Building Bridges.....

  Election time to the Swedish church. I wrote about this in 2013 and in 2017. Nothing really has changed. The  Church of Sweden   is a Lutheran national church . A former state church , that was separated from the state in the year 2000.  The church has  just under 5.8 million members by the end of 2020, it is the largest Christian denomination  in Sweden, the largest Lutheran denomination  in Europe. The church of Sweden is a democratic church and each member has the right to vote in elections for the framework of the church. As a member you have the possibility to influence the church.  If you want to stand as a candidate in the church election, you must: be a member of the Church of Sweden. have been baptised in the Church of Sweden or another Christian faith community, or have previously been an elected representative in the Church of Sweden. You have to be at least 18 years old on polling day, be registered in the church register in the area for which the election is being held.

Rather often do I hear that "I do belive in God, but not the angry and punishing God as we see in the old testament, I ratherbelive in the loving and caring God in the new testament" I read exactly this kind of thinking in the newspaper today and I just wanted to say that it is not true that God in the old testament is angry and harsh. We see stories in the old testament   like the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah etc, but there is no mention of God being angry! When it comes to the flood, we’re told that in fact God was sorrowful, grieved at how wicked humanity had become, and that he acted out of moral necessity rather than anger. With Sodom and Gomorrah, the Bible tells that God judged the cities  because of the massive injustice and perversion taking place there, only after  careful evaluation to determine if judgment was truly necessary, and only on the condition that the overwhelming majority of the population truly deserved it. The Old Testament is  a love story of a Father a