Rarely have debates been so intense within Sweden's Evangelical Lutheran Church, to which just over half of all Swedes belong. Since the beginning of the year, congregants and clergy have been at loggerheads. "There's a lot of emotion, sadness, anger and frustration on both sides," said Amie Ringberg, an elected member of the Vaxjo diocese in the country's south.

At the root of the dispute is the way in which the Church, the country's fifth largest forest owner with 460,000 hectares of forest, i.e., 1.7% of the country's wooded area, manages this precious resource. Ringberg is among those criticizing a policy of overexploitation of forests and calling for the implementation of sustainable forestry. On the other side, many are defending the status quo: a model based on clear-cutting (felling all the trees in a given area) followed by replanting.

While this debate is not new, it became heated after the publication, in September 2024, of a report commissioned by the Church from Goran Enander, formerly the head of the National Forestry Agency. This former senior civil servant was commissioned in 2023 to make proposals "to ensure ecological, economic, social, spiritual and existential sustainability."

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