Word of Life / Livets Ord (Sweden)

Livets Ord became the Nordic hub of Faith teaching — positive confession, prosperity, and divine health — through its Bible school, media, and conferences, planting Word of Life International affiliate congregations from 2012 onward across Scandinavia, the former USSR, and beyond; by 2023 the network reported having helped establish roughly 1,000 churches. Its Theological Seminary (1994–2014) offered American degrees under an affiliation with Oral Roberts University without ever gaining Swedish accreditation, and closed in 2014 after years of operating losses.

Swedish public debate in the late 1980s and 1990s centred on clinicians' reports and published accounts of anxiety and psychiatric breakdown among some ex-attendees, healing doctrine that discouraged medical care, and aggressive tithing and offering campaigns; the church rejected this framing and pointed to voluntary participation. The pressure campaigns resurfaced as a live issue in November 2015, when the Swedish investigative programme 'Uppdrag granskning' aired a critical episode reporting that founder Ulf Ekman had demanded cash payment for guest appearances at other churches, cultivated a 'culture of silence' discouraging internal criticism, and pressed congregants for multiple offerings on top of the tithe; then-pastor Joakim Lundqvist publicly conceded the weak culture of dialogue and repeated-offering pressure had been real problems, while maintaining the church had since changed its practices.

Ekman handed the Uppsala pastorship to Lundqvist in 2013, then announced in March 2014 that he and his wife were leaving Livets Ord to join the Catholic Church, a move covered internationally by Christianity Today and Charisma as a striking exit from Word-of-Faith leadership; scholarship, including Simon Coleman's ethnography of the movement, treats the conversion as symbolically closing the classic high-demand era. Leadership continued to turn over afterward — Jan Blom became senior pastor in 2022 before a serious motorcycle accident forced him onto sick leave later that year, an interim team led the congregation through 2023–24, and David Ekerbring took over as senior pastor in 2025 — while the roughly 1,700-member Uppsala congregation and its wider international network settled into a more conventional charismatic-evangelical profile. The profile scores the documented high-pressure decades culminating in the 2015 exposé, while noting a congregation that today operates as a broadly mainstream, publicly accountable charismatic church rather than the totalising 1980s-90s Faith culture Swedish clinicians and media once described.