The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden ( – until 2003 'Swedish Mission Covenant'), founded in 1878, was a Swedish evangelical free church. It was the second-largest Protestant denomination in Sweden, after the national church, the Church of Sweden. In 2011, the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden completed a merger with two other denominations, resulting in the new denomination Uniting Church in Sweden (in Swedish: ). The denomination was a member of the Swedish Free Church Council, the International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches, and the World Communion of Reformed Churches.
History
The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden is a breakaway from the Lutheran Church of Sweden. As a movement it had roots in Pietism and the spiritual awakenings of the 19th century such as Nyevangelism 'new Evangelism'. When Swedish Covenanters emigrated to the United States and Canada in the last half of the 19th century, they formed the Evangelical Covenant Church (see Mission Friends). The denominations are independent of each other but have maintained fraternal ties. The forming of the Swedish Mission Covenant was one of the first steps in forming free-church denominations in Sweden after the 1858 repeal of the Conventicle Act.
The Swedish Evangelical Mission ( 'Evangelical Homeland Foundation', EFS), from which the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden came, was founded in 1856. EFS was and is a movement within the Lutheran Church of Sweden and thus does not constitute a separate denomination. EFS had many affiliated local associations (missionary associations and EFS groups, with at least earlier names such as Evangelical Lutheran Missionary Society, Lutheran Missionary Society, Missionary Society, Chapel Society and Evangelical Lutheran Missionary Assembly).
The 1870s was a period of new ideas and divisions within the Church of Sweden. Priest Paul Petter Waldenström's new view of the atonement as being humanity's reconciliation with God – rather than the opposite – was one that many followers in Pietistic circles began to follow after its publication in Pietisten, "the theological journal of Nyevangelism". This led to a demand that the Swedish Evangelical Mission's missionaries should not be obliged to adhere to the Augsburg Confession. There was also a desire in some quarters to break with the church's order of communion; Waldenström began to distribute communion outside of the church, a factor leading to his resignation. Jakob Ekman spearheaded the founding of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden in 1878 and would become its first president. When a proposal to change the Swedish Evangelical Mission's confessional stance was rejected at its 1878 conference, the Mission Covenant Church was founded at a preachers' meeting in the Baptists' Bethel Chapel in Stockholm. Waldenström had previously been dismissed from his position as EFS representative. From the start and for several decades, Mission Covenant members were called Waldenströmers.
Missions
The church sent numerous missionaries to many countries around the world, such as China in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular Xinjiang, Japan, India, Russia and Caucasus, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Ecuador, Alaska, Spain and, in numbers of missionaries the largest field, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Congo. In many other countries there were missionary projects.
The SMF also included missions in other countries in its program from 1880 and sent its first missionaries the same year: to the Congo in the service of the Livingstone Inland Mission, which was the start of the (). Högberg was sent to Russia and J. E. Ågren, A. Lindgren and K. J. Gustafsson to Lapland. From the early 1880s, there were several different missionary cooperative organizations in Sweden: the (from 1876), the Swedish Evangelical Mission (from 1865), the Swedish Alliance Mission (from the early 1900s) and the Swedish Alliance Mission (from 1880). The Baptist Union of Sweden's congregations also had missionary activities (from 1881). The Swedish Holiness Union (, today part of the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden) came in 1887, the Örebro Mission in 1892 and the Swedish Pentecostal movement began its missionary activities after 1911.