TA 2/2017 (122. vuosikerta)

Competition Shaping the Status of the Church: The Changing Operating Environment for Church Social and Education Work in the Health and Social Services Reform Introducing Freedom of Choice — This article examines the significance of competition to the position of the Church from the standpoint of the ongoing health and social services reform. Its theoretical framework is based on the theory of religious-secular competition. A questionnaire dataset originally gathered for the project concerning the Church and public services and the report of its steering group are used. The analysis shows that parishes will have a significant need to diversify their networks if competition will further broaden the diversity of service providers. The tradition of religious-secular collaboration is manifested by the fact that the Church considers the policies of secular society in its decisions. However, expanding competition will probably weaken religious-secular collaboration, and therefore the restructuring may undermine the position of the Church in secular society.

The New Public Role of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland? Citizens’ Views on and Expectations for Church Welfare — In the process of modernisation, the sectors of society have been assumed to increasingly retreat into their differentiated spheres, and religious organisations have been assumed to withdraw to the private sphere of individual life and religious practice. However, this view has increasingly been questioned, as religion has recently become more public in various ways. One example of this is the role of religious organisations in welfare. In this article, we study Finns’ views on the role played by the majority Evangelical-Lutheran Church in welfare, examining them in relation to other sectors of society and exploring what the societal position of the Church is. The results of our study are based on a representative survey of 1,285 respondents in Finland.

Bonding, Bridging and Transnational Communality: An Analysis of the Meaning of Russian-speaking Worship Communities in Creating Cohesion and Integration — The article analyses the meaning of communality in various Russian-speaking Protestant worship communities in the Helsinki metropolitan area. Most of these communities were founded when Russian-speaking immigrants, mainly re-migrating Ingrian Finns, started coming to Finland in the 1990s. The article demonstrates how the communities create communality and cohesion among their members, form a bridge to society at large and form transnational links with both their former homeland and coreligionists elsewhere. The empirical data come from interviews and texts that the communities have produced: documents, reports and Internet sources gathered between 2014 and 2016. The worship communities create cohesion and integration in various ways: their members bond through “language, culture and mentality” and a shared identity, but the communities also form a bridge to society at large through helping, active participation and a feeling of belonging. Individuals gain a better access to public spaces and the feeling of belonging in Finland through their worship communities.