In the evening, at Midsummer in the year 1540, the chaplain Andreas Olavi entered the pulpit in the parish church in Skellefteå, in Northern Sweden. According to the chaplain the time was due to abolish the traditional vespers and replace this fully liturgical act with an evangelical evening sermon (Sw. aftonpredikan). However, a slight problem occurred. After Olavi entered the pulpit, he had to stand there for about half an hour until the congregation finally let him talk. His attempt to change the vespers into an evening sermon caused turmoil among the congregation. A ‘racket’ (Sw. buller) arose as the parishioners claimed that he was ‘crazy’ when he wanted to preach in the evening. After this surely traumatic event, no evening sermons were held in Skellefteå for five years. The chaplain himself left the parish for Uppsala two months later, and returned as a vicar to Skellefteå in 1544.

The source of this event is Andreas Olavi's own report, but what he tells us about the resistance to his liturgical innovation is not unlikely to have happened. During the period c. 1525 to 1550, there are numerous reports concerning popular resistance in Sweden to all kinds of innovations in liturgy and traditional piety. And, as in the case of Andreas Olavi in Skellefteå, many of these reactions postponed planned ecclesiastical reforms.

In research on the Reformation in Scandinavia there is a tendency to describe the process as a smooth transition phase during which the reformers hesitated to make any radical changes in Church life. This continuity has been considered typical for the ‘eastern’ Scandinavian tradition, which has been described as characterized by the reformers’ ambition to preserve continuity with late medieval liturgical practice. This slow and smooth process has been explained as partly due to the lack of popular pressure for reform. Consequently, much of the Catholic medieval ritual tradition in the kingdom of Sweden has been described as ‘untouched’ until the beginning of the seventeenth century. The question is whether it is possible to combine this perspective with the many reports of violent reactions against the ecclesiastical transformations in the Kingdom of Sweden during the first twenty years of Gustav Vasa's reign.