George Scott

George Scott (18 June 1804 – 28 January 1874) was a Scottish Methodist missionary active in Stockholm from 1830 to 1842. His preaching has been described as the start of Sweden's Great Awakening that began in the 1840s.

Biography

Scott was born on 18 June 1804 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Robert Scott, a master tailor, and Margaret Lumley. He grew up in a very religious home. On 2 April 1824 he married Elizabeth Masson; however, she died just a few years later in 1828. Scott was raised Presbyterian but eagerly joined the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1827, engaging in lay ministry work and becoming a Sunday school teacher. He became a local preacher the next year and was ordained by the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1830.

That year, Scott was sent to Stockholm to take over Joseph Rayner Stephens' work. He first worked as a religious teacher and preacher for industrialist Samuel Owen and the British workers in his factory. His goal, while perhaps initially to spread Methodist teachings, was to inspire spiritual renewal among the people in a manner that deemphasized religious sectarianism.

In 1832, Owen and Scott initiated one of the first Swedish temperance societies, ; the following year it expanded into the rest of the city of Stockholm. In 1837, the two, along with , , Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Anders Retzius, and others, founded the Svenska nykterhetssällskapet (the Swedish Temperance Society). The organization would reach over 100,000 members in the 1840s.

In 1833, Scott married Janet Kelley. Their son James Scott (1835–1911) was a missionary to South Africa.

Scott's work would build on and influence the growing revivalist movements, including Pietism, Radical Pietism, and the Reader (läsare) movement. With his low-church Pietist views, he inspired and supported several people who would become leaders in the many Swedish revival movements that would flourish in the latter half of the 19th century. Among these were Swedish Baptist pioneers F. O. Nilsson and Anders Wiberg, and co-founder of the organization (EFS, later the Swedish Evangelical Mission) Carl Olof Rosenius. Rosenius initially came to Scott for guidance in a crisis of faith. Scott's inspiration led Rosenius to move to Stockholm to become his assistant; the two maintained a lifelong friendship and worked together for several years. In 1842 Scott and Rosenius would also found the journal Pietisten, for Mission Friends, together. Scott's influence was present in other ways as well: the biographical dictionary Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon describes Scott's "emphasis on the individual's momentary conversion and adherence to new forms of organization, as well as his connection with the work of the temperance movement" as "decisive for the entire development of the later Free Church movement," stating that, "after the Reformation, hardly any single foreigner has had as great an impact on the transformation of Sweden's religious structure." In 1838 Scott received approval for its construction. It was consecrated on 24–25 October 1840 as the first free church in Sweden with Johan Henrik Thomander and Pehr Brandell co-officiating. The building was bought by the EFS in 1857 and renamed Bethlehem Church. Scott continued to work as a traveling preacher taking three-year assignments in cities including Aberdeen, Liverpool, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was elected as president of the Methodist conference in Canada in 1866. Scott worked as a preacher until his death in Glasgow on 28 January 1874.