Sweden

Someone asked me an obvious question, "Was it cold?".

Perhaps we can clear that one up with a couple of pictures;

I'm very grateful that several people helped to make my visit to Sweden worthwhile by giving me people I could visit.

Any Pastor visiting Stockholm is likely to find himself looking up the Filadelfia Church. For much of the 20th Century it was the largest Pentecostal Church in the world and although we have become accustomed to megachurches in contemporary-style buildings it is amazing to think that this cinemalike building was constructed in the 1930s. It was great to be shown a glimpse of the work of this great church.

Lewi Pethrus was Pastor for nearly half a century and was one of the instruments by which Pentecostalism became a great force in northern Scandinavia (though the original Filadelfia Church was that of T.B.Barratt in Oslo, Norway, perhaps the true Father of European Pentecostalism). Today, in this tradition, one of Europe's largest congregations gathers in the modest-size city of Uppsala at Livets Ord (Word of Life).

Lewi Pethrus began ministry in a small Baptist Church before the Swedish Baptist Union dispensed with him. Not so many kilometres from the Filadelfia Church I was shown round a more modest Baptist Church to which I had been pointed by a contact in Stockholm. The friendly man who showed me round was at pains to tell me what they weren't.

"In Sweden we are not conservative," he smiled. "I wish George Bush had never been born." (A comment that struck me as somewhat obscure to the purpose of a Swede explaining the church's work to an Englishman). And then out of the blue this classic comment,

"I've been coming to this Church for over twenty years and I've never heard hell mentioned. Not once, praise the Lord!"

So were the seats of this church in which you had a cat-in-hell's chance of hearing about hell filled with grateful, positive worshippers? You can probably guess the answer is No. "Young people round here are really sad. There have been a lot of suicides. But they never even think about Church."

A reasonable estimate of the Gospel material from the mouth of Jesus (as some miltant atheists have also pointed out) is that 10% of it is about hell, judgment and/or eternal punishment or loss. Jesus was switched on to a lost world. There is no more point in a Church in a lost society not mentioning hell than there is in an ambulance crew not wanting to upset anyone by flashing blue lights and sounding a disturbing horn.