On the Faroe Islands, a small archipelago of some 55,000 people in the North Atlantic, the light of the gospel shines more brightly than almost anywhere else in the Nordic region. Collin Hansen, writing for The Gospel Coalition after a visit, asks why — and finds an answer that runs against the usual story about religion and modernity.
The usual story is that economic development produces secularism. Denmark and its neighbours tell it as the “modern breakthrough”: a backward rural nineteenth century gives way to a progressive urban twentieth, and the churches empty. The Faroes should have followed. Their GDP per capita now exceeds Denmark’s, thanks largely to salmon farming and rising fish prices over the past three decades. Yet the islands have not descended the same ladder. Hansen suggests that secularism may be less an economic inevitability than a philosophical fashion that took root in the developed West between roughly the 1860s and 1960s. Cultures that developed later were shielded from its full force, and catching up economically has not meant catching up religiously. He sees a parallel with parts of the United States, especially the Southeast.
The other clue is older. In the village of Fuglafjørður, Hansen learned about Victor Danielsen, a twentieth-century Brethren missionary and Bible translator. Danielsen produced the first Bible for ordinary Faroese readers in their own language rather than colonial Danish; his New Testament appeared in 1937, a year before the islands secured Danish permission to use Faroese in churches and schools. Early Brethren missionaries from the United Kingdom had laboured for two decades without seeing spiritual fruit. With Danielsen’s ministry, the movement took hold, and today the Brethren make up at least 10 percent of the islands’ population — including the islands’ 29-year-old prime minister.
Hansen’s argument is that the Brethren did not grow merely by opposing the Lutheran state church. Opposition, he writes, is necessary but not sufficient; a movement must also channel the aspirations of the people it reaches. The Brethren combined a high view of biblical authority and a countercultural holiness with a deep identification with Faroese language, culture, and the islanders’ sense of themselves as a free and independent people. They became champions of ordinary Faroese. Hansen calls this the gospel’s “indigenizing principle” — the faith taking root in a people’s own life rather than arriving as a foreign import. He compares it with Presbyterian missions in Korea, and notes that the Faroes have themselves become a missionary engine, sending workers throughout Europe and beyond.
The essay is a travelogue, but its claim is theological: the health of a church is not simply a function of money, education, or the direction of history. Moderate tension with the surrounding culture, a serious regard for Scripture, and a genuine love for the people and place where a church lives can together produce something the theories did not predict. “Big breakthroughs can start in small places,” Hansen writes. “Of all people, Christians know that story.”
Source: The Gospel Coalition — thegospelcoalition.org
