Threatened church is great advert for city

Feb 26 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Plans to close Liverpool’s historic Scandinavian Seamen’s Church are being bitterly opposed. Peter Elson reports

SHE’S a lady of possible pensionable age, who walks with the aid of crutches. But there’s fire flashing in her eyes and fervour fermenting in her belly.

“You save the church or I’ll duff you up,” she roars at this quaking, hapless scribe, while waving a threatening crutch in my direction.

Meet Gladys Bakken, married to expatriate Norwegian Arn-Finn Bakken, and stalwart parishioner of the Scandinavian Seamen’s Church, in Liverpool.

And among the Nordic community she is far from alone in her feelings. As in days of yore, the Liverpool Vikings (now boosted by a big dose of local Celtic blood) are on the attack to repel closure of their church.

This venerable northern European institution, officially called Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, planted on Liverpool soil, celebrates its 125th anniversary this year as the world’s oldest original Swedish Seamen’s Church abroad.

Celebrate, of course, in the current situation is not the right word, as the church’s owners, Swedish Church Abroad (SKUT), made their decision on February 5 to close the church and divert resources to a proposed travelling ministry in Thailand.

The church is located at Park Lane and Cornhill, in recent decades a grim area, but now rapidly coming to developers’ attention with its proximity to construction of Grosvenor’s Liverpool One shopping centre and trendy flats.

Selling the church and its car park could raise £1m for Swedish Church Abroad. The site without the church is probably worth much more.

Bizarrely, this closure and sale is not because Liverpool’s Scandinavian Church is failing. Quite the contrary.

It is the lively centre of a thriving community, run by a voluntary committee that turns in an annual net profit of £24,000 – a sum many British parish churches could never dream of achieving.

Some 14,000 people visited the church in 2007. More than 1,000 people took Communion there last year, and there is a regular Sunday congregation of nearly 40 members.

In daily use, the church is famed for the food provided by Mette Royden, the church’s Norwegian house mother. Scores of people attend the weekly Wednesday coffee mornings, lunches and other events.

The church holds together a scattered community of Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns and Icelanders who live in Merseyside and the North West, with their families.

The young vicar, Rev Ulf Soderlind, ministers to the Scandinavian crews of ships visiting Liverpool, which is more important than ever in a smaller seafaring community, with fewer compatriots.

The church is also a regular stopping-off point for many Scandinavian tourists. These include the Norwegian group of Liverpool FC supporters who also use the church’s popular bed and breakfast facilities.

Without the Scandinavian Church, Liverpool’s annual Norway Day Commemoration parade, marking the close ties of Britain and Norway in the Battle of the Atlantic, Arctic convoys and other WWII campaigns, will probably collapse, says the city’s Norwegian Consul’s office.

Likewise, Liverpool Cathedral’s superb Santa Lucia candle-lit Christmas service, based on Swedish church tradition, is likely to disappear.

There is one word that the congregation keep repeatedly muttering over the closure due for December 31 – namely that Swedish Church Abroad’s action is “un-Christian”.

Even Rev Soderlind and his wife Anna-Karin (who is church secretary) cannot quite believe this will happen.

On applying for the 10-month posting, they were told part of their job would involve the unhappy task of closing the church on July 4, prior to their return home to Sweden.