Serving the Paymaster

The Swedish Church As Ministry for State Propaganda

The church in Sweden is funded by the State.  It comes as no surprise then, that as the years have passed, the church has morphed into a motley collection of false prophets, dancing dervishes to please Herod.  Never bite the hand that feeds, says the pragmatic realist.  

Sweden has evolved to where it believes multiculturalism is the highest of all humanist values.  It is the secular kingdom of god.  Yes, yes, yes chant the false prophets.  The following report was written by Nima Gholam Ali Pour for the Gatestone Institute:

After a French priest, Jacques Hamel, was murdered by ISIS sympathizers in Rouen, France, on July 26, 2016, an initiative started in Sweden where Swedish Christians took "selfies" with a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians. The initiative, called "Mitt kors"("My cross"), was started by three priests from the Church of Sweden.

The Church of Sweden, however, criticized it. Gunnar Sjöberg, Head of Communications for the Church of Sweden, wrote on his Facebook page:  "I really do not know about that. This thing about Christians suddenly wearing a cross as a sign for or against something. It is actually nothing new, but the call seems seditious and un-Christian in the conflicts that already exist."

So now, according to a senior official in the Church of Sweden, the call to wear a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians is "un-Christian".
 That the Church of Sweden distances itself from people who carry the cross caused Ann Heberlein, a doctor of theology and lecturer at Lund University, to write,

"The leadership of the Church of Sweden no longer wants to lead a Christian community; they want to lead a general ethical association for humanistic values of the most vulgar kind."

The Church of Sweden's attacks on the "My cross" initiative continued until one of the priests who had started it publicly left the Church of Sweden. In an article, Johanna Andersson, the priest who is resigning, writes: 

"Church leadership has for several weeks been running a campaign against us who started the group 'My cross.' In this campaign, I have been discredited, called 'questionable', 'unclean', 'agitator', 'un-Christian' and attributed xenophobic hidden agendas."

 The state church claims 6.6 million members.  That sounds like a lot.  But only about 400,000 go to church once a month or more.  Even more telling, only 15 percent believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

Throughout the West, we suspect, secularist states envy the place and position of the Swedish church in that country.  It has become a lap dog for militant, mindless secularism.  The secularists in the West would wish that the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ would wake up and get with the Progressive tsunami, working with secularism, not against it.  Sweden provides the example, like a city set upon a hill, shining its light before all men.

Christians, however, see a different reality.  They see the Swedish church more as a beacon of warning, a lighthouse.  No passage can be navigated between the Scylla of secular materialism on the left, and a Charybdis of a state-funded church on the right.  The church filled with false prophets will always end up serving its paymaster.  Sweden has become a klaxon warning siren to all who seek the favour of men.

The Bible commands, "Come out from among them and be separate".  Abraham Kuyper was so right when he said, "In our isolation lies our strength."  The Swedish "church" aptly proves the point.  Nevertheless, let us continue to pray for the faithful remnant in that apostate nation.