When the Swedish Church was separated from the State in year 2000, the previous church tax automatic membership and church tax became optional. This has led to a dramatic reduction in membership incomes to about SEK 975M last year of which SEK 75M was allocated to the budget for Svenska Kyrkan I Utlandet (SKUT). For this year the budget has been reduced to SEK 63 M and the projection for 2030 the projection is SEK 30 M.
“We have already drastically cut our overhead costs by reducing the staff in our office at SKUT by more than 50 percent,” says Richard Jönsson, who joined SKUT in 2017. Now, we only have three employees administering the 32 churches abroad, most of which are in Europe, plus 2-3 churches in South America and 5 in North America. For the Church of Sweden in SF/Bay Area one scenario could be that SKUT continues to pay the salary for the priest but that the local church takes on a larger responsibility for rental costs. In other places it could mean that churches owning a building may have to consider renting.” Says Director Jönsson.
It is probably not a coincidence that Mr Jönsson got the job to come up with a plan of action as he has some 25-year career as a professional problem solver and organizational / management consultant in London. This is where he also has been an active force on the board of Trustees of the Swedish Church for many years. Together with Johanna Holmlund, who has a 20-year background at SKUT as the head of HR and now the Associate Director of SKUT he visited San Francisco on February 23. On this trip they had completed visits to all the churches on this side of the Atlantic and were on the way to the final stop in Los Angeles. These visits were a follow up to a report completed last year by another consultant.
I had the opportunity to ask some questions to Richard Jönsson who has a long unique background as a management consultant.
Tell us about your background in Sweden and first meeting with the church.
I was born outside Kristianstad. Part of my family was religious, and they mostly belonged to Salvation Army, whereas I stayed with the Church of Sweden, and throughout my London years, I have remained part of the church council. My studies are varied, and I have read law, English literature, economics, computer science and theology, so I have a good foundation with me I started out in the military, both navy and then army, and then moved to customs before moving on to mostly working in IT and management. My wife is Welch and works as a Chief Legal Officer for a large US company in London. My mother lives just outside Kristianstad and that is where my brother lives. He is a professor in didactics with specialisation in natural science didactics, and his wife is associate professor natural science didactics as well. My sister lives in the North of England where she works as a HR- Director. Many of my family members in previous generations immigrated to the US so I have relative’s all over the country.
Working for customs was more a fluke, it came up and I applied and enjoyed it. I worked with both enforcement, tariffs, and intelligence. During my years with both the military and customs I served with UN forces and the monitoring missions. During the Yugoslav conflict I was stationed in various missions and roles, appointed by the Sanctions Assistance Mission (SAM), and International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) and both was difficult, and both high-level diplomatic as well as practical.
How did your studies of Computer programming and system design help advance your skills as a problem solver in complex operational and organizational challenges in your consulting career?
The IT side appeals to my structured side as you say it is all about problem-solving and structure, which also applies to consulting, but with the added spice of selling concepts and change to people, which isn’t always the easiest task… For a few years I worked for Gateway, organizing and streamlining their customer care and then I worked with different consuming firms. We had a lot of clients within the government, both in the US and EU. In 2010 I was based in Bay Area for a period including TechExcel, and they provided software for quality monitoring in pharma and tech industries, At Macmillan Cancer Support in UK I started with running a change programme with, and then their IT operations. Later I worked as a management consultant with Deloitte for a few years before my current job at SKUT.
Tell us about your volunteering work and favourite hobbies. When did get your pilot certificate?
I do a lot of volunteering and pro-bono work for charities and associations, to give back to the local community. I have been the chairman for several schools, including a Church of England primary school. When it comes to hobbies, then the list is long, I do fencing, shooting and travelling.
The pilot cert, is also more a fluke, as I fly a lot I took interest in how it works so the pandemic gave me some extra time when I wasn’t on the road, so I stated with taking a PPL and then added a CPL…now is the problem to keep it up…but the commands are there for example at take-off, and what happens first when you roll down the runway is to compare the instruments so then are same for both of us and that is normally done with a check at 80 knots, next step is V1, which is last stage you can abort take-off, then is rotation when you lift and then if it is a positive climb, wheels up and away.
What are the fundamental challenges for the future of SKUT? What have been the critical steps to come to a proposal?
The fundamental change is that the church membership in Sweden is declining and thus the money declines so both abroad and at home we need to take a bigger local responsibility. The steps for us at this time are to prepare the organisation for this and to make sure all parts work well together to achieve this. This thorough review has culminated in about 120 pages of suggestions to the board of governors (Kyrkostyrelsen).
Who is making the final decision and when?
Ultimately it will be the synod (Kyrkomötet) that decides although it will start with the board of governors (Kyrkostyrelsen) in March and finishes with the Kyrkomötet in late November.