Religion

The majority of people in Sweden belong to the Lutheran Church, which is the state religion. Most Swedish immigrants to Canada have also been Lutheran, though two other denominations – the Mission Covenant Church and the Baptist Church – have had sizable numbers of adherents in this country. The Lutheran church in North America that most closely corresponded to Sweden’s state institution was the Augustana Synod, founded in 1860 and with its seminary and college at Rock Island, Illinois, from 1875. The synod was divided into a number of conferences corresponding to dioceses, including the Minnesota Conference in that state and the Columbia Conference in the Pacific northwest. These two conferences played significant roles in the establishment of Augustana Synod congregations in Canada.

In 1878 a number of pietistic members of the state Lutheran Church in Sweden who had started coming together for Bible study formed the Mission Covenant Society. Though it was not recognized officially, this group became an independent organization with its own congregations and pastors. Conservative in religious matters and morals, the movement was progressive in political terms. It was also much concerned with missionary activity. The split had reverberations in Lutheran circles in the United States, and in 1885 the Evangelical Mission Covenant Church was established, which included not only former Lutherans but other mission groups as well.

Baptist missionaries had been active in Sweden in the early decades of the nineteenth century and had made a number of converts, despite restrictions on non-Lutheran groups. In the early 1850s some of these individuals emigrated to the United States, where they were free to worship as they chose. The first Swedish Baptist congregation in North America was founded at Rock Island, Illinois, in 1852, and the movement subsequently spread to other Swedish settlements in the United States and also into Canada.

The Mission Covenant Church, now known as the Evangelical Covenant Church, was the first to establish a Swedish church in Canada. It was opened in Winnipeg in 1885. One of the earliest Swedish arrivals, M.P. Peterson, who had come to the city in 1874, had already held devotional meetings in his home, and in 1884 a pastor was found who would extend his field of activity in the Red River valley to include Winnipeg. The following year Peterson and fourteen others formed the Guds Skandinaviska Församling (God’s Scandinavian Congregation), later known as the Första Skandinaviska Kristna Missionsförsamling (First Scandinavian Christian Mission Congregation). Peterson purchased a house for the congregation’s meeting place, and services were held here and in various other locations in town until a proper church could be erected in 1897. The congregation joined the Evangelical Mission Covenant Church in 1886 and received its first full-time minister the following year. In the 1890s a schism developed within the congregation over baptism, and a number of members left and joined the newly formed Swedish Baptist Church.

During the next few years several Mission Covenant congregations were formed in rural areas in Manitoba and Saskatchewan where Swedes had settled. Five churches in Winnipeg, Scandinavia, and Tyndall in Manitoba and New Stockholm and Theodore in Saskatchewan formed the Canada Conference in 1904. Initially, congregations in Ontario and British Columbia were not included in this conference, and it was not until 1910 that the two churches in southern Alberta, those in New Sweden and Malmo, joined. Over the next few decades new congregations were established in Manitoba (Alpine), Saskatchewan (Hyas, Norquay, Fairy Glen, Marchwell, Hume, and Young), and Alberta (Calgary, Meeting Creek, Alder Flats, and Highland Park). A major problem faced by the church in its early years was persuading pastors to serve the scattered congregations on the Canadian prairies, but the situation eventually improved. Whereas in 1910 there were ten congregations with only one permanent pastor, by 1934 there were twenty-three churches with nineteen pastors.

A church-sponsored school, run at various locations with a mixture of religious and secular courses, was opened in 1918 but lasted only a few years. Church camps were established in the 1920s, and short-term Bible institutes held. The Covenant Bible Institute, later renamed the Covenant Bible College, was founded at Norquay in 1941 and moved to Prince Albert three years later. Until the onset of World War I, Swedish was the primary language of the Mission Covenant Church. The occasional Sunday school class or evangelistic service may have been held in English, but in some places even these concessions were vigorously resisted. At one church conference it was even put to a vote whether or not an English speaker should be allowed to join the church. A missionary society for young people founded in the early 1920s was conducted in English, and during the course of that decade the language was used more and more frequently. The church songbook became bilingual in 1934, the ladies’ aid society started holding its meetings in English two years later, church documents and minutes began to be translated in 1938, and the following year Swedish ceased to be the official language of the church.

A doctrinal dispute over the atonement caused fifteen pastors and seven congregations to leave the Evangelical Mission Covenant Church in 1946. Two of these congregations later returned, and by 1949 there were seventeen churches with thirteen pastors. Until that time, except in Winnipeg and Calgary, the church had focused its activity on the rural areas, where membership was declining. Thus it was decided to concentrate more on establishing congregations in the cities. Beginning in 1951, churches were founded in Edmonton and Saskatoon. British Columbia, previously part of the North Pacific Covenant Conference, joined the Canada Conference in 1973, adding congregations in Nelson, Erickson, Vancouver, and later Surrey. Ontario entered the conference in 1988, bringing two additional churches. The Covenant Bible College, together with the head offices of the Canada Conference, was moved from Prince Albert to Strathmore, Alberta, in 1995. As of the late 1990s there were twenty Evangelical Covenant churches in Canada with approximately 1,300 members. The church has lost most of its Swedish character and now has members from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

