Million Dollar Mountains
A Saga on Stewardship in the Iceland Conference – Part 1
August 23, 2024 | News
On September 22, 2022—a cloudy afternoon—the Kirkja Sjounda Dags Adventista (Iceland Conference of Seventh-day Adventists) prepared to hold their triennial constituency session over the next three days. The 69 delegates from the conference’s six churches represented about half the active membership in the conference. Weeks before the meeting, an official 80-page report on the past three years of conference activities had been sent to each representative. Below the surface—the protocol and attempts at regular business—a storm was brewing among constituents.
Iceland Conference President Gavin Anthony wrote a letter to constituents imploring the body to set aside their preconceptions and yield to the emanation of the divine during the meeting. “Only the Holy Spirit,” he wrote, “can give us spiritual wisdom to know the plans to move us forward and provide supernatural power to accomplish those plans.” He quoted a letter by Ellen G. White from California to 1888 General Conference Session attendees, suggesting that they internalize the 136-year-old message in preparation for the meeting. “The truth can lose nothing by investigation,” White wrote. “Let every soul now be divested of envy, of jealousy, of evil surmising, and bring their hearts into close connection with God.” She also instructed, “There will be no strife; for the servants of God must not strive. There will be no party spirit; there will be no selfish ambition.”
The reason Anthony attempted to set a tone of civility and harmony ahead of the session was the heavy cloud of conflict looming over the future of the 472-member Adventist Church in Iceland.
Those familiar with Icelandic Adventism estimate that around 100 people actively participate in church life throughout the island nation of just under 400,000 citizens, where natural forces from the Atlantic and the Arctic bring rapid weather changes, and 32 active volcanoes add fire to summer waterfalls and winter ice.
Unlike much of the Adventist Church’s structure, the Iceland Conference is not part of a union but is directly attached to the Trans-European Division (TED). One senior European leader quipped it’s because no one wants the headache.
The 20 constituency session agenda items were mostly standard—many constitutionally mandated: reports from the three officers, four department directors, three committees, and the headmaster of Suðurhlíðarskóli, the day school operated by the conference. But the final item on the agenda was a mining operation that had already been the subject of controversy, making Anthony’s pleas for unity even more relevant.
Instead, the constituency session erupted over land owned by the church.
Over the previous few years, simmering under the surface of evangelism and hand-wringing about Iceland’s continual drift into secularism were a number of objections raised by a small but influential group of church members regarding a lucrative gravel mining operation at Breiðabólstaður, a 35,000-acre parcel the Iceland Conference owns in the municipality of Ölfus. It is one of the largest privately owned pieces of land on the island, near the source for Icelandic Glacial, a bottled water company with about $30 million in annual revenue.
Some constituents—several of whom are related—leveled alarming allegations: that the Adventist-owned company that operates the quarries on the conference’s land, Eden Mining, breached their contract and had not paid the conference its full share of the profits, among other claims. Eden and the Iceland Conference executive committee asserted that the allegations were unfounded and lacked evidence.
Eden Mining was founded in 2022 by two Icelandic Adventist businessmen, Eiríkur Ingvarsson and Kristinn Olafsson, after many of the mine’s previous operators went bankrupt. The repeated insolvency of the mining operation over the years often left the Iceland Conference in financial difficulty, and Ingvarsson worked with previous operators to recover money owed to the conference. Ingvarsson and Olafsson had first signed contracts in 2009 to manage the mines as Eden Consulting. Changes around the new contract and organization’s name added to the controversy.
The terms of the contract would allow Eden to extract and sell the materials from the two quarries on the conference’s property for 25 years. They would also pay for any equipment and facilities and push through any regulatory hurdles. In turn, Eden would pay 10 percent of the company’s profit and 10 percent of the value of the material mined to the Iceland Conference.
Eden now calls itself the “largest aggregate exporter in Iceland,” selling a series of basalt-based products for “insulation production, road building, foundation filling, concrete manufacturing, filtering, [and] water treatment.” Over the years Eden has more than doubled the contractually guaranteed minimum revenue to the conference, sending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to the conference through some mining operations and separately via Ingvarsson’s management of a lava tube on the land that attracts a significant number of tourists. An opportunity with one of the world’s largest building material companies led to the signing of a new contract between Eden and the conference in 2022.
Questions by a few constituents about the process of going from the 2009 contract to the new had led to a General Conference Auditing Service review that “found no irregularities,” but did note that neither party had exercised their rights to terminate the contract. However, questions and accusations still circulated among some constituents about provisions in the various contracts—much of it personal due to the family relationships on both sides.
