Folk Church Research Articles

Et «makedonsk kall»

A “Macedonian Call”: Clerical perspectives on declining church attendance within the ecclesiological dynamic between folk church and community of faith" The Sunday worship service, in Lutheran ecclesiology, is the place where the Word is proclaimed, and the sacraments are administered. It is the main assembly of the congregation, according to the liturgical ordinance of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Norway. Over the last decades, however, worship service attendance has continuously declined. This article examines the pastors’ perspectives on lower attendance by presenting new empirical material from four group interviews with a total of 16 pastors. The data is viewed theoretically by considering ecclesiological perspectives. The analysis shows that the pastors use the well-known categories of folk church and faith community. While also problematizing these concepts, they experience that normative and descriptive ecclesiologies are somewhat contradictory. The pastors point to fellowship and new relationship-building initiatives as central to congregational life but question whether the Sunday worship service is capable of including such dimensions. Our study emphasizes the necessity of developing strategies that identify and meet local needs for the church’s presence.

Nya andliga praktiker i Svenska kyrkan – från exklusiva retreatmiljöer till kyrklig vardagspraktik

The research project "New Faces of the Folk Church – Lived Religion, Spiritual Practices and Theological Legitimacy" aims at investigating everyday spiritual activities laypeople engage in within an ecclesial institution, the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Sweden, and how these practices are linked to notions about religion and health. In this article we give an account of our preliminary findings. In a netnographic survey of the websites of the parishes in the diocese of Stockholm, counting all activities except services and concerts, we found that there is a plethora of new activities going on which have emerged during the last fifty years. Many of these activities were geared towards community building, and 15 percent of them fall into the category of holistic practices. Such practices, comprising of, for example, meditiation groups, yoga classes, and dance, can be found in eight out of ten parishes. Our material indicates that the church has quadruple functions: (1) theological, (2) life cycle related, (3) ordinary community building, and (4) holistic everyday spiritual practices. These new spiritual practices were first offered in exclusive settings like retreat centres, but have now moved into ordinary parish life, accessible to all parishioners. Some of the practices, like zen meditation and yoga, have been contested but are now broadly accepted. In the next step of the project, we will conduct interviews and participatory observation to investigate how these practices are integrated in individuals' lives, as well as how they are negotiated and legitimized on the institutional level.

Ecclesial Online Identities during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The majority churches in Europe are paradoxically considered to be both powerful and weak religious institutions. Their complex position in secular society makes it important for them to communicate who they are to the public. The Covid-19 pandemic was a situation in which churches and other religious institutions were ‘forced’ to use digital media as a primary arena of outreach. This article investigates how three Scandinavian majority churches negotiated their ecclesial identities on Facebook during 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The following question is explored: did ‘online’ enactments represent their religious identities and core values in new ways to the public? The data material consists of material from the official Facebook pages of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark (the ELCD), the Church of Norway, and the Church of Sweden, as well as interviews with Facebook editors from each church. The study demonstrates how the Church of Norway and the Church of Sweden enact church practices on Facebook, while the ELCD tries not to be too ‘churchy’. Facebook emerges as a hybridized third space where Scandinavian majority churches pursue new logics and forms of meaning making to retain their position in secular societies. Overall, the churches’ online identities on Facebook are not new representations but intensified versions of their distinct offline identities as ‘folk churches’ for the whole population.

Ulrich A. Wien. Crossing Borders–Impact of Reformation in Transylvania since the 1520s: Diversity of Faith and Religious Freedom in the Ottoman Zone of Influence

Ulrich A. Wien. <i>Crossing Borders–Impact of Reformation in Transylvania since the 1520s: Diversity of Faith and Religious Freedom in the Ottoman Zone of Influence</i>

The bishop as mystagogue, prioress, and leader of the choir: exploring the nature of episcopal authority in the Church of Sweden

ABSTRACT The authority of the bishop is not easy to define outside the three key concepts of teacher (mystagogue), prior or prioress of the ordained clergy, and democracy in which the bishop is the ‘leader of the choir’. In Uppsala there is a sense of a folk church in which all ministry is collaborative and the bishop’s authority is rooted in a practical ‘powerlessness’. The bishop is a teacher through regular parish visitations and operates alongside an elected General Synod of which she is not herself a member. As a teacher the bishop is a theologian with a future orientated teaching in the body of the Church.

