Religious Change and Continuity in a Danish Town: Results from a Mapping Project

Abstract

Local changes and global patterns – mapping congregations in the city of Aarhus.

This article will present the results of a mapping project from 2012 of religious groups in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. The mapping project followed up on a similar project from 2002, and was therefore able to document how religion changes in a specific area in relation to over-all trends of religious transformation. Data concerning the religious groups was collected through interviews and participant observation and analyzed both through a comparison with the previous study and in relation to theoretical questions concerning the transformation of religion, e.g. globalization and growing religious diversity. This article will focus specifically on developments within Christian congregations and the question of local transformations in relation to regional and global patterns of religion. In Aarhus, as in Denmark generally, the primary numerical divide is between the majority church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark) and the minority groups. Among the minority groups a key tendency is how globalization affects the religious landscape both in the form of changes in older congregations, e.g. through global Christian networks, and in the form of new congregations arriving in the city. Among the new arrivals, the two primary tendencies are a growth in Orthodox and Pentecostal congregations.