It's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

"Får Inte Djur!" Translation: Please do not feed the sheep....But always feed the kids ice cream!

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Warm enough to wear a tee shirt, if you are a Somali man....

...And warm enough to wear almost nothing if you are a Swedish woman.

Many, if not most, of the immigrants here are unemployed and living off of government welfare. My ethnic Iranian friend Omid tells me it is not because most immigrants here do not want to work.  Rather, the work they can get doesn't pay as well as welfare pays them if they simply stay at home.

In order to encourage adult citizens to have children, because of the negative growth rate (1.67 children/woman), the government also mandates employers to give parents 16 months vacation from work for every child they have.  The father is required to take two of these months himself. This vacation is paid for by the government.  The government also pays parents, regardless of whether they have a job, a set amount each month for every child until the child turns 16. This is encouraging the immigrants who live off of welfare (and therefore who typically do not integrate into Swedish society), to have many children.  But it is doing little to encourage ethnic Swedes to improve their birthrate. (Nor, might I mention, is sponsoring Gay Pride encouraging the birthrate either!). To ethnic Swedes, having lots of children, if any, encumbers their freedom and independence....

...So if you want to have children, and don't want to bother working outside the home, come to Sweden! You've got it made....

...But your young bucks might find it harder to impress their girlfriends. It's much more expensive to own a car than in the US.

But let's be practical.  With public transportation like this, who needs a car?
Do you see the woman in this photo?  She is hidden inside a black burka while waiting for a bus.

Omid and I planning our attack

I met Omid yesterday and we discussed how we might do evangelism together in the coming weeks.

Omid is a 28 year-old ethnic Iranian who has grown up here in Sweden.  He is a science teacher for high schoolers, and belonged to a religion very antagonistic to Christianity (you can guess which one) until a few years ago, when he became a skeptic with suicidal thoughts.  He had a recurring dream that he was drowning. It was then that he decided to read the Bible, in search of answers to life.  Eventually, he had the dream again, and instead of struggling to save his life, he surrendered it to Jesus, who was holding him under.  He drowned but came up suddenly into penetrating light. When he woke up, his depression and anxiety had evaporated into thin air. He had met Jesus, and he has never been the same. Dreams like this, he says, are becoming common among Iranians.

For three years now, Omid has been a Christian, and an energetic witness for Christ through preaching at the church plant and through evangelism on the street and with the church plant's book table in the expansive neighborhood marketplace.

I asked him to explain to me the Gay Pride Week Festival that is going on now in Göteborg, and suggested that we take this opportunity to do some evangelism together.  This was an exciting challenge for us both.  We decided first to come up with a plan about how we would engage people in conversation, and how we could steer it toward the Gospel.  He suggested a method he had heard about Americans doing elsewhere, one which I had been planning to use myself with the college athletes at Trinity, so we immediately set about brainstorming how we would use it in this cultural context.  Essentially, the plan was to interview people on the street or in the park where the Festival is happening. I'd tell them I'm from a Christian college in the US and I want to write an article for the school paper about views on Christianity at the Gay Pride Festival.  Omid would simply be with me to translate if needed, and also give me critique afterwards. 

Once we arrived downtown yesterday evening, and began walking toward the tents set up along the main drag, I suggested we pray together before we start to engage in combat. So as we were walking along the promenade, we prayed.  Then after a few minutes of looking for someone who might be open to a conversation, Omid asked me if he should choose.  He was getting impatient.  I asked him if he had seen anyone that looked like a good target. He said, yes, about half the people we'd seen already.  Feeling the pressure of the situation, like standing on a 30 foot diving platform though not knowing how deep the water really is or how cold it will be, I finally saw a couple that looked somehow more approachable.  I dove in!

It wasn't a cannon-ball, but it wasn't a belly-flop either! It was more like a swan dive--beautiful, but not enough points to win gold. It ended up being a conversation that must have lasted well over an hour.  Annika, a tipsy 47 year old bisexual, and her 20-something nephew, were eager to discuss with us the questions we had. The golden moment came about halfway through, when Annika began asking me questions herself. Both say they are atheists who believe in Darwinianism but also a spiritual afterlife. They refuse to take the existence of a holy and perfectly loving God seriously, though I think through the encounter we managed to plant some seeds.  Seeds of thought and seeds of love.  Seeds of thought concerning the goodness of God and his holiness, humanity's fallenness and depravity, and God's plan of salvation and ultimate restoration in Christ, a rescue from our fallen condition which they desire but have failed to see, let alone believe. Seeds of love for "religious people" like us, who in their minds had only tried to shame her for her sexual choices.

Omid and I will set out again tonight with the same plan, only I'm going to try to do better at sensing when to leave the conversation.  He pointed out to me that it was pretty evident they were not willing to see things differently about half-way through our conversation, enjoyable though it was.