The Church of Sweden () is an Evangelical Lutheran church in Sweden. A former state church, it is a national church which covers the whole nation.
Headquartered in Uppsala, it is the largest Christian denomination in Sweden. A member of the Porvoo Communion, the church professes Lutheranism. It is composed of thirteen dioceses, divided into parishes."SFS 1998:1591" , Riksdagen The Primate of the Church of Sweden, as well as the Metropolitan of all Sweden, is the Archbishop of Uppsala.
It is liturgically and theologically "high church", having retained priests, vestments, and the Mass during the Swedish Reformation. In common with other Evangelical Lutheran churches (particularly in the Nordic and Baltic states), the Church of Sweden maintains the historical episcopate and claims apostolic succession. Some Lutheran churches have congregational polity or modified episcopal polity without apostolic succession, but the historic episcopate was maintained in Sweden and some of the other Lutheran churches of the Porvoo Communion. The canons of the Church of Sweden states that the faith, confession and teachings of the Church of Sweden are understood as an expression of the catholic Christian faith. It further states that this does not serve to create a new, confessionally peculiar interpretation, but concerns the apostolic faith as carried down through the traditions of the church,Kyrkoordning för Svenska kyrkan: med kommentarer och angränsande lagstiftning. Verbum, 2005. pp. 43–44 as the Lutheran Reformation aimed at conserving the faith and traditions of the Church while removing what it saw as medieval innovations.
It was Sweden's state church until 2000. At the end of 2025, its registered membership of 5,365,542 included 50.7% of the Swedish population. This high membership is due largely to automatic membership, through 1995, for any newborn child of a church member whose membership was not rejected. Approximately 2% of the church's members attended regularly in 2010, when the membership was higher. A total of about 4% of the members were in attendance in a given week at that time."Liturgy and Worship"
Theology
King Gustav Vasa instigated the Church of Sweden in 1536 during his reign as King of Sweden. This act separated the church from the Catholic Church and its canon law. In 1571, the Swedish Church Ordinance became the first Swedish church order following the Reformation.
The Church of Sweden became Lutheran at the Uppsala Synod in 1593 when it adopted the Augsburg Confession to which most Lutherans adhere. At this synod, it was decided that the church would retain the three original Christian creeds: the Apostolic, the Athanasian, and the Nicene.
In 1686, the Riksdag of the Estates adopted the Book of Concord, although only certain parts, labelled , were considered binding, and the other texts merely explanatory. included the three aforementioned Creeds, the Augsburg Confession and two Uppsala Synod decisions from 1572 and 1593.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, a variety of teachings were officially approved, mostly directed towards ecumenism: the 1878 development of the Catechism the Uppsala Creed of 1909, preparing for Eucharistic communion with the Church of England the constitutions of World Council of Churches (WCC) the constitutions of Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Church of Sweden's official response to the "Lima document" a Council of the Bishops Letter in Important Theological Questions the 1995 Treaty of Communion with the Philippine Independent Church
In practice, however, Lutheran creed texts play a minor role, and parishes instead rely on Lutheran tradition in conjunction with influences from other Christian denominations and diverse ecclesial movements, such as Low Church, High Church, Pietism ("Old Church"), and Laestadianism, which locally might be strongly established, but have little nationwide influence.
During the 20th century, the Church of Sweden oriented itself strongly towards liberal Christianity and human rights. In 1957, the General Synod rejected a proposal for the ordination of women, but a revised Church Ordinance bill proposal from the Riksdag in the spring of 1958, along with the fact that, at the time, clergy of the Church of Sweden were legally considered government employees, put pressure on the General Synod and the College of Bishops to accept the proposal, which passed by a synod vote of 69 to 29 and a collegiate vote of 6 to 5 respectively in the autumn of 1958. Since 1960, women have been ordained as priests, and in 1982, lawmakers removed a "conscience clause" allowing clergy members to refuse to cooperate with female colleagues. A proposal to perform same-sex weddings was approved on 22 October 2009 by 176 of 249 voting members of the Church of Sweden Synod. In response to the rise of theological liberalism in the denomination, traditionalist clergy and laity from the Church of Sweden established, in 2003, the Mission Province of the Church of Sweden, a nonterritorial ecclesiastical province that only ordains men to holy orders and does not perform same-sex marriages. The Mission Province (Missionsprovinsen) is a member of the International Lutheran Council, which represents Confessional Lutheran bodies around the globe.
In 2000, the Church of Sweden ceased to be the state church, but it maintains strong ties with communities, particularly in relation to rites of passage. There are many infants baptized and teenagers confirmed (currently 40% of all 14 year olds) for families even without formal church membership.
History
Middle Ages
While some Swedish areas had Christian minorities in the 9th century, Sweden was, because of its geographical location in northernmost Europe, not Christianized until around AD 1000, around the same time as the other Nordic countries, when the Swedish King Olof was baptized. This left only a modest gap between the Christianization of Scandinavia and the Great Schism, however there are some Scandinavian/Swedish saints who are venerated eagerly by many Orthodox Christians, such as St. Olaf. However, Norse paganism and other pre-Christian religious systems survived in the territory of what is now Sweden later than that; for instance the important religious center known as the Temple at Uppsala at Gamla Uppsala was evidently still in use in the late 11th century, while there was little effort to introduce the Sámi of Lapland to Christianity until considerably after that.
