Saint Anna Mission was started in September of 2023 A.D. Olof discovered Orthodoxy during the lockdowns beginning in 2020. His quest uncovered the great jewel he had been longing to discover his whole life: The Orthodox Faith.

This Faith still exists today as it did in the time of the Apostles. His family approached Orthodox Churches as inquirers. Unfortunately, the Orthodox Churches are not all following the Orthodox Faith. On top of this, his European history was scorned and ridiculed by some. To others, the Lutheran history and rich remnants of Orthodoxy in his Swedish Lutheran roots were simply a weird imposition.

As the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church began to spread, Bishops were assigned to people groups. There is a sense in which we are all children of Adam, members of the human race. There is also a sense in which the nations have unique traditions, skills, beauty and culture. The Church, in its wisdom, acknowledged this and as such, established bishops and later crowned kings to lead their nation or ethnic group. It is weird to have Northern Europeans subsumed into Greek and Middle Eastern churches. These churches closely guard the ranks of bishop from anyone who is not their ethnicity. This is both frustrating for an outsider and understandable for an insider. Maintaining that unique ethnic identity and culture within an Orthodox framework is what has maintained their identity, while the absurdity of classical liberalism with its blurring all ethnic distinctions has destroyed our connection to our people. The atomistic individual of liberalism is not bound by connections to history, ethnicity or tradition. Each person is considered a blank slate upon which any form can be imposed if desireable to the individual. This toxic ideology is antithetical to Orthodoxy. We are not autonomous individuals. We are a thin thread in a giant tapestry of relations to our ancestors, to our children and to our neighbors. This tapestry is the body of Christ when we are aligning ourselves with his will for us. When we are aligning ourselves with our own gnomic will indepentently, we are like loose threads which will fall away to the floor. Our salvation is ultimately both: We are responsible for rejecting sin and repenting for ourselves. We should consider our sins as a catalyst for the sins committed by others. On the other hand, we are raised in a sea of sinful poison which some can tolerate and dam off, while others cannot. So in a sense, our culture and leaders bare a certain guilt for our sins.

Which brings us to the current diffuculty with European bishops who were originally Orthodox. What happens when they stop following the Orthodox Faith. Sensing the subjectivity, arbitrary abuse of authority and lack of Grace experienced noetically, the people fall away. The remaining Orthodox bishops do little to recover the territories which fell into heresy. Attempts have been made in Europe to reunite the heterodox bishops with the Orthodox. This has born little fruit. During the centuries of waiting, great hoards of people have fallen into ever increasing sin and deception. Thankfully, God is just. There is a sense in which we will not be held to the same standard. It still does not restore the mystical Grace to those people. This is a large part of the reason Europeans are going extinct. The liberalized culture is… no culture at all.

Our vision is to bring European people back to the Orthodox Faith. Ideally, we will gather a large contigent of formerly Lutheran, Calvanist, Anglican, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic Papists and other heterodox back under European bishops who profess and follow Orthodoxy.

Possibilities

Adding additional parrallel jurisdictions in areas where Europeans exist seeking Orthodoxy. The world is now global. People are no longer geographically confined as before. Is Orthodoxy going to follow the model of liberalism and mix all people groups together in parishes, then condradict liberalism when only ordaining bishops from the old country?

Establish a non-parrallel jurisdiction with a single episcopacy over an area. Parishes would be broken up by ethnicity under the same bishop. I see this as leading to constant fighting and jockeying for which ethnic group will have the greatest power. I do not see this differing much from papism.

At the end to the day, we as individuals have little power to change what the bishops decide. 2025 could be the year the church heals all wounds and grafts the heterdox back into the church after the bishops commit to denouncing the errors of papism, modernism, ecumenism, sergianism and all other self pruning heresies.

As an individual you can practice the Orthodox Faith as closely as you can until you find an Orthodox bishop who has not fallen away, to receive you into the ark of salvation enabling you to partake of the sacraments. By networking together, we can build a ladder which will allow us to climb back onto the ship which is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. My hope is that someone else will take the dirty rags I have managed to cobble together and through the prayers of Saint Anna, her most glorious daughter Mary The God Bearer, all the Saints and Holy Trinity to restore Orthodoxy to European people.

Why is my family Christian?

Our family is Northern European. While we did our best to fight off the influences of pagan Rome early on, Christianity and Christian kingdoms grew out of the seeds of Rome and expanded throughout the world. We take for granted the universal expectations of civil society which are remnants of Christian society. The laws established in Rome and refined in Orthodox Christian Monarchies governed by punishing evil and promoting virtue. Studying history, you will see history prior to Christ and Christian Monarchy, the world was much more barbaric, cruel and evil.

Our family can trace our Christian roots to the founding of the Christian Monarchy in Sweden. In 1008 A.D., Saint Sigfrid of Sweden baptized the first steadfastly Christian monarch of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung. In 1014 A.D. the first bishop, Thurgot (bishop of Skara) was enthroned. From this episcopal throne, grew the Church of Sweden.