A report about the mines was included for the session delegates. It concluded with a call for an end to the debate about the mining contracts and allegations against the conference and Eden Mining, recommending that the delegates vote “to not pursue this matter further as it is not in the best interests of the Church.” The proposal argued the mining operation had been a net positive to the conference, and that Eden Mining had not acted in bad faith or intended to commit fraud.
Hours before the session began, a 14-page letter suggesting the opposite appeared in each delegate’s email inbox. It was by Kristján Ari Sigurðsson, an auditor and former member of the conference executive committee, and it argued that Eden Mining and their deal with the Iceland Conference should be scrutinized more closely. The subject line posed a question: “Whose Responsibility Is It to Protect the Interests of the Iceland Conference?”
Sigurðsson made numerous allegations against the conference and Eden Mining, and attempted to rebut the conference’s proposal. “The financial damage that the breaches of contract caused is considerable and easily demonstrated,” he said, adding that Eden’s payments were often late and diminished by high operational costs that ate into the conference’s share of the profits. Allowing Eden to contract with a third party to operate the mine deprived the conference of the full value of their profits and was a clear breach of the contract, which does not allow for the mining rights to be transferred. He stated, “It is not good stewardship to allow a case like this to be determined with an uninformed decision at the session caused by the executive committee’s refusal to answer legitimate criticism and the countless questions which they have received from the church boards.” Sigurðsson had been on the executive committee and had assisted the conference treasurer “in looking into this matter.”
His letter caused a stir as the session was called to order. The officers of the Trans-European Division, who were present at the session, huddled in Sabbath school classrooms. The leaders asked the delegates not to discuss the letter through the weekend and to “hold the Sabbath in peace.” When the third and final business session opened on Sunday, September 25, the delegates began to debate. Tensions were high—at one point, one delegate threw their identification badge at Sigurðsson as he spoke and stormed out of the meeting.
The first proposal brought to the floor would expel Sigurðsson from the session and remove him from his church’s delegation. That motion failed. The next proposal, if accepted, would form a commission that would look more closely at the mining operation and the allegations that loomed over it. The debate over the proposal waxed through the day with amendments. Finally, they voted for the division to form a commission to review the contracts and make recommendations for reconciliation and forward progress. Then, the body voted to adjourn the session and postpone further debate until the division-led commission completed its report. This meant that the nominating committee—which was on the cusp of proposing an entirely new slate of officers—never made its report, and the current officers’ terms were extended.
The date chosen to reconvene the session was December 11, 2022, but it came and went without further action as the commission had yet to be formed. The executive committee pushed the date for the session again, and the officers’ terms were once again extended indefinitely. One reason for this delay was because the conference had to deal with legal proceedings initiated by the faction of members opposed to Eden Mining. For a time, the Adventists in Iceland existed in a kind of ecclesiastical limbo, which hinged completely upon when the division’s mining commission would form and finish its work—which didn’t seem to be happening very quickly. The delay added to the distrust.
After a Norwegian minister’s brief evangelistic efforts in 1893, the Adventist Church gained a foothold on the subpolar oceanic island when married Swedish missionaries Inger Nielsen and David Östlund were sent to Iceland by the Denmark Conference in 1897. With evidence of Christianity for a millennium, the majority of Icelandic believers belong to the national Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, which began in 1540. The quick, fin de siècle establishment of Adventism coincided with the Lutheran Free-Church Movement, which provided a context and allies in their Sabbatarian arguments for the separation of church and state. Dozens quickly joined, in part because Östlund turned out to be a gifted speaker and built a large readership for his evangelistic paper Seeds. Still, Lutheranism’s cultural domination—and since the 1990s, the country’s increasing secularization—have contributed to keeping official Adventist membership in the mid-to-low hundreds over the last 50 years.
Even when early progress was made, the church had some setbacks. Early on, a fire destroyed the church in Reykjavik. And in what almost sounds like a portentous detail from an old Icelandic saga, its founding missionaries—the Östlunds—fled to the U.S. in 1909 to escape the police due to a scandal that arose from his side businesses. The conference had only offered to pay Östlund a partial salary, expecting him to fund half his work through colportering, something he didn’t enjoy. Instead, he became involved with insurance and real estate deals and then was caught embezzling entrusted funds.
