Interview with deacon Karin Löfgren

Is spiritual care truly psychological?

What is the difference between being a pastor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist?

Deacon Karin Löfgren believes that her profession has a special opportunity to help people with spiritual problems.

On a sunny spring day at the end of April, I arrive at Björkhagen metro station. It is located a few stations from Skarpnäck, a multicultural residential area. Just a few minutes’ walk from the metro is St. Mark’s Church, which belongs to Skarpnäck Parish. It is a church building that looks more like a monastery than a church of traditional cut with its tall church towers. There I have arranged a meeting with the deacon Karin Löfgren from the Church of Sweden.

She brings me into her study, located at the bottom of the building. It is a small space with two armchairs and a small table in between. She gives an informal impression, dressed in a sweater and sneakers.

I have come to talk to Karin about her work as a pastor. I am particularly interested in understanding more about the relationship between her profession as a pastor and related professions such as psychologists and psychiatrists. They have in common that they meet and converse with people with different types of mental health problems. What are the differences and similarities?

Deacons can be unionized and professionally organized into various federations within Saco or TCO. Karin has her undergraduate degree in theology, which belongs to the oldest academic subjects at Swedish universities. This led her to belong to the Church’s Association of Academics. But she has now chosen to join Vision. Both associations are members of TAM-Arkiv.

The Road to the Deacon Profession

What made her choose the deacon profession? It was a long road, she said. As a child, she discovered the ecclesiastical environment. She was born in 1974 in the countryside outside Gävle. It was at a time when the church had not yet been separated from the state. ”It felt like everyone was in the church at the time,” she says.

Karin’s family were also members. There was no talk of religion at home. There was also no active religious practice. When she was six years old, her mother started working. At the time, they lived next door to the local church. So, the mother started working there as a cemetery worker on a seasonal basis. Over time, she became a church caretaker. She then worked more inside the church itself. The mother’s work led to her early contact with the Church and its staff:

”I rode a lot of bonnets on lawnmowers and sat in the church doing my bit when my mom was vacuuming in the church,” she adds reminiscingly.

These early experiences led to her later starting to study to become a priest, something she continued to do for many years. Her goal was to work in the church with social work. She thought she should be a priest. Many who heard about her social commitment suggested that she should instead become a deacon. She had never had contact with this profession. All she had was a spateful image of an old servile lady making coffee for the priest. Karin believed that working as a deacon was a women’s trap in the church. But eventually she dropped out of theology studies and started studying social work instead. Then she went to the ”deacon year” which is a one-year deacon education at university with an internship at the end.

Spiritual care and psychology

Her work is very much about dialogue. Like psychologists and psychiatrists, she meets many people with mental health problems. What’s the big difference? For Karin, the difference, of course, consists in a third party – God – being involved in the conversation. God is involved in the room. Although her visitors don’t always see it that way.

Some of those who seek out Karin have had a relationship with psychiatry. Some have been in contact with psychiatry since childhood I had a bad experience with the care of society. For example, they may have been forcibly taken into custody. They then came to the conclusion that: ”I don’t want that.” The people of the Church can then be freed from this debt, she explains. Others have received psychiatric diagnoses and have experience of how this has been used against them as a means of power. They have become one with their diagnosis:

”It’s interpreted as they are being the ones who constitute the problem, so to speak,” Karin reflects mildly.

Another group is people seeking general psychological help. The need for psychology has been widely recognized in society – we are talking about a ”therapeutic culture”. But at the same time, it is not easy to access psychotherapeutic conversations. Then, the church may be an option.

As a deacon, Karin does not work by any method, has no treatment responsibility or internal assessment tools. This is something she thinks is an advantage. Instead, the starting point is more listening, she means: ”What can I do for you?” But that doesn’t mean she can disconnect her brain. Sometimes she thinks, ”There are probably a lot of diagnoses at the bottom here.” Therefore, general knowledge of diagnoses and disease images is needed in order not to deepen and strengthen medical conditions. Sometimes she can ask if the person has other conversation contacts in psychiatry. But she still thinks that her theology education, which included religious psychology, is sufficient as psychological general knowledge for her part.

Visitors, who are they?

There are many different reasons why people seek out Karin to talk. She has made statistics on her visitors. The largest group is people between 25 and 55. This is the group that the Church finds most difficult addressing. Karin says that they are in contact with that group. But then as individuals.

The vast majority of people who sought out Karin had some kind of relationship issues. Relationships that one has had that are broken; lack of relationships; relationships one is in that you want to leave, or the relationship to one’s children. Then there are people who are at the edge of burnout. But hasn’t the Church, by talking about ”guilt” and ”sin,” imposed mental health problems on people? Karin thinks that’s absolutely correct. There are many beliefs within the Church that have been but for people. But ever since Luther’s Reformation, the Church has strived to keep up with its time, she says.

As we learn more about how humans work, it becomes clear what is not life-affirming and makes people feel good and grow. But at the same time, questions about guilt are always included in her conversations about problems with human relationships.

Cultural meeting place

In Skarpnäck parish there are people from many different countries. In the initial conversation, she makes a kind of basic orientation to understand human values. Those who meet Karin can have many different perceptions of life. Some are not religious at all. Others say, ”I believe in something, but I don’t know what.” There are also those who are very Christian and those who profess other religions. If it’s a Muslim, she knows they have God in common. The Bible may not be as interesting in such cases:

”But many people who have a different faith than mine think it’s nice to talk to someone who believes. ‘No one in Sweden understands what it is to have a Relationship with God.  You get the gist of it,’ they say.”

So faith can be something that unites as well, not just something that severs, Karin Löfgren concludes mildly.

By Leif Jacobsson

Master of Philosophy in social anthropology and co-worker at TAM-Arkiv

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