Knut Opens Doors

 Before we ever set foot in Norway we had initiated contact and conversation with a variety of people. One of those individuals was Rev. Knut Refsdal, one of the two Conference Superintendents of the United Methodist Church (The Norway Annual Conference is a part of an area that shares a Bishop with Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The “business” language of this Episcopal area is actually English, but all of those various national churches are individual annual conferences which operate in their own native tongue).

Knut was good enough to get together with me for coffee in the midst of the bustling Oslo train station even as he was himself on a personal leave. He gave a generous amount of time to discuss an topic he is just as passionate about as I am, ministry in a secular age. 

How do we reach persons with the gospel when church attendance drops, faith has a restricted influence in the public discourse, and an increasing number of people seem to not be able to sense “something more” or transcendent or divine at work in the world?

Knut actually has a podcast on the topic, Kirke på Nye Måter. I highly recommend it and you can find it on iTunes. Be prepared, however, it’s only ‘en Norsk’. If I learn Norwegian it will be because of the excellent and intriguing topics he explores there. 

These are topics he has wrestled with across a lifetime from his youth in a UMC congregation to decades of pastoral ministry.

Before we had met face to face Rev. Refsdal had been good enough to open doors to a tremendous number of other conversations. I’ll tell you about a couple of them here.

 One of the first conversations to greet me in Oslo through Knut’s invitation was with Rev. Erhard Hermansen, General Secretary of Norges Kristne Råd, the World Council of Churches Norwegian Chapter.

For a relatively small country, Erhard has a pretty big job. Norway had a long history of approximately 1,000 years as a distinctly Christian nation. It’s funny, you will hear people describe the United States as a “Christian Nation” from time to time, but it does not mention God in its constitution or establish the specific privileges of a national church. Norway’s constitution does both! At the same time, most Norwegians are still members of the Church of Norway, the official state church with a strongly Lutheran flavor theologically. Liturgical holidays that many American Christians would struggle to identify such as Ascension Day and Pentecost are marked as national holidays on which most businesses close. Most Sundays it has been our experience that businesses (like our local grocery store) and even a great many restaurants are closed. Norway everywhere has reminders of its Christian past, but fewer than 4% attend religious services regularly. 

Enter Erhard Hermansen. His job is first to be an advocate for the churches of Norway (both the state church and free churches such as Salvation Army, the UMC, etc). This is a big job because the current settlement in Norway very much prevents churches from providing community services and sharing the gospel at the same time. Want to run a youth after-school program? Great! The government will even help to fund this. Want to share even a short prayer or word about your mission as it connects to God? Think again! A big part of Erhard’s job is advocating for the church to have the same space as many non-religious organizations have. In this effort he is working against a cultural current which, though still influenced deeply by Christianity, is at the same time just as deeply suspicious of genuine Christian faith. 

A second and equally important part of his task is found in helping churches work together ecumenically and helping to provide resources for churches to adapt (interesting side note, the main initiative of NKR in helping churches adapt was started by Knut Refsdal back when he had Erhard’s current position ! What?!).

One of the biggest challenges to helping churches work together in an intensely secular context is that for some reason the pressure on the Church writ large actually causes it to fragment into liberal, conservative, traditional, progressive, charismatic, liturgical pieces. My guess is that this happens as attendance begins to slide and people look for someone to blame or ways around the cultural trend. It’s way easier to insist the church isn’t “pure enough” liturgically, in its practice, in its doctrine, etc than to actually do the hard work of learning to speak a language people can understand to share the gospel and adapt the church. To be fair, I would guess sometimes people get tired of trying as well. It can feel easier to just seek churches where people think more like I do or just quit going altogether. Churches, individuals, and even denominations break apart like melting icebergs. Without intervention they might just continue to drift apart forever. 

Erhard Hermansen’s deep conviction is that in such a drifting is exactly the wrong response to the secular age. Rather, he asserts, more than ever, Christians need to work together at unity, even on occasions when there is profound disagreement. 

He recently had an opportunity to live this out and has received substantial criticism for it. A Norwegian Christian TV station, operated by conservative charismatic (related to Pentecostal movement in USA) Christians recently invited him on to share about his work. He took the opportunity. As I stated, the guy believes in Christian unity. The problem was that the station had been documented as sharing misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic, denigrating the value of vaccination, and one program on the channel had gone so far as to suggest protection from serious Covid infection in exchange for monetary donations. Hermansen’s participation in an interview with the channel was seen by some quite critically as lending legitimacy to the false claims made that proved to be divisive among Christians in Norway. Some Christians perceive both the channel and Hermansen’s appearance on it as harmful to Christian witness in Norway. These criticisms played out publicly in some corners of the Norwegian media.

Hermansen, however, remains unapologetic about this appearance on the channel. In the conversation with me he seemed to press the question… Do we really believe in unity and love and inclusion of all people through the work of Jesus Christ or not? He believes that not only are these folks from this channel his constituents, but they are his siblings. We don’t further the cause of Christ by erecting walls, but only by engaging with those whom we both agree and disagree. To be clear, nothing here is a direct quote from him, but rather simply my take away from the conversation. That being said, if I understood him correctly, I’d have to say I agree. 

