The Duty Priest Service – a 60-year-old lifesaver

The Duty Priest Service has offered help in crises and a protected space for people’ s questions about existential issues for 60 years. Photo: Magnus Aronson/IKON

The Church of Sweden's Duty Priest Service turns 60 on 7 February and it is an important service to celebrate. The number of calls to the service has risen by 69% since 2008. What’s more, a new survey conducted by market research company TNS Sifo shows that no fewer than 82% of those asked think that the service is important, and nearly 60% would consider using the service if they needed urgent counselling.

Rev. Monica Eckerdal, national coordinator of the Duty Priest Service ("Jourhavande präst" in Swedish), sees that the service has an incredibly important function – especially for people who are thinking about taking or preparing to take their own life.

“We know that a conversation can make the different between death and life,” she says. "For 60 years the Duty Priest Service has offered a protect space in which people can talk about suicide. This helps to reduce the feelings of guilt and shame for people who are struggling with such thoughts, and when people dare to talk, new perspectives can be opened."

Great awareness
As commissioned by the Church of Sweden, the market research company TNS Sifo asked 1,000 people (over 15 years old) three questions about the Duty Priest Service during the period 25–28 January 2016 – see the related document. The result shows that a clear majority have heard about the Duty Priest Service (Jourhavande präst) (73%), and that this awareness varies in different age groups. In the group aged 15–29 a total of 33% have heard of the Duty Priest Service, whereas in the group aged 50–64 no fewer than 92% have heard of it.

Of all the respondents, 4 out of 5 (82%) think that the Duty Priest Service is very or quite important. A higher proportion of women than men think that the service is important (90% compared to 76%).

A majority (58%) would also consider contacting the Duty Priest Service themselves if they needed urgent counselling. Women also outnumbered men in considering this (66% of women compared to 50% of men), and a larger proportion of people in the older age groups (58–64%) would consider contacting the service than in the youngest age group (50%), which comprised 15–29 year-olds.

A small advertisement started the service
The Duty Priest Service is the Church of Sweden’s way of offering urgently needed pastoral care that supplements the pastoral care offered in the parishes. The 60th anniversary will be commemorated on Sunday 7 February with a joint prayer of intercession (see the related document) in the Church of Sweden’s parishes.

The launch of the service is documented as being on 7 February 1956 when a small advertisement was published in the newspaper Öresunds-Posten by a priest named Erik Bernspång: “Before you commit suicide, ring...”. It started as local services, but today all of the Church of Sweden’s 13 dioceses cooperate in the nationally organised service. The priests who work in the Duty Priest Service, women and men of all ages, are based in parishes throughout Sweden.

Since 2008 (when joint compilation of the statistics began) the number of answered calls has risen by 69%. In 2015 a total of 81,157 phone calls were answered, which means more than 220 per day, plus 25 contacts per day via the online chat service that is open four evenings a week. In addition, on average two digital letters are received each day.