Category: Church
Will the real Sodomite(s) please stand up!
Sodomy and sodomite are two sad words in the english language. The words have been used in the past to describe Homosexual men and their actions. Of course the word actually means “a person from Sodom” and the verb should mean “doing what the people in Sodom did.” So what did the people of Sodom…
Healing, long overdue…
Yesterday I was invited to speak at EKHO (A swedish organisation for Christian LGBTQ+ persons). The talk was held at “Ågesta kursgård” which is also the site of the Salvation Army Officers school in Sweden and the place where I did both my application conference (for becoming a Salvation Army officer) and later my captains…
Theo-Erotic
You may have noticed that the blog changed title. This to reflect the changing tone and content of the blog over the past three years. As I started studying theology in earnest I started at a very broad spectrum deconstructing and reconstructing everything from creationism to eschatology. Slowly though I realised that the spirituality that…
We are writing history!
This year has been a fantastic year, a year of change, a year of honesty and integrity, a year of new directions. But all of these thing are in the past what is exciting about this new years is what is coming! As I was talking to my beloved last night I realised that while…
Spirituality, Sexuality, Social justice
This is the teaching shared at the first MCC heart gathering in Malmö on the 6th of December 2015. The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), is an international Protestant Christian denomination. There are 222 member congregations in 37 countries, and the Fellowship has a specific…
Why I am religious AND spiritual
It has become very popular in the west to state that one is “spiritual and not religious”. For years I have felt that Religion was a bad thing and that religious was a derogatory term. For me religion was all the man made traditions and customs that many times where contradictory to scripture and inhibiting…
What if we could own our inability…
So in light of my most recent post on the Ashley Madison reveal and the churches inability to provide a positive alternative to the schools sex education (or lack of sex ed). I have been pondering what could we do … when I read this article voicing some of the same concerns and citing a…
Being queer – The censored post
This post was originally posted in september 2012 and taken of the blog that same month as requested by the Salvation Army national leadership. I am now reposting it as it was an important step on the journey. This post in itself was an experiment in being open, authentic and vulnerable. The post pushed a…
This is the end
So this is it, the last day at the Malmö Salvation Army, the last day as a Salvation Army officer. We are spending the day clearing out the office, which is almost like moving house. It’s been six hard years with a lot of opposition and slow progress, but has also been the most transforming…
Truth
I am the truth, the way and the life — Jesus It is funny how even though this statement of Jesus makes truth rather singular we still have so many different bids on the truth from different religions and different churches. Somehow we as humans seem to think that if we believe it hard enough…
What’s the controversy?
This Sunday I talked about the sacramental life at the corps. It was a nice service with good worship (Thanks Boris) and the teaching flowed nicely. As I am preaching my way through my “Life is my religion” teaching we where talking about life as a spiritual practice and apart from sacramental living we got…
Feelings are not dangerous and unreliable
If you have been raised in church or spent a longer time as a member of some sort of church, then I am sure you have been told not to trust your feelings. I was certainly told time and time again that feelings are a roller coaster, they come and go and cannot be trusted.…
Shameless!
A while ago I wrote about the importance of self love and how self love is the first step to loving others since you can only love others as much as you love yourself. Now we know we should love ourselves, and we hopefully feel that it is ok to love oneself. The question then…
There is no us and them
Someone once told me that all dichotomies are false dichotomies. And maybe this is the most sinister but also the most widespread of them all. The very idea that there is us and them, the idea that we are somehow different *better” that them, whomever they are. In what may have been one of the…
Sex is not filthy
IT’S TRUE!! Not even when it’s really good! Not even when it’s long or loud, wet and rowdy. Sex is not even filthy when it is public or outside or taped. Sex is not filthy when it is between two men or two women. It is not filthy no matter what clothes we dress up…
Falling upwards or sin is not that bad
So this week we are talking about sin. It doesn’t happen a lot around here. I abhor the notion of sin, not because of what it means but because of the cultural baggage that we have attached to the idea. Let me just say outright that the whole concept of a catalogue of sin, certain…
Science is not secular
We live in a secular society, which for most people means separation of church and state. We have this idea that church simply should not be political or involve itself in matters of state. In the same way we have this notion that church has nothing to do with science and that science have nothing…
Why are we so afraid?
Those of you who have heard me teach have probably heard me say that joy is the Christian trademark, well that and or grace. While there are a lot of really awesome teaching in most of the world religions, the idea of grace, the completely undeserved, unconditional gift that inspires a no holds barred kind…
Kiss me, I am a Christian!
So I was looking at one of my favourite geeky webpages when I found this T-Shirt that said: “Kiss me I’m elvish”. Which of course is a rip-off of the old “Kiss me I’m Irish” slogan. And it got me thinking…Today Christians are so afraid of any physical contact, because we have fallen into the…
Women are not inferior
The title should be enough, that should be the end of discussion. However, since we are prone to get stuck in patterns based on fragmented readings of scripture we have to go deeper than just this statement. We have gotten stuck on a handful of bible verses about submission and male dominance instead of letting…
Ministry is not a program
Ministry is an interesting word for many reasons, the most important reason is that it does not mean what most people assume it means. For me as a Swede it has double significance as it is one of the Christian buzzwords that do not exist in the Swedish language. The closest we get to the…
Community is not a meeting
The holy grail of church planting in my opinion is the building of a community. The way we traditionally do this is by planning activities in our church buildings and we put on meetings. That is we create structured environments in which people can meet and greet. I am not saying there is anything wrong…
Church is not an adress
In evangelical circles we keep saying this, Church is the people not the building, but do we really understand it? The word church comes from the german kirche which in turn comes from the greek word kurios meaning lord. So the word church means “those who belong to the lord”, well you could of course…
God is not a belief system
It is a simple truth really: god is god. God is not what we believe of god. God is not our theology or our doctrines. Since the dawn of time humans have had various ideas, religions, doctrines, theologies about god. God has remained god all that time. I will not say that god is unchanging,…
The things Pope Francis did not say…
The last couple of days there has been a post circulating on the internet with a bunch of statements allegedly made by the current Pope. People are upset that a pope would say such things (although he didn´t) and what it would mean for Christianity at large. Other people are praising the Pope for these…
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