My name is Christian Mölk and I am the Lead Pastor of the Pentecostal Church in Härnösand, Sweden. I have a bachelor’s degree in Theology from Örebro School of Theology 2009-2012.
On this website (christianmolk.com) I share my Bible Commentary, Bible Talks and Bible Devotions for free. Most of them are originally written in Swedish and published on my Swedish website (christianmolk.se) and then translated into English. This website may therefore contain some linguistic inaccuracies. Please contact me if you find any.
How I became a Christian
My Christian walk began in Israel. There my newly saved parents met on a kibbutz and moved to Sweden where my mother is from. My father and my surname Mölk come from Austria where my Catholic family is an unholy mix of barons, peasants and businessmen. 18 years later my older sister is also on a kibbutz where she is baptized, which leads to me eventually being baptized and starting to go to church as well. So I am both born thanks to Israel and born again thanks to Israel.
But, let’s take it from the beginning. When my parents came to Sweden in the early 80’s they started going to a church, but unfortunately they ended up in a cult-like denomination which led to them eventually leaving. So I grew up believing in Jesus but didn’t go to church very often. When I was 11, my parents asked me if I wanted to be baptized and since my simple and straightforward belief was that if you believe in Jesus you should be baptized, I was baptized in Filadelfia in Linköping, Sweden. During my teenage years, however, I lived like any other Swedish teenager. The fact that I was a Christian was probably not something that my friends noticed very much. If someone asked me if I believed in God, I would say yes, but I never talked much more than that about my faith.
That all changed, however, when I was 18 and my older sister Jessica came home from a year in Israel. Jessica had been through a conversion in Israel and now wanted me to go with her to church. My incredibly honest but thoughtless response was: “I’m not going to go to church with you, I’m already a Christian!” Because of my failed high school studies, I was unable to get into any college and therefore had the ambition to do my military service and then apply to be a UN soldier. To start living as a Christian was not on the world map at that time. But Jessica kept nagging me and eventually I gave in. But not only did she want me to go to church, she also wanted me to be “baptized in the Holy Spirit”. My answer was: “No, I don’t want to be like those Pentecostals who only talk about Jesus all the time!”
For two weeks I wrestled a lot with this question. I understood that it was God calling me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to answer his call. I felt God grabbed me by the collar and pulled me to church and really insisted that I go. A Bible passage that became alive for me in the context of this tug-of-war between me and God was:
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
John 6:44
I knew almost immediately that God was going to win this, but I did the best I could to drag it out.
After those two weeks, I finally went with my older sister to Johanneskyrkan in Linköping. After the sermon, I went forward for prayer and said that I wanted to be baptized in the Spirit. I didn’t really know what it was, but I understood that God wanted this. The experience I had is very difficult to describe in words, but I will try:
It started with the one who prayed for me putting his hand on my shoulder and started praying. I, who usually never cries, suddenly struggled to hold back the tears while my body began to shake and I felt all warm. After a moment of prayer, it was as if something inside me opened up like a tulip blooming. Inside me I saw all the colours of the sky and was filled with joy.
After this spiritual experience, I knew for sure that I was now baptized in the Spirit! But it was not only an inner certainty, slowly but surely my life began to change. I no longer wanted to live like a normal teenager, I stopped partying and instead started talking about Jesus with all my friends and started going to church. As I matured in my newfound faith in Jesus, I experienced how God was shaping me. God allowed me to see things in my life that were wrong and challenged me to stop doing them and instead do new things as God wanted.
A few months after this, I went with some friends on a small mission trip to Bosnia. On that trip, I had an incredibly strong desire to work for God full-time, which led me to eventually attend Bjärka-Säby Bible School, work as a youth pastor in a Pentecostal church, study theology at Örebro Mission School and now work as a pastor in Pingst Härnösand.
God changed my life in a humorous way: I who didn’t want to go to church eventually became employed by the church, I who wanted to be a UN soldier eventually became a pacifist, I who didn’t want to be a Pentecostal eventually became a Pentecostal pastor!
Why I became a pastor
The background to me becoming a pastor began when I attended the Bjärka-Säby Bible School to try to realize my dream of becoming a missionary in Nepal or Peru. As the Bible school year drew to a close, I realized that it would probably be a good idea for me to work in a church for a few years first, as I was a relatively new disciple and, in all honesty, didn’t really know how a church worked from the inside. The Pentecostal church in Bankeryd contacted the Bible school and wanted a new youth pastor and my name came up. But after meeting with the church, I was very unsure about everything and didn’t know if it was youth pastor God wanted me to be, or if the church even liked me.
But then one night when I had just turned off the lamp and gone to bed, to my great surprise I see Jesus standing by the side of the bed! I couldn’t see any exact details, it was like a mix between a “real” sight and a spiritual sight. I didn’t see any details in Jesus’ appearance, but he radiated a white glow, and I could clearly understand that it was Jesus standing next to me, because he was saying to me: “It is my church”. These words made me immediately think of Jesus’ words to Peter:
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Matthew 16:18
With these words, I understood that Jesus was in control of the situation. If Jesus wants me to be the youth pastor in Bankeryd, I will be because the church belongs to Jesus and not to the Bankeryd Elders. With these words I understood that I will become the youth pastor of Bankeryd because Jesus wanted it. I could safely relax and trust in God’s care.
A few months later, I was indeed a youth pastor in Bankeryd and I tried hard to learn the profession in the best possible way. I had some difficulty at first because my personality was more of an evangelist than a shepherd, as a pastor should be (the word “pastor” is Latin and means “shepherd” in English). To be a good pastor, one needs to “tend my sheep” and “feed my sheep” as Jesus said about the sheep that Jesus entrusted to Peter in John 21:15-17.
But one day I hear God say to me: “I will make you a shepherd”. I was glad to hear these words from the Lord because that was exactly what I was wrestling with in my ministry. I wrote it down in my little notebook where I used to write things that God was speaking to me about. Then the months went by and I grew in my role as a youth pastor and God did just as he said, he developed me in my shepherding and slowly but surely made me a better pastor.
But lo and behold, a year later I hear the exact same words again from the Lord! However, for some unfathomable reason, I had actually forgotten that God had said this a year earlier, so I took out my little notebook and wrote the Lord’s words again. But when I looked back in the notebook, I noticed to my great surprise that God had spoken exactly the same message to me, on exactly the same date, but one year earlier! I understood then that these words of the Lord were not a figment of my imagination but God’s call to me. God was calling me to be a pastor and He was going to equip me with the gifts and talents needed to be a good shepherd.
After 5 and a half years I quit my job as a youth pastor in Bankeryd to study theology at Örebro Mission School which resulted in a bachelor’s degree in theology (due to too much truancy in high school I am one of the few who has a bachelor’s degree but not a high school diploma, hehe..). After several years as pastor in Timrå Pentecostal Church I am now pastor in the Pentecostal Church in Härnösand, Sweden and continue to develop in my life’s great calling; to lead Jesus’ sheep to pasture. Where this journey ends I have no idea, but no one could be happier than me that I get to do the very thing Jesus has called me to do!