After the denomination covered his debts, he returned to the island without approval and then created a schism among the 50 or so Sabbatarians until he permanently left in 1915. One group met as The First Church of Seventh-day Adventists, led by Östlund, and the other was called The Union Church, led by an official missionary from Norway named Olaf J. Olsen, who led the church to organize as the Iceland Mission in 1914, attached to the Scandinavian Union. When that union split into the East Nordic and the West Nordic unions in 1931, the Iceland Mission and Faroe Islands Mission became the Iceland and Faroe Islands Conference with Olsen as president. It was attached to the West Nordic Union, which also included conferences in Norway and Denmark.
At that time, Iceland had 362 Adventists and nine churches. The country, which had been ruled by either Denmark or Norway since 1260, expanded its 1918 sovereignty to achieve full self-governance in 1944 while Denmark was under German occupation. The war and the country’s independence contributed to Icelandic Adventism being separated from the Danish-controlled Faroes by the church in the late 1940s. By 1948, the 390 members in Iceland went back to mission status. They were detached from union control and attached to the Northern European Division, headquartered in Sweden. When the NED was later reorganized in the mid-1980s, the new UK-based Trans-European Division included Iceland, which regained conference status in 1955. Since then, the Iceland Conference has remained directly attached to the TED—as tensions around land, mining, and money have grown, these administrative ties across the North Sea appear to be fraying at both ends.
Icelandic Adventists collected money for years, hoping to one day open a school. The 1951 opening of Hlíðardalsskóli (Iceland Mission School), an Adventist boarding academy, fulfilled their dream. Built to hold 40 students, the school quickly became a community anchor—a significant outlet for training and a new field for evangelism in the increasingly secular student population. “People tried to send their children to that school because it had discipline and a good reputation,” explained Elias Theodorsson, an alumnus of Hlíðadalsskóli and one of the property’s current managers.
The conference ran the school with minimal resources. Often, the conference president doubled as the school principal and a teacher. Other employees also wore many hats. Theodorsson once worked as the boy’s dean, maintenance director, and business manager at the same time.
The church members’ investment in the school also proved to be a reliable income source. The school’s 35,000 acre campus—Breiðabólstaður—is well-endowed with resources, natural and otherwise. An Adventist Review article from 1951 called the property one of the largest owned by the Adventist denomination. Two mountains—Mount Lambafell and Mount Litla-Sandfell—sit on lambafellshraun, ancient molten rock fields bisected by north-south connector route 39. They are caked with gravel that has been mined since the 1960s and frosted by the presence of pillow lava. Geothermal water heats the school’s buildings and has been fodder for past business propositions. A farm once occupied the open pastures filled with cattle and a nearby lava cave generates extensive tourism income for the conference.
This steady trickle of business income has outlasted the school. Although Hlíðardalsskóli was filled to capacity for many years, even necessitating expansion in the 1960s, enrollment began to decline in the 1980s. Education reform in Iceland left the school without the public funding it was heavily reliant upon.
When the conference called a special constituency session in 1996, Theodorsson strongly opposed and argued against selling the property. “I said, don’t sell it, don’t sell it, don’t sell it, don’t sell it. But we were outnumbered, and they decided to sell it.” When it came time to list the property, he convinced the conference to list the campus separately from the surrounding land, which holds the mines and a farm. He justified the proposition by referencing the legal benefits of owning an agricultural piece of property, such as tax breaks. “I knew then it wouldn’t be sold because nobody wanted to buy the campus. What can you do…with the random buildings?”
When a businessman offered to buy the property, Theodorsson and several other Adventists agreed to maintain the campus for the church through a new company they would form named Hlíðardalssetrið. The church sold some of the land in 2004 to a power company, a sale which Theodorsson again opposed, eventually convincing the conference president not to include the mines in the deal. “So actually, I have saved those mines twice now, in the year 1997 and 2004, and it’s all for the church,” he said.
When Eden took over the mines in 2008, the future looked bright. Iceland was still in a decades-long streak of prosperity. In addition to the existing gravel sales, Eden worked to secure contracts to export the raw materials and launch new business ventures. Both Eden and the conference stood to gain from the arrangement. But around the same time, Iceland’s banking sector collapsed. The Icelandic Króna fell sharply in value, and the country entered a severe economic depression. The economic headwinds prevented any meaningful mining. No income was being generated. Then, in 2017, the mines suddenly roared to life.
With the flow of new resources, cracks in the church expanded as criticism bubbled among some constituents, finally erupting at the 2022 session.