SERBIAN CHURCH MUSIC IN BANAT - HISTORICAL ASPECTS

Serbian church music includes, in addition to the church compositions of Serbian composers, the folk song of the church. The song of the Serbian church represents, according to its characteristics, acquired during the historical development, an original work, created with the help of the influence of the church and the people. How fast the Serbian church folk song developed towards independence, from the adoption of Christianity until the middle of the 13th century and how much it could separate from its model in that short time, cannot be determined, because there are no data. about that and there are no records. In the Serbian autocephalous archdiocese (since 1219) and later the Patriarchate of Peci (since 1346), the care of Serbian church leaders, which is reflected in numerous donations, has created favorable opportunities for the full expansion of church life. With the transfer of the people and national and church leaders to the Habsburg Empire, many of them in the region of Banat, the singing of the church, in the more favorable circumstances of the civilized state, developed freely, but increasingly independent of the distant model. Church authorities have taken steps to preserve, renew and develop the song. With the founding of the seminary in Sremski Karlovci in 1794 and the appointment of the first teacher of church singing in 1797, an important center was created for maintaining a certain unity in church singing. The most difficult and important, however, is the problem of the structure and essence of Serbian folk church singing.

“Dictionary-Encyclopedia” as a Type of Amateur Dialect Dictionary (Dictionary of Bakal Town Dialect by B. P. Plaksin)

A comprehensive description of one of the types of amateur dialect dictionaries, namely the “dictionary-encyclopedia”, is carried out. As a material for the analysis, a dictionary of the dialect of the Bakal town of the Chelyabinsk region, compiled by Boris Petrovich Plaksin (the volume of the dictionary is about 4000 words) was selected. The results of the analysis of the thematic, stylistic belonging of the vocabulary constituting the vocabulary of Plaksin’s dictionary are presented. It is shown that a significant part of the dictionary is made up of dialectal linguistic facts (as well as common and colloquial vocabulary and phraseology, which the author qualifies as local) of the thematic groups “Rural life”, “Economy”, “Human characteristics”, “Professional activities”, etc. It is emphasized that a vast layer of dialectal and national facts given in the dictionary is the vocabulary and phraseology of traditional folk culture, church terminology and vocabulary of the Old Believers, as well as designations of the realities of various historical eras. It is concluded that B. P. Plaksin chooses a strategy of value-historical selection of vocabulary and includes in his dictionary the vocabulary of various cultural and historical layers, focusing on the various sources available to him on Russian history, traditional rituals, historical facts, etc.

Leaving a Folk Church: Patterns of Disaffiliation from the Church of Sweden

Leaving a Folk Church: Patterns of Disaffiliation from the Church of Sweden

Den samskabende kirke?

Co-production has become an important notion within public governance, particularly in municipalities. The Danish Folk Church has a long history of working together with the municipalities and is an institution with many civil resources. Through an empirical study involving the municipality, the church and citizens of Aarhus, this article discusses the implications of co-production for the church and its theology. St. Augustine’s concepts of the “City of God”, Luther’s concept of the “priesthood of all believers” and “vocation” and Luhmann’s concept of faith as dealing with “paradox” offer an analytical frame for understanding how the church co-produces the city. The “priesthood of all believers” underlines the “bottom up” character of the congregation and thereby its civil character, while the “City of God” as an ambivalent and paradoxical term for salvation holds together the tensions involved in co-production.

Growth in a context of decline

Churches all over Europe are experiencing decline within a larger context of religious decline. One under-researched field concerns the consequences this decline has at a local organizational level. This article examines congregations experiencing growth in attendance at their regular Sunday worship services, and asks: What has caused growth in attendance among these congregations? What are the consequences of the attendance growth according to parish leadership, staff, committed volunteers and regular churchgoers? The empirical material for the study is interview and observation material from four congregations in the Church of Norway. These congregations have witnessed an increase in attendance of between 15.5% and 31.6% the last five years (2013–2017) compared to the previous five years (2008–2012). The ecclesial ideal in the Church of Norway, as in other national majority churches, has been to balance between “the core congregation” and “the folk church”. However, the Nordic pattern of “belonging without believing” or “believing in belonging” is not as strong as it used to be, and this has made “vicarious religion” more contested within congregations. A more polarized neither-nor understanding of the Sunday service can explain why the studied congregations have been able to grow within a context of decline.

