Henrik
Larsson, a pastor with the Church of Sweden in Nacka and project manager for
the initiative, says that God’s House will be the first building to house a
church and a mosque since the Umayyad Mosque was built in Damascus in the 600s.
The idea for the project arose a few years ago as a “natural extension of the
growing cooperation” among the Church of Sweden, St. Konrad’s Catholic Church
in Nacka, and the Muslim Association in Nacka (Muslimska föreningen i Nacka).
Said Larsson:
“In 2004,
the local schools came to us and asked us for help and advice in how to teach
children about religious tolerance and address any problems, and the idea to do
something together started to take form as we thought, ‘Could we do
something?’”
After
members of the far-right Social Democrat party who campaigned on an openly
anti-immigration and anti-Muslim platform won seats in Sweden’s Parliament for
the first time in 2010, Church of Sweden Bishop Bengt Wadensjö wrote in a
letter to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:
“In Nacka
we do not think that Muslims or immigrants should be seen as a threat, as
suggested by Jimmie Åkesson [leader of the Social Democrats’. The idea is to
demonstrate how people can get along together regardless of culture, language
or faith.”
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