In less than 40 years, a massive reformation was underway in Rome. Pope Gregory the 7th born Hildebrand of Sovana adopted heterdox beliefs and practices. He established himself as the super bishop and claimed supremacy over all other bishops throughout the world. The power grab was manufactured using forgeries, state craft and military force to crush anyone who would continue following the Orthodox Faith. In 1054 A.D. he sent a Bull of Excommunication to the Ecumenical Patriarch. The key issues being the Filioque (The addition of “and the son” to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.), leavened bread(the ancient Orthodox Tradition) and married priests. In 1075 A.D., he issued his document Dictatus Papae carving out his unprecendented and uncanonical powers. This formed the basis of spirit of innovation and domination which has plagued Roman Catholicism to this day. Forty years is not a very long time for our ancestors to fully instantiate the Orthodox Faith. Even so, there was still much of the faith present even under the innovators. There are many terms to identify the split between the Pope of Rome and the rest of the bishops comprising the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. It is most commonly referred to as The Great Schism. Contemporary Saints of Orthodoxy have added language which clarifies this event. Saint Justin Popović describes

Ecumenism is the common name for the pseudo-Christianity of the pseudo-Churches of Western Europe. Within it is the heart of European humanism, with Papism as its head. All of pseudo-Christianity, all of those pseudo-Churches, are nothing more than one heresy after another. Their common evangelical name is: Pan-heresy. Why? This is because through the course of history various heresies denied or deformed certain aspects of the God-man and Lord Jesus Christ; these European heresies remove Him altogether and put European man in His place. In this there is no essential difference between Papism, Protestantism, Ecumenism, and other heresies, whose name is “Legion.”

Orthodox dogma, that is to say the overriding dogma of the Church, is rejected by them and replaced by the Latin heretical overriding dogma of the primacy and infallibility of the Pope, that is to say of man. From this pan-heresy heresies were born and continue to be born: the Filioque, the rejection of the invocation of the Holy Spirit, unleavened bread, the introduction of created grace, cleansing fire, superfluous works of the saints, mechanized teachings about salvation, and from this sprang mechanized teachings about life, Papocaesarism, the Inquisition, indulgences, the murder of sinners because of their sins, Jesuitism, the scholastics, the casuists, Monarchianism, and social individualism of different kinds…”

From the chapter “Humanistic Ecumenism” in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, by Father Justin Popovich, trans. by Asterios Gerostergios (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994), p. 169.

Papism indeed is the most radical Protestantism, because it has transferred the foundation of Christianity from the eternal God-Man to ephemeral man. And it has proclaimed this as the paramount dogma, which means: the paramount value, the paramount measure of all beings and things in the world. And the Protestants merely accepted this dogma in its essence, and worked it out in terrifying magnitude and detail. Essentially, Protestantism is nothing other than a generally applied papism. For in Protestantism, the fundamental principle of papism is brought to life by each man individually. After the example of the infallible man in Rome, each Protestant is a cloned infallible man, because he pretends to personal infallibility in matters of faith. It can be said: Protestantism is a vulgarized papism, only stripped of mystery (i.e., sacramentality), authority and power.

From this we can more astutely define the departure of Rome from Orthodoxy, “The Great Schsim,” as a Papal Reformation and ulimately Papal Protestantism.

Reformation 1.0 (1054 A.D.) – One man lays claim to all churches, doctrines and authority. One man becomes the arbeter of what is “orthodox”.

Reformation 2.0 (1517 A.D.) – One man lays claim to all churches, doctrines and authority. Everyone becomes the arbeter of what is “orthodox”.

The Church of Sweden then decides to move from one protestant framework to another. In 1544 the king and the Diet officially declared Sweden a Lutheran nation.

This is why our family has Lutheran Pastors going back 300 years. I cannot ignore this history. I do not understand why there is no mechanism for reclaiming these fallen sees other than waiting for Orthodox bishops to come to the rescure. Instead, we see the World Orthodox churches attempting a reunion with Rome. I would love to see everyone embrace the Orthodox Faith and back out 1000 years of heresy. I do not see that happening. Like any problem with management, you need to clean house to fundamentally change the organization. We need Orthodox bishops over Europeans. Not weird ethnic sidebars in which are people are seen as, “not from our old country.” Speaking of our old country…

My great-great grandfather Pehr Adolph Bergquist was a Lutheran Minister. Trained in Sweden and America, he went on to have three sons who also became Lutheran ministers. His wife, Amanada Tellander, daughter of minister Thellander in Sjövik parish, Småland, Sweden, had Lutheran Pastors in her family going back 300 years. Very close to the reformation itself.

Rev. Pehr Adolf Bergquist Swedish Lutheran Pastor

Rev. Adolph Theodore Bergquist Lutheran Pastor

Rev. Joseph Emanuel Bergquist Lutheran Pastor

Rev. J Gottfrid Bergquist Lutheran Pastor