A Year of Grace: Volume 1, Collected Sermons of Advent Through Pentecost and A Year of Grace: Volume 2, Collected Sermons Covering the Season of Pentecost/Trinity by Bo Giertz

Reviewed by: A Year of Grace: Volume 1, Collected Sermons of Advent Through Pentecost and A Year of Grace: Volume 2, Collected Sermons Covering the Season of Pentecost/Trinity by Bo Giertz Mark Mattes A Year of Grace: Volume 1, Collected Sermons of Advent Through Pentecost and A Year of Grace: Volume 2, Collected Sermons Covering the Season of Pentecost/Trinity. By Bo Giertz. Translated by Bror Erickson. Irvine: 1517 Publishing, 2019–20. 240 pp and 212 pp. In these two volumes, the late Bo Giertz (1905–1998), a Swedish bishop best known for authoring The Hammer of God, offers sermons for the entire church year. These sermons, preached over several decades and in different settings, were assembled into two volumes and published in Sweden in 2006. In contrast to North American preaching, which often employs gimmicks to draw listeners into the sermon, Giertz's sermons are simple, direct, and not manipulative; he is confident that the word is able to capture and hold its audience. Giertz offers no jokes, cutesy stories, or personal anecdotes to win hearers over, but instead presents the scriptural texts in as straightforward a manner as possible. He draws out where the text intersects with his modern Swedish audience. Hailing from an atheist family, he is well aware of the rise of Swedish secularism but he is never defensive about the faith. Instead, he repeatedly portrays Christ as able to save and make a difference in life. Theologically, these sermons are steeped in traditional Lutheran theology. Giertz's sermons, unlike so much North American preaching, is unapologetically didactic. He wants the listener to know the faith from the inside out. Volume 1 presents sermons from Advent through Pentecost. Throughout, Giertz displays sensitivity to his listeners. For those insecure about their relation with God he promises that Christ "who won you at such a cost … cannot lose you so easily. Therefore He comes back [to you] with a peculiar obstinacy" (46). For those suffering wrongs, he acknowledges that many lives seem like an unfinished fragment. Many wrongs will be unavenged. The evil sit intact, and the righteous suffer. All this remains a double mystery as long as we only consider what is on this side of the grave. It is a mess of injustice. But God is just. He sorts out the mess. He creates a new creation … (91) [End Page 245] Giertz has a powerful ability to express in words the various feelings, from elation to depression, that all Christians have. His sermons are powerful because they are so confident of the truth of faith. Giertz's pastoral sensitivity continues in the second volume, offering sermons throughout the Pentecost or Trinity Season. Giertz ever points to Jesus Christ as the Savior. "For the gospel is this: the unworthy can come. Not at some point in the future but now. And they come. They don't aim for some undetermined point in the future when it might be more suitable" (17). "For His sake, you may be a child of God. Each and every one who believes in Him is righteous. He who allows all his lost causes to depend on Jesus, his faith is counted to Him as righteousness" (30). Giertz finds numerous occasions to chide his fellow Swedes. Challenging heterodoxy and hypocrisy in the state church he asks, "Is the Church of Sweden today an apostolic church?. … Is it so that it is Jesus who is believed to be right?" (38–9). Nor, for Giertz, should Feminist theology endorse the practice of naming God as "mother," which amounts to a "false teaching" (57). Likewise, we should question pervasive universalism: "And in the democratic folk church such as we now have quite recently received, can such ideas miss making their mark in the life of the church … [that] all go to heaven and become angels?" (113). And, criticizing Scandinavian materialism, Giertz asks, "what shall we Swedes then say as some of the world's richest people?" (127). Finally, for the bishop, the gospel cannot be reduced to social activism but instead "we need repentance and life in Christ" (161). At his best, Giertz's pastoral heart comes through. He calls out the human attempt to...

