The Church of Sweden (Swedish: Svenska kyrkan) is the largest Christian church in Sweden. The church professes the Lutheran faith and is a member of the Porvoo Communion. With 6,589,769 baptized members, it is the largest Lutheran church in the world, although combined, there are more Lutherans in the member churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany (10 million). Until 2000 it held the position of state church. Approximately 2% of the church's members regularly attend Sunday services.
The Church of Sweden, by law, is organized in the following manner:
- It is an Evangelical Lutheran community of faith manifested in parishes and dioceses. The church also has a national organisation.
- It is an open national church which, working with a democratic organisation and through the ministry of the church, covers the whole nation.
The Primate of the Church of Sweden is the Archbishop of Uppsala, currently Anders Wejryd.
Famous quotes containing the word church:
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)