In the Book

After the church in Finderup, Pastor Jens showed us a large patch of land that showed the original way this region would have looked in centuries past. Instead of trees and fields of grain there was mostly heather. Apparently sheep can live on heather, and that was mostly what you would find in this area of Denmark, sheep farmers. We looked out over the land from this high point (set aside like a nature preserve). We got even higher by climbing up on a burial mound. These were dotted all over the landscape, and are very ancient, dating back 3000 to 4000 years.

Next we visited to Sædding Kirke, where Søren Kierkegaard’s father attended at one point in his life, and even Søren himself was there once. Apparently when he was about ten, Søren’s father cursed God from the top of a hill nearby, cursed God because God wasn’t taking care of God’s people. According to Pastor Jens (who was a bit of a Kierkegaard expert) that curse shaped the life and religiosity of the Kierkegaards, and influenced Søren in his writings many years later.

We also had many Mission Houses pointed out as we drove around. In this area of Denmark there were three revival movements (for lack of a better term). The one started by Grundtvig, but wasn’t as influential in this region, and then the Lutheran Mission (similar to the Haugian movement in Norway I think) and the Inner Mission (not as anti-church as the Lutheran Mission). These organizations would have their own meeting halls, and set up their own groups - though their members would probably be officially members at the local Lutheran Church (and would commune once a year to maintain that status).

We ended up at Pastor Jens’ new home, we would call it a parsonage (a house owned by the church but made available for the pastor to live in), but it was more than that. Attached to the house was Pastor Jens office (a lovely, large room looking out over a valley… I admit I was a bit envious), and a large meeting room where confirmation classes would be taught and Parish Council meetings would be held. While the setting and construction of the house was very nice, both Beth and I were unsure that having the Office and Meeting rooms attached was ideal. Another interesting thing was that Pastor Jens mentioned that they had just moved into this new house and it was smaller than their previous house. It seemed pretty large to me, until I saw a picture on the wall of the previous parsonage - which looked a bit like a country home for some aristocrat. But in conversations with Pastor Jens I determined that the high level of respect Pastors in Denmark were once shown was disappearing - in fact I found a number of parallels between their experience and ours.

One similarity, for example, is that they are struggling with rural de-population, just like the Canadian prairies. One of the ways they are managing this shift is by combining more congregations together into one parish. Pastor Jens used to be responsible for just 2 churches, in the past couple of years he has been responsible for 4 churches. They too are losing young people from their region, and the younger children do not attend worship like they used to due to sports and other activities on Sunday mornings… sound familiar?

At Pastor Jens’ home we met his wife Kirsten, who had a nice lunch prepared for us. In touring their new house we saw a room that was an art studio, Kirsten is an artist who likes to put religious themes into her artwork. The lunch was a typical Danish lunch - open faced sandwiches. I even had one they called “The Veterinarian’s Night Bite” which was basically a liver pate covered with a couple of pieces of some kind of sliced meat, and topped with a substance I can only describe as a jellied form of beef broth. We had a nice visit, us asking questions about Denmark and the Danish church, and them asking us questions about Canada and the Canadian Lutheran church. I believe the conversation would have continued for a long time if Kirsten didn’t need to go to work (she works in a local Senior’s Home).

Following lunch on Wednesday Pastor Jens said “Let’s see if we can find your grandfather in the records” (All the records for the past 100 years, from all 4 churches he is responsible for are stored in this parsonage in a fire proof vault in the basement). He dug out the book from 1908 and with the flip of a few pages there it was - the name Harry Henriksen, on the top of the page. That was quite a thrill for me, though it is hard to put into words exactly why. We spent a little more time looking for the records of others from the family (of which we found a few). I took photos of each of the entries, and Pastor Jens made photocopies for us as well. In some way seeing the names in the book made this journey seem more real, which is strange because it felt plenty real before that, but seeing the name Harry Henriksen in the book has made a difference.