«Et hus har vi reist til Guds ære; kom Jesus med vigsel og fred, saa det for vor bygd faar være et gudsordet helliget sted.»

“We have raised a house in God’s honour; Jesus came with consecration and peace, So for our community let there be God’s word in this holy place”

“We have raised a house in God’s honour;Jesus came with consecration and peace,So for our community let there be God’s word in this holy place” Fridtun” chapel at Hillestveit in Bømlo, built in 1845 was one of the early chapels in the country, and the first in Finnås Parish. It has now been  restored and put into good order as a museum. (Ronny B. Skaar).

The Chapel and the Layman’s Movement

If you see a particularly ugly building out in the country, a bit bigger than what houses normally are, with large cold windows, it is obviously a chapel, if it is not a youth house or a school house”. It was the architect Johan Lindstrøm who came with this attack on the architecture of the chapel in an article on “Official buildings in the rural areas” from 1927. We regard this characterisation today as more of a caricature with a sting against the “un-Norwegian” Swiss style which influenced many of these buildings from the turn of the century. But more than the style and the architectural expression, it is the cultural and ideological aspects which capture our interest. Cultural radicalism’s one-sided picture of the chapel as an exponent for puritanical narrow-mindedness and opposition to culture has been replaced today by a wider and more nuanced view of an important cultural factor in Norwegian society. The chapel, a meeting place for the Christian layman’s movement is the bearer of a democratic Low Church tradition with strong social engagement and an attitude towards resources and values which speak to our own times: “Fear of God and frugality is the great gain”