Lisa Fredlund, a leadership developer with the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden (Evangeliska Frikyrkan) and pastor at Mötesplatsen Örebro, has called on churches to resist the accelerating pace of modern life, identifying stress as the single greatest threat to love in contemporary culture. In a podcast conversation transcribed by Sändaren, Fredlund argued that many Christians are as trapped in society's tempo as anyone else — not unwilling to love, but simply too hurried to stay anywhere long enough for love to deepen. "The biggest threat to love in our culture is stress," she said, "because we never manage to stay put long enough."
Fredlund's diagnosis cuts against the grain of a strategic, model-driven approach to church renewal. She urged congregations to begin not with analysis but by asking what God dreams for the church, likening believers to bloodhounds who sense God's activity intuitively before they understand it intellectually. Drawing on her experience as a mother of three young children, she pointed to children's capacity for immediacy and presence — qualities she believes Jesus had in mind when he called his followers to become like children. The church's future, she argued, depends less on discovering new models than on reclaiming the practices of presence and patience that form Christian life from the inside out.
Fredlund also addressed what she described as a crisis of confidence in Swedish free church circles. "It almost feels like the free church has worse self-confidence than Friskis & Svettis," she remarked, referring to the popular Swedish gym chain — despite possessing something true, beautiful, and life-changing. She recalled an early encounter with a Christian family whose home held a distinctive atmosphere of warmth and light, a space where she sensed God becoming visible through ordinary hospitality. For Fredlund, hope for the church rests not on institutional survival strategies but on the unstoppable nature of Christian hope itself: communities that proclaim, believe in, and follow Jesus will endure, she said, because "hope is an unstoppable force. It lies in God's own work."
(Originally published in Swedish. Summary translated by CC / Connexion.)
Source: Evangeliska Frikyrkan / Sändaren — sandaren.se
