Swede Bend Church: Myth or Reality?
One of the delights of my ministry has been a weekly pericope study group comprised of local pastors, active and retired. At a session of this group, one of our number brought a copy of the history of the Swedish Methodist church. It was not out of the ordinary that this history was about Swedes and written in Swedish because Stromsburg, Nebraska’s five churches (Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Covenant, and Free) were all established by Swedish-speaking congregations.
What was striking about this book was a picture of a simple white wooden mission house on the prairie with a rank of rectangular windows on the side and a chimney at the end. The image triggered my Covenant historical consciousness. Covenant confirmands and other readers of By One Spirit by Karl Olsson have seen a similar picture on page B7 (in the second section of pictures and illustrations) — a picture of the very first Covenant Church in Swede Bend, Iowa. My glimmering association of historic images began to flash even brighter when a scan of the accompanying Swedish text revealed the words “Swede Bend.”
With mounting excitement, we sought the translating skills of our resident linguist/theologue, Earl Byleen, who rendered the opening paragraph as follows. “Stratford was previously known as Swede Bend, and is one of the oldest Methodist Congregations in Iowa.” He then completed our astonishment by recalling that the Swedish Baptists also had an early work at Swede Bend! We have not been able to obtain a picture of their sanctuary, but could it have been other than a small white rectangular mission house?
Disturbing? Only the encounter with the Gilgamesh Epic, the Babylonian flood story, could rival the sense of intrusion — yes, even violation — that this discovery caused to my Covenanter’s sense of heilsgeschichte [salvation history]. First we discover that the Babylonians have a “Noah” called Utnapishtim, and now I discover in this Methodist history that there was a Methodist pastor named G. Smith in the hallowed place of C. A. Björk, the Swede Bend lay pastor who became the first president of the Covenant Church!
Historians of religion in the dim and distant future will examine this evidence and come to the inevitable conclusion that this is another mythic typology. Historians will see middle Americans as people who had an irresistible attraction to the simple beginning, the modest style, the folk ideal. The prototype will no doubt be the story of Abe Lincoln’s birth in a log cabin! And did Smith discover his homiletic skills when someone hid his copy of Wesley’s sermons? I, for one, do not want to know. It is enough to know that Björk read sermons from Pietisten until someone hid his copy, forcing the lay pastor to preach his own message.
I want to keep our dear Swede Bend, unsullied by science and relativism. Geologic evidence indicates that in the immediate area of nearby Manson, Iowa there is a large crater caused by “meteoric impact” from — somewhere.