During his Sunday morning service, Ulf Ekman announced the he and his wife, Birgitta, are converting to Roman Catholicism.
Ekman is the founder of Word of Life, a megachurch in Uppsala, Sweden. News reports and blogs coming out of the nation reveal the congregation was “partially stunned” after hearing what was packaged as a “special announcement.” The theme was “Follow the Lamb Wherever He Goes.”
“For Birgitta and me, this has been a slow process were we have gone from discovering new things, to appreciating what we have discovered, to approach and even learn from our fellow Christians,” Ekman says on his ministry website.
This is big news for Christians in Sweden, or in Europe in general. Ulf Eckman may have started out as a preacher of the horrendous Kenneth Hagin/Kenneth Copeland prosperity gospel, but he mellowed over time and gradually build up one of the most influential and respected Pentecostal churches in Europe, with 3000+ members and an even larger Sunday attendance. Moreover, like Willow Creek under Bill Hybels in suburban Chicago, or Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Eckman’s church spawned a host of similar churches that grew into a dynamic network of Pentecostal churches in eastern Europe. A significant number of charismatic Swedish Lutheran ministers migrated into Eckman’s thriving church in Uppsala, bringing their high church sacramentalism with them.
As a Wheaton grad myself, I note that Eckman has a son who came to the USA and graduated from Wheaton too, and that son beat his parents to it by converting to Catholicism a few months ago. Some people may see such remarkable conversions as evidence of the contemporary converging of previously alienated traditions (the popular “Three Streams, One River” concept. Personally, I see it as evidence of what I like to call “the New Grassroots Ecumenism” and of the growing appreciation for what I likewise love to call “3-D Christianity” (evangelical, catholic, and charismatic). In a secular age when whatever is new is presumed to be superior to what is old, and in a transient society where social as well as religious roots are often shallow and weak, the conversion of this prominent Swedish pastor to Catholicism is Exhibit 546 of the vast hunger many conservative Protestants have for a more historically grounded form of Christianity, one that doesn’t rely on just the Bible alone for guidance.
David Handy+