In a less recent travel, earlier this year I traveled to Gothenburg, Sweden for a missions trip with Cru Ministries in March. This was my first missions trip ever, and although it didn’t change me as much as I was expecting it would, I still enjoyed it.
I will be honest, I had never heard of Cru before until my sophomore year in college, when one of the Sweden missionaries traveled to my school to promote the trip to my dorm floor. I was embarrassed to admit that as a 20 year old Christian woman I had never participated in a missions trip before, and I felt called to try something new and go.
We mainly spent our time in Gothenburg because our group wasn’t large and we lost half of the people who signed up when Sweden changed the vaccine status back to mandatory. Because our trip occurred not long after Ukraine was invaded by Russia, we spent a lot of our time serving refugees in a refugee center. We would go try to spend time with them and talk to them, whether it came from playing soccer or blowing bubbles with the children or trying to learn their story of the invasion. I do not have any pictures of the refugee center due to respecting privacy of the refugees and the staff; I mainly only have city pictures.
We also tried to share the gospel to the Swedes in a park using a card game that contains five categories based on the person’s beliefs. While I personally did not get anyone to ask me further questions about Christianity, a couple of my teammates got several people interested in further discussions. Like Britain, Sweden also has tea/snack time but they like to call it “fika”. Everyone in my group fell in love with the concept of fika, and tried to set up fika appointments with Swedes who were interested in talking more about Christianity or who just simply wanted to get to know us better.
My favorite part of the missions trip though was serving in a Conversation Cafe event, which is a place where people can come together to discuss deep conversations without feeling socially awkward about it because it’s an organized event. While this might sound silly to us Americans, this is actually a social barrier in the Swedish culture because they feel like they can’t talk about it deep conversations with their friends and family with as much ease as we can. I attended public school in high school and while I enjoy going to a Christian university, learning other people’s opinions and perspectives behind an issue was one of my favorite things about going to public school and I was excited to have that again just for one night. I hope that there can be more of this in Sweden so having deep conversations can become normalized.
Another interesting thing that I found about the Swedish culture was that it was not common for people to attend church regularly on Sundays. While it is similar to America’s decline in church attendance, it is for different reasons in Sweden. The Swedes generally do not give much thought about whether there is a man upstairs and just simply see going to church in childhood and getting baptized as a cultural and social check mark; they never have to think about God or church ever again after they accomplish that. The goal that the Cru missionaries aim for is to serve them as well as trying to get them to start thinking.
If you would to hear more about my Sweden trip, you can listen here on my portfolio!