A church that was built almost a century and a half ago has an intriguing recent history that is little known.
The Gustav Adolf Scandinavian Church on Park Lane, known to many as the Nordic Church, was built in barely a year during the early 1880s by the wing of the Swedish church which operates abroad. Though its design was intricate, its function was fairly simple - to provide religious services for Scandinavian seamen staying in Liverpool during a boom when unprecedented amounts of people from Nordic countries were using the popular port.
The building then was much different to now. Its ceiling was taller, its interior design perhaps more grand, and the congregation which filed in on every Sunday to worship was numbered in the hundreds. The community behind the church has certainly changed.
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This change wasn't entirely due to what some consider the decline of religion in the modern era, or social media, or celebrity. In part at least, it could be attributed to the separation of the Swedish Church Abroad (or SKUT, their overseas branch) from the Nordic Church itself.
In 2008, after being responsible for the church and its congregation for 124 years, the board of SKUT decided that it was time to cut ties with the Gustav Adolf Scandinavian Church, and went about selling it to be redeveloped as luxury flats. In February of that year, they transferred the pastor's post to London and it was around that time that the congregation learned they could be evicted from its premises.
There was outrage among the congregation and the then-pastor told the ECHO at the time that the news was 'very hard' to take. However, that wasn't the end of the church - which found its salvation in some unlikely places.
The congregation, including Roger Metcalf who helped run the Nordic Church, were saved from eviction by a clause in the original agreement from 1883 between SKUT and what is now Liverpool City Council that ownership must revert to the council if the SKUT decides to sell the property.
Roger, now in his seventies, told the ECHO: "The senior people in the Swedish church abroad came here and said right, at Christmas we're going to close the building and sell it, and we said no you're not. The 1883 indenture prevents you from selling it in effect, because it says in the indenture that if you attempt to sell it then the ownership reverts to the Liverpool City Council."
SKUT then took aim at the legalities they had originally failed to spot when they announced their plans to sell the church. Roger said: "They then spent the best part of two years with London solicitors trying to break the indenture".
But luckily for Roger, they failed in their attempts, thanks in part to a 'very friendly solicitor who worked on that case pro bono'. He added: "So they summoned me down to London and signed over the building and in effect, I took over ownership of the 1883 trust also".
Roger now runs the church and its activities with the help of the Nordic Church in Liverpool 1883 Trust, an entity which leases out the space to Liverpool International Nordic Community (LINC) which he is also on the board of. But times have been difficult since 2008, when this all happened.
The Nordic Church now operates mainly as a community space, and its religious purposes have diminished. Further complications have been brought about more recently due to the inability of LINC to alter the space for disabled users. Because of this they have not been able to open fully to the public as something more akin to a venue or historical site.
Yet, if its recent history is anything to go by, the community at the Nordic Church, with the help of the vigilant Roger, should have faith in the future.
