A New Year Brought NEW LIFE to Laestadius
LARS LEVI LAESTADIUS was a Lutheran pastor in Sweden, working among the Lapps, especially the Sámi people. He learned the Sámi and Finnish languages so that he could be understood as he preached against sin. Nothing changed. Drunkenness, adultery, and theft continued in full vigor.
Although everyone thought Laestadius was a good man, he carried a nagging burden of guilt for past sins. In 1844 he was ordered to conduct inspections of several churches and schools to determine if they showed any spiritual life. On this day, 1 January 1844, he encountered a young woman named Milla “Maria” Clementsdotter of Föllinge. He left that encounter with his guilt lifted.
In the winter of 1844, I came to Åsele, Lapland, to conduct a church inspection. Here I met some readers of the milder sort. [Readers were a sect that criticized the established church.] Among them was a Lapp girl by the name of Maria, who opened her whole heart to me after hearing the message from the altar. In the order of grace this simple girl had experiences that I had never heard before. . . . And I thought: Here now is a Mary who sits at the feet of Jesus. Only now, I thought, do I see the way leading to life. It had been hidden from me until I could talk with Maria. Her simple account of her travels and experiences made such a deep impression on my heart that the light dawned even for me. On that evening that I spent with Maria I felt a foretaste of the joy of heaven.
Laestadius’s friend Raattamaa noted that Laestadius had been impenitent until he lost a child and himself became sick. Then he sought salvation but “did not understand it until the Lapp girl Maria said to him that he should believe his sins forgiven in the condition in which he found himself. Then he obtained peace by faith in Jesus and began to preach by the power of the Spirit.”
Although Laestadius now preached more fervently, he reported,
I have preached the law as sharply as I could, but it doesn’t have any effect. My predecessor, Pastor Grape, preached mostly pure gospel, and the old ladies blubbered in church, but there was no sign of serious repentance or new birth.
Yet the following year, some listeners began to experience bodily tremors. They asked questions about the faith. Still they did not change. Finally on 5 December 1845, a woman came to salvation and leaped for joy. Others wanted the change they saw in her. By the end of 1847, upper Sweden was in revival. Many converts experienced vocal outbursts and uncontrollable shaking. Taverns closed for lack of business. Some jails stood empty. People made restitution for thefts. The number of illegitimate births plummeted.
Large regions had no teachers. To get around a law that forbade laypeople from preaching, Laestadius sent teachers out as temperance workers. This fit in with the government’s desire to discourage rampant alcoholism. These teachers read the Bible and sermons to gatherings. Laestadius also founded a school to meet the increasing need for literacy.
As more and more people came to Christ, opposition arose, sometimes fueled by businessmen whose alcohol sales dwindled. Enemies of the gospel began a campaign of vicious slander against Laestadius. The Consistory (a church body) wrote him a warning, followed by a reprimand, giving him insufficient time to respond. When he was able to respond, his explanations were accepted, but a cloud hung over his head.
A group of Readers began to distort the Bible, declaring themselves “holy and righteous,” and above Bible teaching. Although Laestadius reported the matter to his superiors and labeled these Readers fanatics, he was blamed when they resorted to violence in 1852.
Trouble and opposition followed Laestadius until his death in 1861. Nonetheless, Christian faith, pious simplicity, and sobriety reigned in thousands of Sámi homes. Laestadius is also remembered by scientists because he was a notable botanist who discovered new species. Among several plants named for him is a willow tree: Salix laestadiana Hartm.
—Dan Graves
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For more on how Christianity came to Sweden, read Christian History #63, A Severe Salvation