The Christian church in Scandinavia was originally governed by the archdiocese of Bremen. In 1104, an archbishop for all Scandinavia was installed in Lund. Uppsala was made Sweden's archdiocese in 1164, and remains so today. The papal diplomat William of Modena attended a church meeting in Skänninge in March 1248, where the ties to the Catholic Church were strengthened.
The most cherished national Catholic saints were the 12th-century King Eric the Saint and the 14th-century visionary Bridget, but other regional heroes also had a local cult following, including Saint Botvid and Saint Eskil in Södermanland, Saint Helena of Skövde,Saint Helen of Skofde Patron Saints Index and Saint Sigfrid in Småland. In their names, miracles were performed and churches were named.
Reformation Shortly after seizing power in 1523, Gustav Vasa addressed the Pope in Rome with a request for the confirmation of Johannes Magnus as Archbishop of Sweden, in the place of Gustav Trolle who had been formally deposed and exiled by the Riksdag of the Estates.
Gustav promised to be an obedient son of the Church, if the pope would confirm the elections of his bishops. But the pope requested Trolle to be re-instated. King Gustav protested by promoting the Swedish reformers, the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri, and Laurentius Andreae. The king supported the printing of reformation texts, with the Petri brothers as the major instructors on the texts. In 1526, all Catholic printing presses were suppressed, and two-thirds of the Church's tithes were appropriated for the payment of the national debt. A final breach was made with the traditions of the old religion at the Riksdag called by the king at Västerås in 1544.Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, article Sweden
Other changes of the Reformation included the abolition of some Catholic rituals. However, the changes were not as drastic as in Germany; as in Germany, Swedish churches kept not only crosses and crucifixes, but also icons and the traditional liturgical vestments which in Germany were usually discarded in favor of the black preaching gown and stole used until recent times. Many holy days, based on saints' days, were not removed from the calendar until the late 18th century due to strong resistance from the population.
After the death of Gustav Vasa, Sweden was ruled by John III, who had Catholicizing tendencies, and then by his more openly Catholic son, Sigismund, who was also ruler of Catholic Poland. The latter was eventually deposed from the Swedish throne by his uncle, who acceded to the throne as Charles IX, and used the Lutheran church as an instrument in his power struggle against his nephew. He is known to have had Calvinist leanings.
The New Testament was translated into Swedish in 1526 and the entire Bible in 1541. Revised translations were published in 1618 and 1703. New official translations were adopted in 1917 and 2000. Many hymns were written by Swedish church reformers and several by Martin Luther were translated. A semi-official hymnal appeared in the 1640s. Official hymnals of the Church of Sweden () were adopted in 1695, 1819, 1937 and 1986. The last of these is ecumenical, and combines traditional hymns with songs from other Christian denominations, including Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Catholic, Mission Covenant, Methodist, Pentecostal, and the Salvation Army. In October 2013, the Church of Sweden elected Antje Jackelén as Sweden's first female archbishop.
Emigration aspects In the 1800s–1900s, the Church of Sweden supported the Swedish government by opposing both emigration and preachers' efforts recommending sobriety (alcoholic beverages are sold in Sweden by a government monopoly). This escalated to a point where its ministers were even persecuted by the church for preaching sobriety, and the reactions of many congregation members to that contributed to the desire to leave the country (which, however, was against the law until 1840).Vår svenska stam på utländsk mark; Svenska öden och insatser i främmande land; I västerled, Amerikas förenta stater och Kanada, Ed. Axel Boëthius, Stockholm 1952, Volume I, pp. 92, 137, 273 & 276; for the whole section
Lutheran orthodoxy
Coat of arms
The 19th century coat of arms is based on that of the Archdiocese of Uppsala. It is blazoned Or on a cross Gules an open crown of the field and thus features a gold/yellow field with a red cross on which there is a gold/yellow crown.Gold is represented as yellow in non-metallic representations of coats of arms. The crown is called the victory crown of Christ, based on the royal crowns used in medieval times and corresponds in form to the crowns in the Swedish coat of arms and to that resting on the head of Saint Eric in the coat of arms of Stockholm.
Membership statistics
+ Church of Sweden statistics Year Population Church members Percentage Change in the Percentage (yearly avg.) 1972 8,146,000 7,754,784 95.2% 1975 8,208,000 7,770,881 94.7% 0.2% 1980 8,278,000 7,690,636 92.9% 0.4% 1985 8,358,000 7,629,763 91.5% 0.3% 1990 8,573,000 7,630,350 89.0% 0.5% 1995 8,837,000 7,601,194 86.0% 0.6% 2000 8,880,000 7,360,825 82.9% 0.6% 2005 9,048,000 6,967,498 77.0% 1.2% 2010 9,415,570 6,589,769 70.0% 1.4% 2015 9,850,452 6,225,091 63.2% 1.4% 2020 10,379,295 5,728,748 55.2% 1.6% 2021 10,452,326 5,628,067 53.9% 1.3% 2022 10,536,649 5,555,385 52.9% 1% 2023 5,484,992 52.1% 0.8% 2024 5,426,053 51.4% 0.7% 2025 5,365,542 50.7% 0.7%
Synodical structure