Nord, Gustav Edward (1881–1955)

Gustav Edward Nord was a Swedish- American pastor/evangelist. He served as a school principal, conference and union president, department leader in the Northern European Division, and leader of the Scandinavian, Russian and Ukrainian departments in the General Conference.

Conversion and Early Life in the United States

Gustav Nord emigrated as a fifteen-year-old to Chicago¹ in 1896 with his parents and four siblings. His first contact with the Adventist church was through the Swedish Adventist periodical Sions Väktare (Zion’s Watchman), which an old Adventist woman gave him. He was baptized in the spring of 1897, which caused great distress and opposition in his family and among his many relatives in Chicago. For a time, he was shut out from his family. After awhile, however, two of his sisters joined him, and later his mother accepted the Adventist message as well.²

After a time working as a colporteur, Nord enrolled at Battle Creek College in 1905, then did further studies at Union College. After graduating he became a successful evangelist among Swedish-speaking people in towns in Illinois and in the big cities of Brooklyn and New York.

Around this time the General Conference Board launched special schools and seminaries for Germans, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes. In 1910 Nord was called by the Swedish Department of the General Conference to be the principal of Broadview Swedish Seminary close to Chicago.³ He was 29.

In 1916 Nord married Anna Cecilia Andersson, who was born in the United States in 1893 to Swedish immigrants. Anna had trained as a nurse at the church-owned sanitarium in Nevada, Iowa.

In 1918 Nord was asked by the General Conference to take up leadership of the total work for Swedes in the United States.

Return to Sweden

Only three years later, in 1921, Nord was elected president of the Swedish Conference.⁴ In 1922 he replaced J.C. Raft as president of the Scandinavian Union.⁵ Nord showed immediately what an energetic and effective leader he was. He demonstrated that needed enterprises could be started in spite of years of reluctance by Swedish leadership. He started traveling to visit believers in small groups and churches spread out in the long (approximately 1500 kilometers north to south) but sparsely populated country. Nord was a charismatic preacher and dynamic evangelist.⁶

In 1924 the Swedish Union acquired a property in Stockholm City with a church building attached. Its central location still serves the Swedish capital with its “temple” and headquarters for the union. Two years later, in 1926, a year-round sanitarium was bought and rebuilt to be a well-functioning health institution, Hultafors, which continued operating until 2004.

The Nyhyttan Mission School,⁷ in rural Bergslagen, had been under scrutiny almost since its beginning. Should it be enlarged at its isolated site, or should it be moved? During Nord’s leadership of the Scandinavian Union the decision was finally made, and in 1932 a move to Ekebyholm’s manor house was made. The school became Sweden’s Ekebyholm Seminary and Mission School.⁸ This seminary was to send out many missionaries to foreign fields, as well as provide the church in Sweden with workers for a long future.⁹

Having studied in the United States, Swedish was no longer Nord’s first language. There were times when he got upset, started stuttering, and became quite red, his temper no longer the cool and constrained Swede.¹⁰ Yet no other leader got so much done in the 15 years he served the Adventist church in Sweden and Finland.¹¹

Nord became the seminary’s first principal in 1932, serving until 1936, when he was called to serve in the Northern European Division in England.¹²

Division Leadership, War, and Return to the United States

Even before taking leadership of the Home Mission Department at the Northern European Division, Nord had been involved in the international church. In 1934 he had traveled to West Africa on an inspection of, among others, a Scandinavian mission station in Northern Cameroon. It was served by a Swedish couple, Ruben and Hanna Bergström, and a Norwegian couple, Kåre and Mathilde Johannessen. While his attempt to solve an ongoing conflict between the two couples did not succeed, Nord had great success in Africa leading an evangelistic series, and returned in 1937.¹³

When the Second World War broke out, American citizens were asked to return to the United States. This affected the Swedish Adventist church and the Northern European Division, as the Swedish-American connection was strong. Among others, Nord and his family were forced to return to the United States, much to the loss of the Northern European Division, including its African fields. Nord was assigned to lead the Scandinavian, German, and Ukrainian department in the General Conference. When the war ended Nord was assigned to pastor some small Swedish speaking churches in New York. It was in a way a very humble way to end a long leadership career.¹⁴

Before leaving for Sweden as a young pastoral couple the Nords had buried an infant daughter in Chicago. In 1955, as he was traveling back to his home in Colorado, Nord died in Chicago and was buried there. Anna Nord survived him by many years, dying in 1981. A son, Gustav Edward Nord Jr., born in Stockholm in 1926, had died before his father in 1953, only 27 years old. The Nord’s two daughters, Vernette and Ingeborg, trained as nurses, and both married medical doctors and lived with their families in the United States.

