In 1395, nearly 120 years before Martin Luther famously nailed his 95 theses against corruption in the Roman Church, a group known as the Lollards nailed their 12 Conclusions to the door of Westminster Abbey. So there’s some inflation for you.

Inspired by the teachings of the great John Wyclif they were campaigning for the reform of a church that they saw as deeply compromised and corrupt. They argued that that the church and the state should be separated, that those who hold high positions in the church shouldn’t also hold high office in government. They argued that the practices of the clergy had become wrapped up in superstition and unbiblical practices that needed to be stripped away. They argued that they needed to return to a more simple, more biblical faith.

In the mid 16th century Marie Dentiere was one of the first women to defend the reformation in French. She is the only woman to have her name engraved on the famous wall of reformers in Geneva. She, along with the other reformers were convinced that the church had gone wrong and was in desperate need of reformation and so must return to the gospel. In fact the reformers coined a phrase in Latin Semper Reformanda which basically means that the church is ALWAYS in need of reforming.

From the days of Paul until now there have been constant pressures on the church to move away from its doctrinal, ethical, and missional convictions. And there have always been men and women who have contended for the church and for the gospel. You will find in the history of the church in Africa, in Asia, in the Americas and in Europe movements that, thought they might not always agree on the solutions, are arguing for the same basic thing: the reform of the church. Something they argue is off, and we need to work at bringing the church back on track.

And it would be hard to argue that the church in Sweden doesn’t need something to happen because, well, to be brutally honest it doesn’t look good.

• Sweden has the highest percentage of atheists in Europe and the second highest in the world. Just after North Korea.¹
• In 2000 83% of the population was a member of the Church of Sweden. Twenty years later it is 53% and they continue to drop by about 1% a year.
• But that number is a bit misleading because only 8% of the population regularly attends any kind of church. And by regularly they mean monthly, not weekly.
• Which means in Stockholm on any given week the figure is probably closer to 1 or 2%.

In my mind if you only turn up to church 12 times a year, you’re not a regular.

But the Svenska Kyrkan is not the only group that is struggling in Sweden. Things are not better in what are called the Free Churches of Sweden. In the last 20 years the number of free churches in Sweden has fallen by nearly 25% and the number of members by nearly 10%. In short in most place in Sweden more churches are closing than starting, more people are leaving than joining but there are some small glimmers of hope.

Those are the numbers but there’s also an issue with the content. In other words I think there is an issue with what Christians in Sweden believe and how they live. Increasingly the difference between the values of the secular population and the church is narrowing. If you add those two things together you can tell which way the direction of travel is. The gap isn’t narrow because people are joining the church and becoming more Christian in their beliefs and practices, the numbers say different. Instead people are leaving and the church is responding by adopting more of the values of the surrounding culture and has become trapped in a spiral of decline.

You can look at the church in the West, and especially in places like Sweden and Stockholm and with some justification say the big picture is of a church that is crumbling into ruins. It is slowly failing and falling through neglect, through vandalism from both inside and out. And although this is not true for every local church in every place, there are after all some good churches in Sweden, it does seem to be generally true. What seems unarguable is that there simply aren’t enough healthy and growing churches. There aren’t enough to even stop the decline let alone reverse it. So to say the church needs restoring, that it needs rebuilding, renovating, refitting is not at all unreasonable. The church is a piece of beautiful treasure that has become torn, dirty, damaged and what it needs is careful, painstaking restoration so it can once more be seen for all the beauty its’ creator has put into it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism

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