To protect the stranger, the one who is not protected, runs like a thread through the Old and New Testament. There would probably be no approval from Jesus for the government policy.”

On the basis of what many Christian leaders in Sweden say, Jesus seems to have been interested in migration policies, and he seems to have thought that they should be liberal.