What happened last night in Sweden?: To preach without fear in a Scandinavian Folk Church, in a situation when populist nationalism rises in the context of migration

This article focuses on the situation in the Church of Sweden, one of the largest Lutheran churches in the world. The links between the state and the church in Sweden were only recently cut. Political parties still engage with church policy and form the majority of the Church Assembly as well as many local Church councils. When nationalistic parties also are involved in church policy this becomes a challenge. Homiletics is taught at the Church of Sweden Institute for Pastoral Education as part of the final, ministerial year. At the Institute we make use of North American literature by authors like Brueggemann, Lose, Tubbs Tisdale and Troeger. There are many differences between the Scandinavian and the North American contexts. This paper seeks to investigate how homiletical training in one context is carried out with the use of textbooks from another, different context. How can homiletics based on North American theologies fit into a Folk Church context? How does a North American homiletic approach encourage Swedish students to preach a prophetic word of God, without fear, in a situation when populist nationalism rises in the context of migration? How can prophetic preaching, as described by for instance Brueggemann and Tisdale, be contextualised in this situation? This article discusses when and how prophetic preaching inspired from the Biblical example, with its narratives and with metaphors and poetic language, should be used and when a more confrontational, head-on witness is needed.

One Volk, One Church? A Critique of the “Folk Church” Ideology in Finland

Is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) a state church or not?1 The answer depends on whom you ask. Looking at international surveys and comparisons, the answer is a clear “yes.” On Chaves and Cann’s six-point scale, Finland scored the highest of all 18 countries compared in terms of the state privileging one or more denominations.2 Christensen’s analysis of historical and current debates on the issue of Finnish church and state relations—in many ways a precursor to my own aims here—says clearly, “The Church exists within a special relationship with the state, and maintains many of the same designations it held when its ties to the state were more official.”3 Robbers lists Finland among the countries with “a State Church or predominant religion.”4 Finally, Fox’s global comparison of religion and state relations files Finland under countries with “active state religions,” i.e., countries where “the state has one or more official religions and the state actively promotes the state religion through various measures.”5

Константы мировоззренческого поведения в народной языковой культуре

The purpose of this article is to identify and to analyze semantics of the specific terminological system of people’s Orthodoxy from the standpoint of Russian dialectology and ethnic linguistics. The study substantiates and proves the hypothesis of G.P. Fedotov that Russian spiritual poems reaction at the categories of Christian theology is not outdated; they can be fixed not only in different types of folklore and everyday text, but also developed on the lexical material of Rus-sian folk dialects. The novelty of the approach to the allocation of ideological constants in the na-tional language is due to the following material of the study: dialect lexical units associated with the belief of the traditional peasant population of Russia. At the same time, not only the data of dictionaries are presented, but also unique data of the regional dictionary of national Orthodoxy collected by the author in the territory of the modern Tambov region. We trace the peculiar folk philosophy of word-making: reveal the semantic categories of mental spirituality that determined the individuality and sections of the vocabulary of the religious sphere; prove their influence on the formation of dialect data and their generalization into a single system of folk Church vocabu-lary. As a result, we reveal the possibilities of using ethno-linguistic semiotics to describe the vo-cabulary of faith and Church. The proposed categorical approach can become a universal scenario of description, covering the dialect lexical corpus of the terminological system of Orthodoxy.

Utfordringar for prestar og undervisningsmedarbeidarar i dåpsarbeidet i Den norske kyrkja

Challenges for pastors and catechists related to baptism in the Church of Norway The purpose of the article is to explore the different emphases among leaders in dioceses and pastors/catechists in local congregations concerning challenges related to baptism in the Church of Norway. Findings in annual reports from two dioceses are compared with an empirical material consisting mainly of interviews with pastors and catechists in six congregations in these two dioceses. The selected congregations are urban and countryside, large and small, and a characteristic of parts of the context of these two dioceses is a strong low church or prayer house tradition. The article gives an empirical contribution by describing and exploring how different challenges come to the fore at the diocesan level and in the practical baptismal work in congregations. The main finding is that while the decreasing number of baptisms in the Church of Norway and how to deal with this is the focus in the annual reports from the dioceses, this theme is almost totally absent among pastors and catechists. Relational aspects, how to deal with the parents’ lack of follow-up after baptism, and the desire of being open to all church members irrespective of their engagement in church activities are among the main concerns at the local congregational level. In a concluding reflection, the concepts of the church as a folk church and as a religious community serve as a theoretical perspective to enlighten the tension between diocesan and local congregational level, but also tensions among the respondents. The tensions seem to stem both from contextual and personal factors.