The temptation as secularity deepens in the USA has been and will continue to be to retreat to comfortable corridors with those who think only as I do on a whole variety of matters. This is not a viable option for someone who believes Jesus Christ comes for all people. We have to figure out how to adapt, but just the same to work at Christian unity as much as possible at every turn.

One of those people who find power and hope in Christian unity, not just for its own sake, but for the sake of others is Lemma Desta, a coworker of Erhard Hermansen’s with whom I had a separate conversation. Lemma helps the churches of Norway cooperate to welcome refugees of whom there were 100,000 arriving from Ukraine as we spent time in these conversations (yes for you keeping track that’s about the same number of Ukrainians as the USA will permit and Norway is a MUCH smaller country).. 

Lemma was born in Ethiopia, and immigrated to Norway about 20 years ago. He is a devout Christian who rejects the notion that secularity will be with us forever. He holds out hope that God’s Spirit can bring revival and do new things to change the settings of the culture. That being said, he doesn’t believe that this can happen without Christians coming together to seek racial reconciliation. The road to renewal runs through the valley of difficult conversations about deeply entrenched patterns of racism that run through all western culture, even in Norway where there was little participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He believes this because he has both experienced the harm by attitudes and systems first hand and because he has experienced the power unleashed when God’s people come together to assist, understand, welcome, and learn from people who are not like themselves. Lemma suggested to me that we don’t need more than we have been given in scripture to see these changes through.

I have to say that again, Lemma, as Erhard, was a compelling witness to me. The Spirit was speaking loudly- LOVE ONE ANOTHER. It may end up being the case that practicing Christian unity within the church, and for the sake of those on the margins who are outside the church may not ultimately turn back the waves of cultural change… but it surely can’t hurt. 

Anyhow, back to Knut. We met just days after the United Methodist Church’s commission on General Conference announced that the 2020 General Conference will be delayed again until 2024 due to the difficulties of non-US citizens in acquiring visas to travel to the US (in some African nations in particular the backlog of USA visa processing is years, not months, long). This delay has caused an increasing number of churches in the US to declare their intention to leave the UMC. Discussions and beliefs about human sexuality and how to include all people in the church seem in many cases to be the presenting issue. 

In the last two minutes of an almost 90 minute conversation our attention turned to the ongoing UMC turmoil. “I’ll be careful as I come into contact with your congregations. I won’t make any mess for you to have to clean up,” I promised. Knut was amused and also unconcerned.

 “We would’ve solved this in Norway several years ago if it was up to us. We are a small church. We know each other and care for each other very deeply. We know where each stands and most are committed to continuing to walk together even with differing perspectives because we know we need each other. But how about in Indiana?” 

His response gave me pause, but after a moment I replied. “I think your description of us being small and caring for each other deeply is on the mark as far as my local church is concerned (shout out to Ford Street!). I believe we can determine how to live together, respecting one another’s convictions as we welcome all people. As for the UMC of Indiana… it is a much larger church (a single district in IN is the size of the Norway Annual Conference), we don’t know each other always very well and I’m not convinced we always act in ways that demonstrate we genuinely love each other. It will be up to us to see if we hold together in care” 

No matter how the dust settles within and around the UMC the message was clear: We won’t figure out ways forward in this age unless we practice a genuine, sacrificial love for one another as siblings in Christ. The cross-winds of the age persistently gust upon Christians pushing them apart, but survival and mission will only be uncovered to the degree we remain together in love and in love fixed on the vulnerable who God in Christ came to seek and save. 

All of this swirled in my mind day by day. In the midst of these conversations the kids discovered a new place to hang out when their homework was done. They enjoy sliding around and playing on the gently sloping hill, covered still in a thick sheet of ice that stretches out to the south of Sofianberg Kirke. 

The park which surrounds the church is now full of children and life, but for centuries was actually the church’s graveyard. Some estimates suggest there may have been as many as 20,000 burials in the 80 acre park over its long history. 

Now most of the grave markers and a fair number of the bodies have been removed to other resting places and the place around the church serves as a park. The church building remains.

During a conversation with the church’s pastors (yeah, Knut set that up for me also), who also serve a nearby larger congregation, I learned that the church’s worshipping membership almost totally and finally drifted apart during the pandemic. The small and increasingly aging group of worshippers simply ceased to exist and function as a church after a history as a congregation longer than most Americans can even dream.

There are a lot of factors that go into the final closure and death of a historic worshipping community, but in my experience in the United States one persistent factor arises more often than not: People quite caring about the gospel and the good news of Jesus Christ as much or more as they care about their own opinions and preferences. They settle in comfortable and content to be surrounded by the people they know and who think like they do rather than continuing to extend the uncomfortable call of mercy and reconciliation to all. This begins a drift apart between congregation and community and inevitably leads a congregation’s members to drift and be blown apart themselves by the winds of culture, history, and often petty grievance.

It does seem that there are witnesses who open doors to us for a better way. I hope to remember deeply their word of love. I hope to be a person who lives into the example of these witnesses as one who opens doors rather than just letting them shut.