Åsa M. Waldau (; born October 26, 1965) is the former leader of a Christian sect in Knutby, Sweden, that disbanded in 2016. She is one of four sisters, the youngest of whom was the victim of the Knutby murder on January 10, 2004. Biography In 1985, Åsa Waldau had one month's theological training in a Pentecostal bible school in Stockholm. In 1990 Waldau (then Björk) was hired by the Pentecostal church in Uppsala as a children's pastor. However, because of her actions and because she divorced, she was forced to resign. She then moved to Knutby, where she lived with the Waldau family, whose young son Patrik (born 1975) she had befriended in Uppsala. They married in June 1994. Waldau was hired part-time by the Pentecostal congregation of Knutby in March 1992. Kim Wincent, whom she had met in bible school in 1985, was a pastor there. Waldau's authority over the congregants rapidly increased after she declared herself to be the "Bride of Christ" personified. There were claims of prophecies about a "disrespected servant of the Lord" who would be the cause of a "fire from Knutby." She traveled widely in Swedish Pentecostal communities, and induced many young people to move to Knutby. In 1997 she convinced Helge Fossmo and his wife Heléne to join the Knutby community as a pastor. In 2020, Waldau and two pastors from the Knutby congregation were convicted of assault towards members of their church. Her sentence was conditional release, plus 120 hours of community service. Teachings The Philadelphia congregation in Knutby was established in 1921 during the Pentecostal revival in Sweden connected with Lewi Pethrus. Waldau was the granddaughter of Pethrus' successor Willis Säwe, but her mother did not raise her in the faith. She was born again, and entered the Pentecostal tradition, but she also underwent influences from Ulf Ekman and his Livets Ord movement and from Word of Faith. The eschatology is pretribulationist. As the self-proclaimed "Bride of Christ," Waldau expected that she would be taken away before the Rapture, in a manner reminiscent of the dormition of the Virgin or the assumption of Mary, to be united with her Bridegroom. Connection with the Knutby murder In 2004, Helge Fossmo's nanny Sara Svensson confessed to having killed Fossmo's second wife Alexandra (Åsa Waldau's sister), under the influence of Fossmo. Fossmo had claimed to get text messages from God on his cellphone,