Last July, while on sabbatical, I had the fortune of visiting the old Viking burial mounds, and the 1000 year old church, at Old Uppsala in Sweden. In Viking days, it was the seat of kings and a place of religious ceremonies and celebrations. The early missionaries, after the kings had converted to Christianity, built the first church on what they believed was a “pagan temple” or a sort of “pagan cathedral” – a symbolic replacing of the old with the new. You can still see the church, rebuilt a couple times because of fires, which is a working parish church with Sunday services.
The Viking burial mounds at Old Uppsala, Sweden
Of course, as you tour the area you read on the displays that modern archaeology and historical research has not been able to back up the claims of the missionaries that the place was a center of animal sacrifices, nor did it have a sort of “pagan cathedral”. They have found none of the mass collections of bones where they were supposed to be, nor did Viking religion even have cathedrals and temples.
Those medieval bishops can be somewhat forgiven for not understanding the nature of Scandinavian paganism; it was such a different worldview from theirs - an enchanted universe where everything in creation had spirits and powers and meanings. The gods were not particularly caring, just powerful. Thor and Odin would never talk about “abiding in love”, just a lot about bravery and war. It lacked centralization – so people practiced sacrifices all over the country, at different times, without a central organization or priesthood. Yes, some were closer to the gods, or knew more, or had more visions, but nobody got certified. Each chieftain practiced in each place as he saw fit.
Old Uppsala Church, built on the site of a former Viking building, probably a long house.
What was believed to be a “pagan temple” was probably just a “Long House” that would have hosted festivals (read: drinking and gift-giving parties), sheltered people at times, and been a community gathering space. It was where the king would hold court, so putting the church there, surrounded by the mounds of buried long ships and treasures, was symbolic that Christianity was the new central theme in town.
Having studied some of the history of my pagan ancestors, both Irish and Swedish, it intrigues me to see young generations romanticizing the old ways. If you listened to the neo-pagan memes, you would think it was some sort of egalitarian utopia of spirituality and nature connection. In fact, the Vikings could be very violent and practiced slavery. They had kings, rigid social classes, and an economy dependent on plunder. But the part that the neo-pagans do get right is that the universe was not separated from the gods and the spirits, but intimately connected to them.
Inside the church in Old Uppsala.
It's that sense of connection that they’re longing for, more so than Odin and Thor and Loki. That’s why they’re best called “neo-pagans”, because they practice a highly edited and cherry-picked version of the old religion that keeps the nature and skips the slavery, plundering, and hierarchies.
But it wasn’t Christianity that killed the connection with nature or the spirit world. If you went back to medieval Europe, people very much believed spirits, both good and bad, inhabited everything. The rain, the crops, the trees, were all full of them. Angels and demons roamed everywhere, and visions and dreams were still considered messages from God. Where you got in trouble with the church was if you tried to summon those nature spirits for power over others with curses; that was witchcraft (and, yes, a good deal of those accusations were totally bogus and just about property disputes and such). But the world was still very much an enchanted place full of divinity and power.
What broke that connection was the Enlightenment and the advent of modern science. They taught that miracles don’t happen, God doesn’t heal things, angels are fantasy, demons are nonsense, and if God exists, he’s outside the world, never interacting. This forced scientists to explore nature and not fall back on “the gods made it happen” every time they couldn’t answer the question. But it also made nature meaningless, spirit-less, just molecules arranged through natural selection and physics. Just things.
And when nature became just things, we became separated from it, and could now trash it or exploit it without feeling bad. There’s no “essence” or “spirit” in that redwood. It’s just cells – cells that can make me a good profit if I chop it up. There’s no “meaning” to the wetland, so let’s just drain it and build another 5,000 houses, etc. etc.
Seeing the destruction of nature, and feeling the disconnect, a lot of people are asking if something was lost when we took the spirituality out of the world. Are we killing off a part of our selves, and our experience of life, when we see everything as meaningless material objects?
This certainly goes against the experience we all have when we are in nature, and we talk about the effect it has on us, and how we feel refreshed and healed being in it in ways that can’t be explained with just molecules. A lot of modern Americans sense this, and know that there must be more out there than a cold world of particles, but they don’t want to get involved in church, so they call themselves “spiritual but not religious”. It’s a sort of “take the parts of religion you want without the commitment or beliefs or community or practices or expectations”. It’s having the connection with a world of meaning and value and spirits, without doing anything or believing anything. Or you can call it “neo paganism” and have essentially the same thing.
