Equmeniakyrkan has begun the process of placing the next group of candidates for its supervised guidance year, and the choices they have registered challenge a common assumption about rural ministry. Of the 19 people preparing to enter the year, 11 are pastors and eight are deacons, and the great majority have asked for the countryside, smaller localities, small towns and local communities rather than the big cities. None of the pastors going out now wants to work in the Stockholm area, and none chose Malmö. A few said they could imagine the Gothenburg region, but preferably not the city centre. The newspaper Sändaren reported the figures on 20 October.
The finding speaks directly to a staffing problem that has worried Equmeniakyrkan's countryside congregations. Earlier this autumn Sändaren reported from Dalsland, in western Sweden, where several small congregations had begun exploring a shared appointment because none could easily attract a pastor on its own. That report raised the question of whether the church's ordained ministers are willing to move to rural parishes at all. Linnéa Lidskog, who works with the recruitment and coordination of ordained staff for Equmeniakyrkan, said the new candidates' preferences point the other way. "I think God absolutely calls to the countryside," she told the paper.
Lidskog added that the difficulty is not confined to rural areas. Congregations in Stockholm can also struggle to find pastors, she said, and people who have not already lived and worked in the capital are rarely willing to move there to begin congregational ministry. The guidance year is the supervised stage that candidates pass through before taking up ordained ministry in Equmeniakyrkan, so the preferences registered now shape where the next generation of pastors and deacons will serve. For small congregations, the recruiter's message is that the willingness exists — the question is whether local churches can offer posts that match it.
(Originally published in Swedish. Summary translated by CC / Connexion.)
Source: Equmeniakyrkan / Sändaren — sandaren.se/nyheter/2026/10/20/pastorerna-valjer-inte-bort-landsbygden-tvartom