Routes and relations in Scandinavian interfaith forums: Governance of religious diversity by states and majority churches

In the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as elsewhere in Europe, governance of religious diversity has become a matter of renewed concern. A unique aspect of the Scandinavian situation is the hegemonic status of the respective Lutheran Protestant majority churches, usually referred to as ‘folk churches’, with which the majority of the population associates, alongside a prevalence of high degrees of regional secularism. As such, the majority churches have played a key role as both instigators and organisers of several interfaith initiatives, and have thereby come to interact with the public sphere as providers of diversity governance. Based on country-level studies of policy documents on majority-church/interreligious relations and field studies, this article sets out to explore the prompting and configuration of majority-church-related interfaith initiatives concerning church–state relations and the governance of religious diversity.

Towards a Queer Sister-Folk Church? Reimaginations in Lutheran Scandinavian Folk Church

The article argues that the inclusion of material created from an ethnographic research strategy opens the possibility for theological reimagination of two aspects of Scandinavian creation theology: the meaning of ecclesial space and the notion of folk. The article uses elements from queer theory/theology as sensitising devices for recognizing the potential of such theological reimagining. The empirical material is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Church of Our Lady, Trondheim, Norway, an ecclesial practice committed to rituals of hospitality. Reading the displacement of street space and church sanctuary space in the light of elements of queer theory/theology, the article aspires to show how the notion of folk and the meaning of sanctuary space is destabilized and unsettled through these practices.

Impressions of the Church of Sweden: liberal and catholic with nuances of Lutheranism

The Church of Sweden is difficult to describe or to characterise, whether as a Folk Church, a national church, as catholic or liberal, or as, in some sense, Lutheran. This article refers to aspects of its complex relations with the Roman Catholic Church and with Lutheranism at large. The author detects, from ecumenical agreement and practice, an incipient new communion of churches, based on a common claim to be catholic and also to be open to developments in society. This group includes the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the USA, the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht and the Philippine Independent Church, all of which are in communion with each other. The author's presentation is set out in relation to the Church of Sweden's liturgical and sacramental life, its church–state relations, and in an account of the rather asymmetrical shape of ecumenism in Sweden, in all of which the question of gender plays a role.

Challenges from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Access to Theology and Church Practice in the Church of Norway

ABSTRACTUnderstandings of disability and impairments have changed over the last decades both in society and in academia. Policy and law have evolved toward the objectives of non-discrimination and equal access. Norway ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2013. Article e of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (General Principles) emphasizes respect for inherent dignity, nondiscrimination, and difference. The World Council of Churches emphasized the importance of equal right to access and citizenship in the valuable interim statement launched by the Ecumenical Disability Advocates Network in 2003, “A Church of All and for All.” The author investigates to what extent these changes have influenced church practice in Norway. Norway has a state church organization, which is a Lutheran folk church. Approximately 74% of the population are members of the church of Norway. The author discusses understandings of disability and access to ministry in the Church of Norway, between 1997 and 2014, based on the church's recruitment policy. Church documents have been studied, and the heads of the practical theological seminaries have been interviewed. The findings indicate that disability is grossly omitted, and when mentioned, a medical definition of disability seems to be presupposed. Influence from United Nations documents and World Council of Churches policy documents remain scarce. Disability is approached as a topic of inclusion of lay people. Disability is infrequently recognized as a basis for discrimination or as a critical hermeneutical category. A distinct theological engagement in the new understandings of disability as social and relational might pave the way for a theology of access and recognition of the equal status of people with disabilities.

The Hill of Angels – place of practices of piety of the XXXIth century Lithuania

The article analyses the origin of the Christian folk piety place in Lithuania (The Hill of Angels in Trakai neighbourhood) in the 21st century. It seeks to answer the question of what is common and different between folk piety and Church’s tradition in The Hill of Angels? The results of the research indicate that the origins story of The Hill of Angels and its religious cultural expression are the result of local people’s piety in the 21st century which leads to the Church’s acknowledgment of holiness.