Assembly?

This is a picture of the Church of Akureyri (Akureyrarkirkja, á íslensku) – it’s the thing right in the middle of the bottom of the frame – with the two strange, boxy towers, and the clock. Usually when people take photographs of the Church of Akureyri, they frame it so these iconic towers are soaring into the sky (it’s pretty easy to get such a shot at the bottom of the very long flight of steps that go up the mountainside from downtown to the church’s front door). But I decided to depict it as humbled by the majestic mountain, and lost within a clutter of buildings, because of our experience there.

We went to the Church of Akureyri last Sunday, and, to our surprise, we’ll go there again this Sunday. We went with high hopes. This was a church famous for its architecture; it was a well-known icon in the town. It was right in the city center, at the heart of a city known for its culture, in a country known for being Christian since the year 1000. Even better, it’s an “Evangelical” church (which means Lutheran in Europe, as opposed to the rest of the church that Luther protested against) – this had to be a focal point of Akureyri’s vibrant spirituality.

We got there a little early, and to our surprise, only two or three other people had arrived by then. I jokingly said, “What if only twelve people show up today?” – of course, we expected hundreds of people to fill the sanctuary, many of them young, many of them female, many of them smart and curious and spiritually deep. Henry’s response was that there would probably be at least fifty, even if today was an “off” day for whatever reason.

When the service started, there were maybe twenty-five people in the whole place, including us. Six of these people, including us, were under the age of sixty. It became painfully clear that this was another waning European church, slowly drifting into oblivion. We expected the worse – painfully quiet and awkward music, half-hearted attempts to sing along. A short and hurried sermon from a preacher who just wanted to get through the day. All the pleasantries, all the ritual, but no passion; subsistence spirituality, at best.

So it came as quite shock when the organist belted out a huge wall of minor chords that shook the building – and then the choir began the first hymn with unfettered passion and strength. They practically shouted the hymn with crystal clear, indignant, and huge, gigantic voices. And every hymn was like that! And the pastor’s chanting voice – the name Steindór Andersen comes to mind – heavenly! And his sermon – spoken with such passion and energy and pleading insistence … while one of the elderly parishioners kept nodding of to sleep.

We felt terrible; we were probably the only ones seriously fired up by the sermon, and listening intently – but we couldn’t understand any of it. We were undeserving of the immensity of the choir and the organ and the sermon. We all were. The quality and passion of the music befit a congregation twenty times as large, and twenty times as engaged. Why did the choir sing with such energy, and why did the pastor preach with such fire, when no one was there to listen? We don’t know, but we’re going back to find out.

Henry asked his Icelandic teacher where all the young people go to church in Akureyri; we still wanted to meet them. She just laughed. They don’t go to church…

... but they do go to soccer games ... we're going to one now ... this could be a religious experience, stand by ....
Love,
graham