Deacons working within the Swedish protestant church and welfare. : A qualitative study of the relationship between deacons working within the Swedish protestant church and social work.

This study discloses the responsibility of social work for the Swedish welfare state respective deacons in the Swedish protestant church, which roll the Swedish protestant church have in the existent welfare and also if deacons experience any expectations and how these expectations in that case are expressed.The aim of this study was to investigate the relationbetween deacons working within the Swedish protestant church and social work, as it appears for professional deacons. The method of investigating the questions raised by the aim of this study has been qualitative analysis of answers derived from six deacons working in different workplaces. The data derived from these interviews was then analysed through the theory of Gösta Esping-Andersen about welfare states and also through background research and earlier science research about the social work within the Swedish protestant church and other social work. The result of the study show that the welfare state in Sweden has the comprehensive responsibility for the citizens. Deacons working within the Swedish protestant church does not have the same responsibility. Instead deacons usually provided the supplementary social work as regarding existential questions. Different conditions, for example laws and regulations is something that is different regarding the social work that deacons and other authorities in the society performs. Our study also shows that sometimes when the official welfare is insufficient the deacons partly can fill up for this. The deacons in our study experience that there are high expectations from the people in society regarding the social work that deacons performs. There are also expectations from other performers of social work in the welfare as well as from the church itself, although these look a little bit different and are not as clear and explicit. The problem with the expectations is that they are not always realistic which depends on relatively bad knowledge about the social work the deacons perform. When the social work that deacons perform is within the church characterized by Christian ethos a result can be that in meeting with other social work a tension arise which leads to challenges for the different performers of social work