When I was going through seminary in the 1990’s we would debate how to get the people back in church. The families were led by baby boomers who probably had some church connection and believed in God, but found the organization “boring” and “irrelevant”. In came the “seeker-sensitive” churches to make it “fun” and “relevant” with music and lights and sermons about daily life. There was a lot of excess, and some good corrective. Many places were boring and took people’s attendance for granted and gave sermons about esoteric points of doctrine and a lot of sin and hell. So the seeker-sensitive model was supposed to be the solution to evangelism problems, and so contemporary worships were started and life-groups that focused on specific felt-needs and sermons series’ about things like marriage and finances. And some of it worked, and a lot of good came out of it – including a lot of good music.
But the decline in church attendance and belief in God continued.
Now, I believe, we’re in a new phase where the problem is not that church isn’t relevant; it’s that the church is seen as moving you away from nature and experience, and obsessing with life after death. People are longing for connection with the divine, and to find experiences of transcendence, and are asking questions about meaning and value. It’s just that churches bought into the enlightenment ideas that God was not present in the world, but was outside it, in heaven. God was not filling us with dreams and visions, but telling us what vices to avoid, what words not to say, what clothes not to wear, what substances not to inhale, and promising us a place in the other world after we die.
The churches turned their eyes to the beyond nature, while the culture turned their eyes back in.
So our struggle today is not so much about style or packaging or marketing. Those things matter, but only with people who already believe and are shopping for a new church. It’s about bringing God back into the experience of life and nature today. It’s not about teaching how to prevent sin, but bringing back the enchantment with the world where the divine is seen and felt and heard in the world. It’s about finding a richer, fuller, more meaningful, more spiritual life today. It’s about getting more joy and more healing and more presence now.
So a better question to pose is: how do we structure our church and community life in such a way that we help people experience God, find more richness and meaning, more connection to the divine, more spiritual encounter, more living?
Our role needs to be more as guides to experiencing a fuller life through Jesus, not denying life today for a better one later.
I believe that when we become a place, a community, that disciples and guides people to that experience, we will have a better future as a church.
The labyrinth from the prayer retreat on April 20th. It’s an ancient spiritual practice that is even built into the floors of some of the medieval cathedrals. The idea is that walking in the pattern focuses the soul on the Holy Spirit, and allows for greater encounter with God. Many of us do, in fact, prayer better moving than sitting still.
What about Lord of Grace?
I got thinking about all this as I reflected on the April 20th prayer retreat that our Prayer Ministry put on. I intentionally stayed out of it, for a couple reasons. First, the leaders are plenty capable and don’t need my input. Secondly, I didn’t want the presence of THE PASTOR to cause people to defer to me, rather than embracing their own experience of the Holy Spirit. Encountering God is not something reserved for professionals, but something for everyone. I want to empower that.
The prayer wall from 2023 Advent services. Meant to imitate the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem where people roll up and squeeze their prayers, here we do the same thing with colored paper and a mesh of plastic chicken wire from Tractor Supply. Either way we make the encounter of God and selves through our actions, bringing our prayers in person, to put our whole selves into the experience.
Then I heard the reports of all the people, the speakers, the prayers, the people giving me testimonials of how it changed them – it just warmed my heart. This is exactly the kind of things that we need as people – time to experience the Spirit today. In fact, people came from outside our congregation just to be a part. The spiritual hunger is real. The marketing trick is letting people know that this is the place you can find it; you don’t need to return to Odin and Thor or the Fairies Of The Trees And Bogs to find it.
In all we do, I hope we can have great experiences that make life richer and fuller and more divine. Whether that’s in just getting some joy out of line dancing or throwing balls at community days, sharing our pains and concerns in small groups, delving into art or creative projects, or just getting lost in the music. It’s what guides so much of what I’m always trying to do.
I have in my head a slogan, or tagline, of “Lord of Grace: finding the richness of the experience of Jesus in the life today” – something like that. It’s unofficial, but helps guide where I believe God is calling us today - to find him in the world and make a fuller life. It is what Jesus said,
“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” - John 10:10
Peace,
Pastor Lars