During the summer of 1883 a group of pastors from the Minnesota Conference of the Augustana Synod of the Lutheran Church travelling in northern Minnesota decided to visit Winnipeg. They discovered that life there was not as primitive as they had expected; however, they probably did not meet any Swedes, and nothing resulted from their visit. Later the same year, at the request of some Swedish settlers in the Red River valley, the Reverend L.A. Hocanzon of the Lutheran Minnesota Conference came to Winnipeg several times and held services in the city. He tried to persuade the conference to extend its work to Canada, but was told that there was not enough money or people to do so. Other attempts to establish the church in Canada failed for the same reasons. However, in 1885 the Minnesota Conference began to send volunteer pastors, the first of whom, Svante Uddén, arrived in Winnipeg in that fall. He held one service and took note of the newly founded Mission Covenant Church. Further encouragement for Lutheran work in Canada came with the development of the Swedish colonies of Scandinavia, Manitoba, and New Stockholm, Saskatchewan, where the Mission Covenant Church had also gained a foothold. Uddén returned to Canada in 1888 and travelled to western Ontario, as well as visiting Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

The first Augustana Lutheran Synod congregation to be founded in Canada was that at New Stockholm, Saskatchewan, in 1889. Others were established in Manitoba at Winnipeg (1890) and Scandinavia (1891). It was difficult to get pastors to serve these early churches, and most lasted only a short time. During the 1890s, additional congregations were formed in Rat Portage (Kenora), Ontario; Tyndall and Whitemouth in Manitoba; Flemming and Percival in Saskatchewan; and at several places in Alberta. By 1908 Alberta had fifteen congregations, and Ontario had two, at Port Arthur and Fort William (Thunder Bay). The first church in British Columbia was in Vancouver (1903); it was followed by one in New Westminster in 1909. Although attempts were made to found other congregations in the lower mainland of British Columbia, no permanent ones were established until the 1940s because of the transient nature of the Swedish population there.

In 1913, in spite of some opposition, the Canada Conference of the Augustana Lutheran Synod was formed at New Stockholm, Saskatchewan, made up of thirty-nine congregations, eight pastors, and 1,756 communicants. The churches in British Columbia were not included and remained within the Columbia Conference. Plans were made to start a conference school, but nothing came of them. There was a loss of membership between 1920 and 1926, and because fewer young people were joining, a change to the use of English was begun in this period, though it was not completed until the following decade. In 1932 the Augustana synod joined with three other Lutheran groups to found the Camrose Bible Institute. By the late 1940s the membership was made up of many nationalities, and the church soon lost much of its distinctive Swedish character. At the end of 1960, the Canada Conference had forty-eight congregations with 5,688 members. Two years later the Augustana Synod of the Lutheran Church amalgamated with the other Scandinavian and German Lutheran churches, with the exception of the Missouri Synod, to form the Lutheran Church in America. The Canadian churches became independent in 1967 and founded the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

The original Swedish conference, or synod, of the Baptist Church in North America is called the Baptist General Conference of America. The first church in Canada was founded at Waterville, Quebec, in 1892 by a small group of Swedes who for nearly a decade had been holding prayer meetings. This congregation was dissolved the following year, but it provided the nucleus of an English-language Baptist church. In western Canada the first Swedish Baptist church was established in Winnipeg in 1894. Martin Bergh, the first pastor of the Winnipeg church, visited both western Ontario and Alberta, and churches were eventually established in Kenora, Port Arthur, and the Rainy River area of Ontario and in Camrose, Pigeon Lake, Calgary, Edmonton, and the Wetaskiwin region of Alberta. Early churches in Manitoba included those at Scandinavia, Teulon, and Tyndall, in Saskatchewan at Midale and Wadena, and in British Columbia at Matsqui, Vancouver, and Golden.

Two conferences of the Swedish Baptist Church were formed in Canada: the Alberta Swedish Conference, established at Camrose in 1906, which included the churches in Alberta and in British Columbia, and the Swedish Central Conference, formed in Winnipeg in 1907 and including the churches in Manitoba and in western Ontario. Later the British Columbia churches became part of the Columbia Conference, which comprised the Pacific northwest. By 1914 there were twenty-seven churches in Canada with a total membership of more than 800. The Swedish Baptist Bible Institute, later called the Alberta Baptist Bible Academy, was founded in Wetaskiwin in 1925. Some high school courses were taught, in addition to Bible study. By 1951 the Swedish Baptists in Canada had twenty churches with 1,146 members.

A denomination that was important for at least one Swedish colony in prairie Canada was the International Bible Students, later known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. A number of members and their families from North Dakota were among the first settlers in the Calmar area, arriving there in the late 1890s. They built a meeting house on what is now the main street of Calmar in 1912. Because for a while it was the only church in the town, many individuals who were not members attended its mission. Meetings were held in English from a very early period, since the church put no stress on the preservation of ethnic languages or customs, and the group has never celebrated any of the traditional Swedish holidays.

There is also one congregation of the Swedish Church Abroad (Svenska Kyrkan i Utlandet, or SKUT). The sea-man’s mission of the Swedish state church was started in 1876 and carried out its activities in various parts of the world primarily for the benefit of Swedish sailors. Over the years the focus of the mission was broadened to include Swedes of all occupations living abroad. A Swedish congregation already in Toronto became affiliated in 1991 with the Swedish Church Abroad. Services are held in Swedish, but christenings and other special ceremonies may also be performed in English. The Toronto minister, Lars Frisk, used to travel to Montreal four times a year to hold Swedish services in the Norwegian Seaman’s Church until it was closed in 1994. In the late 1990s he was visiting Vancouver twice a year, where Swedish services have been usually attended by between sixty and eighty people.