Eden Mining’s response to Sigurðsson’s email drop came via an 18-page letter, sent directly to a few key church members. By then, more criticism had piled up. Jón Hjörleifur Stefánsson, an independent scholar who specializes in apocalyptic studies, circulated a 205-page detailed document that expanded on Sigurðsson’s claims.
Eden’s letter included strong rebukes to both Sigurðsson and Stefánsson. Auditors, according to Eden, had reviewed Sigurðsson’s letter and found that “the handling of the report does not meet the ethical standards of auditors.” Stefánsson, they said, made “several incorrect and damaging statements” that misled uninformed church members. “There was and still is good reason to pursue defamation cases,” they wrote. Furthermore, they hinted that deeper motivations were behind the “campaign” against Eden Mining. “It has become clear that the group behind these two parishioners… is not only seeking power, but also aims to gain control over the church’s assets.”
Defending their work, Ingvarsson and Olafsson stated, “We fully trust the readers of this letter and the church community to assess the situation if the facts and evidence of the case are allowed to speak.” They added, “These baseless attacks must cease so that we can continue and focus our efforts on fulfilling the role that Christ has commanded us to do. Proclaim the good news, but above all, show love for one another.”
Stefánsson has continued to write articles about his opposition to the mining operation, and has taken greater measures to further his cause, including bringing a lawsuit against Eden and the conference. The case was dismissed, and the dismissal was upheld on appeal. A second lawsuit is now before courts.
As for Sigurðsson, he still stands by what he wrote in that resulted in the 2022 constituency session suspension. One of the lawsuits claimed that the conference was operating illegally in the country due to the delayed church business.
In an interview, Theodorsson alleged that the TED would “take away democracy from the people in the session.” He likened the delayed conclusion of the session to a military coup d’etat and dictatorship. “That’s actually what the division has done,” he said. “This is very much against my beliefs and my understanding of the Adventist Church.” In his view, the conference, in its dealings with Eden Mining, was “fooled.”
Theodorrson has lived on the conference’s Hlíðardalsskóli property for over twenty years and is an influential supporter of Stefánsson and his son-in-law Sigurðsson’s critical labors. He also has ties to organizations including GYC Europe, where he holds a seat on the youth organization’s board.
Tension has grown so great that Ingvarsson and Ólafsson no longer feel comfortable attending church. Still, in their letter responding to their accusers, they struck a conciliatory note: “We ask God to pour out His Spirit upon our broken community and bless each of us, as well as those who oppose us.”
On July 28, 2024, the long awaited Iceland Mining Commission—chaired by retired General Conference Vice President Lowell Cooper—completed its report. It will be officially presented at the next constituency session on September 8, 2024. Among its ten findings were recommendations to tighten up some contractual deficiencies, especially the need for clarification around the 2009 agreement, and a recommendation that the conference and Eden clarify their involvement on some side matters and just focus on their 2022 contractual relationship. Significantly it found “no instances of unpaid revenue based on contract terms.” It noted that while “numerous individuals have raised concerns about the negotiated price for minerals contained in the contract,” it approved of the choice by the conference to “accept a steady guaranteed annual income flow and an indexed moderate price” which comes with less risk. It stated that the parties ‘followed appropriate procedures and performed the requisite due diligence.”
The future of the Adventist Church in Iceland rests upon the upcoming session—and the many questions that have yet to be answered. Theodorrson agrees that the session’s delegates will be the ultimate decision-makers on how to move the burdened conference forward. Influence matters, he added, hinting at his belief that Eden Mining will use its connections to the church to guide the session proceedings. His own role in the broader controversy is not over. In his own words, he has an “obsession with stewardship and the law for the church.”
In a statement to Spectrum, Ingvarsson said that Eden Mining accepted the findings of the Iceland Mining Commission, stating that “It has been heart-aching to witness the development of this case and the level of abuse and hostility. He added, “Families and friendships are broken, and it will take years to heal. With this behind us, the time of healing can be started, and the time of reconstruction can begin.”
Alexander Carpenter and Nate Miller contributed to this report.
Cover photo by Henry Stober / AME (CC BY 4.0). Mine photos courtesy of Eden Mining. Hlíðardalsskóli photos by Kjell Aune / AME (CC BY 4.0). Map graphics by Jared Wright for Spectrum.
A previous version of this article misstated Stefánsson’s relationship to Theodórsson. It has been corrected.
