This fascinating digital exhibition follows a thread through more than a century of ecumenical history in Sweden. It begins with Stockholm 1925 and moves through the founding of the Lutheran World Federation in Lund in 1947, the Third World Conference on Faith and Order in 1952, the 4th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala in 1968, the Lutheran–Catholic commemoration of the Reformation in Lund and Malmö in 2016, and the ecumenical centenary celebrations in Stockholm and Uppsala in 2025. It concludes with the return of the Commission on Faith and Order to Lund in 2026 and the anniversaries of 2027.
These moments belong to different organizations and different periods. They should not be collapsed into a single history. Yet they are connected by questions that have repeatedly brought churches to Sweden:
“What does Christian unity require? What can churches do together while they remain divided? How are theological agreement, communion, common witness, justice, and service related? And how can churches receive their histories in ways that open new possibilities for reconciliation?”
The exhibition therefore looks not only at what happened in Stockholm, Lund, and Uppsala, but at what travelled from these places. Ideas were received, questioned, and transformed through theological dialogues, church agreements, common action, and new forms of communion.
The history presented here is consequently more than a history of important meetings. It is a history of churches learning, imperfectly and over time, to recognize one another, to act together, and to ask again what their unity in Christ requires in the world.