Legacy

Gustav Nord’s legacy is foremost his groundbreaking work in Sweden between 1921 and 1936. He was a true entrepreneur. Because of his energetic and optimistic personality, he acted on the need presented, as when establishing three institutions. The health centers Nyhyttan and Hultafors were to last for the rest of the century. Ekebyholm, now a junior college, still operates today. Among the general membership, Nord is remembered as a lively and convincing evangelist.

Sources

Åhrén, Emil. “Ankomst till Sverige.” Missionären, February 1, 1921.

Åhrén, Emil. “Broderna fran Amerika.” Missionären, February 15, 1921.

Carlstjerna, C.O. “Till medarbetare och syskon.” Missionären, April 1, 1921.

Ingrid, Albiner to Sundquist, Paul. Letter 1992, HASDA, Sweden.

Johansson Öster, Yvonne. Hur blev det med fru Bergström? Stockholm: Skandinaviska Bokförlaget, 2013.

Johansson Öster, Yvonne. Till jordens yttersta gräns, Stockholm: Skandinaviska Bokförlaget, 2018

Lindsay, G.A. “In Memoriam.” Missionären, January 15, 1956.

Nord, G.E. “Vart Kommande Årsmöte.” Missionären, April 15, 1921.

Wiklander, Gösta: I vår Herres tjänst: Missionsarbetare inom Adventistsamfundet i Sverige 1880-1997 [In Our Lord’s Service: Workers in the SDA Church in Sweden 1880-1997], Göteborg: Adventistsamfundets Svenska Union, 2001.

Notes

1. Gösta Wiklander, I vår Herres tjänst: Missionsarbetare inom Adventistsamfundet i Sverige 1880-1997, (Göteborg: Adventistsamfundets Svenska Union, 2001), 79. Chicago had more Swedes at that time than Stockholm.↩

2. G.A. Lindsay, “In Memoriam,” Missionären, January 15, 1956, 5.↩

3. Ibid.↩

4. At that time part of the Scandinavian Union.↩

5. Gösta Wiklander, I vår Herres tjänst, 79.↩

6. Emil Åhrén, ” Ankomst till Sverige,” Missionären, February 1, 1921, 24; Emil Åhrén “Broderna fran Amerika”, Missionären, February 15, 1921, 32; C.O. Carlstjerna, “Till medarbetare och syskon,” Missionären, April 1, 1921, 49-50; G.E. Nord, “Vart Kommande Årsmöte,” Missionären, April 15, 1921, 57-59.↩

7. See, Yvonne Johansson Öster, “Nyhyttan Mission School (1898-1932),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=BIE7&highlight=Nyhyttan|Mission|School.↩

8. See, Yvonne Johansson Öster, “Ekebyholm Mission School (1932-1960),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=8IDX&highlight=Ekebyholm|Seminary|.↩

9. Yvonne Johansson Öster, Till jordens yttersta gräns (Stockholm: Skandinaviska Bokförlaget, 2018), 411-413.↩

10. Albiner Ingrid to Paul Sundquist. Letter 1992, HASDA, Sweden.↩

11. Sweden and Finland constituted the East Nordic Union between 1931 and 1955. See ESDA article.↩

12. Gösta Wiklander, I vår Herres tjänst, 79.↩

13. Yvonne Johansson Öster, Hur blev det med fru Bergström? (Stockholm: Skandinaviska Bokförlaget, 2013) 82-86.↩

14. Gösta Wiklander, I vår Herres tjänst, 80.↩