Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Glocalization from a Norwegian Perspective

By Knud Jørgensen
May 2010

But the shift has implied major challenges for the established go-structures in terms of finding their new roles, forms, and identities. Most are going through a time of crisis to find their feet financially and conceptually.

Corpus Christianum
Local churches are also in the midst of a troubled paradigm shift: since Christendom came to Norway, the basic structure of the church has been, and still is, the parish structure. In some places (e.g., in the countryside and villages), this may still be an appropriate structure. The parish structure, however, grew up alongside the notion of Corpus Christianum, where the church was wedded to the holders of power.

The church became a pastoral institution adopting the shape of society’s structure with parochial churches and a division between clerici (priest) and idiotes (lay people). Even whilst the parish structure remained dominant, there have always been alternate models with greater focus on the small community, such as “prayer houses,” local lay fellowships of believers, and house churches.

Change Emerges through Immigration
Today, the Constantinian model of Corpus Christianum and of parish structures is rapidly heading for change. The state Church may be dismantled in a few years and new church structures will emerge. Already there are a number of examples of experiments with new forms and structures, often initiated by missionaries returning from service abroad.

And we see house churches emerge. Using the images of clan, synagogue, and temple, one might say that the house church is the clan living together in a small hamlet and local communities in the countryside; the synagogue is a community where the smaller groups gather regularly; and the temple is the site of larger scale celebration where the many come together. Such emerging “mixed economy” models grow up in cities and suburban areas in Norway.

Norwegian society was, for centuries, a homogeneous culture and a country with Lutherans constituting the overwhelming majority. Today, the rapidly growing number of immigrants has also made Norway a multicultural and multi-religious society. A substantial number of these immigrants are Christians from Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nigeria) and Asia (Myanmar, China, Philippines). Probably one-third of churchgoers in Oslo on any given Sunday are immigrants. This is a good illustration of how the global comes to the local.

This reverse trend in mission now offers the old heartlands of Christianity a model for renewal and calls for a structural reform of the churches in Norway to grapple with the challenges of migration. There is a long way to go before the churches in Norway “see” and “discover” the new Christians in their midst and begin to consider them “fellow labourers for Christ” and not just strange and exotic bedfellows.

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Dr. Knud Jørgensen is dean of Tao Fong Shan in Hong Kong and associate professor at the Norwegian School of Theology.