Rinkeby

On Saturday afternoon, we traveled to the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby to meet with the leadership team from the Rinkeby International Church.  Rinkeby is an area that is heavily populated (about 90%) with people who are immigrants and refugees in Sweden, and many of these are from a Muslim background.  You may have heard about rioting that took place a few months ago in Rinkeby.  The location of the unrest was right outside the building used by the church for its services.  The leadership team includes a new pastor, Oral Hatava, a native Swede, who has recently returned from France, where he has been church planting for 25 years.  We also met with Ingrid and Stefan, who are long-time members and leaders in the church, and also Markus Sand, who is the previous pastor there.  Markus now works full time for the EFK denomination, training and equipping churches to better serve immigrants in their communities.  There are many prayer requests from our meeting with the Rinkeby Team.  Here are a few of them: pray that some Swedes would stay in Rinkeby and not completely abandon the area to the immigrants;  Pastor Oral is a member of the town council, which is mostly populated with Muslim people, except for him and the Swedish Lutheran Church pastor (pray that he would be a spirit-filled member of this group and will help support Christians in the area);  there is a goal of building at least one and maybe two large mosques in Rinkeby (pray that more Muslim people would become Christian believers and that something else would be built on this empty lot in Rinkeby); Markus Sand and his family are moving to Örebro, west of Stockholm, in a few weeks (pray that this would go smoothly and that they would find a church community to connect with in their new home area); the Christian pre-school that the church operates in the town needs more teachers and more students to attend (pray for both of these things to happen and pray that the pre-school would continue to be a bright light for children and families living in the area)

Pastor Oral Hatava, Stefan, and Ingrid during our meeting (at the pre-school that is operated by the church).

Pastor Markus Sand (with Ingrid and Stefan).  Markus, the previous pastor at the Rinkeby Church, and his family are moving away from Stockholm this month to live close to his current job location.

Walking back from our meeting location to the subway station.  At left, is an empty lot that has been proposed as the site for a mosque.  There is still not enough money that has been raised to build this mosque.