Hillsong Stockholm - welcomed by Swedish church leaders

Posted by Johan under hillsong

So - a Hillsong Church has entered the Scandinavian map. Sunday was a big day for former Passion Church lead by Andreas Nielsen, when it was announced that they change their name to Hillsong Stockholm. And according to Andreas himself and people related to the church, in many ways it’s nothing more than that, a name change - an acknowledgment of them being a part of the Hillsong family, as they’ve been from the beginning.

What will be more interesting is the response in Sweden and Scandinavia.
Some might argue that the response doesn’t matter, really. And for Hillsong Stockholm, it might not matter that much, I’m sure they will do their mission to reach Sweden anyway. But the respons will matter for Scandinavia in general.

I was very happy to read in the Swedish news paper Dagen that Pelle Hörnmark, Superintendent of the Swedish pentecostal movement, was present on Sunday and acknowledged Hillsong Stockholm. Hörnmark says he believes that Hillsong can contribute to the Swedish Pentecostal movement.

Stefan Swärd, pioneer pastor at Söderhöjdskyrkan, points out important it is that the churches do reach the young people, and congratulates Hillsong Stockholm at his blog.

Others church leaders congratulating the “new” church are Richard Svensson pastoring Norrortskyrkan and Per-Johan Stenstrand pastoring LifeCenter, a Hillsong-like church.

Sweden, scandinavia and Europe is in a great need of contemporary churches. Last week Dagen wrote a series of articles about the huge amount young adults leaving churches in Sweden. Also in Finland the fact that young people leave many churches received wide attention in media last year. Of course there are great examples of churches breaking the trend, and attracting young people. But the need is so much greater.

It’s easy to make church politics about new churches, and unfortunately in Finland there have been extremely few church plants the last decades, and even fewer successful ones. Sweden and Norway haven’t been as conservative, and are somewhat better of with new growing churches, as well as some older churches turning into a positive trend.

In the beginning of the 20th century there wasn’t room for what became the pentecostal movement, in the existing denominations. In the coming decades, I believe the pentecostal churches, as well as other, will have their chance not to do the same mistake, but to embrace the new churches (not saying it’s a new movement!), and if willing, to find that the new churches brings necessary life and new thinking which will contribute to Christianity on wider scale.

It is indeed great to see Hillsong on the Scandinavian map. Congratulations to Andreas & Lina Nielsen!