Bishops, Porvoo, and the Parting From the State

What makes the Church of Sweden unusual among Lutheran churches is what it kept. The dioceses were not abolished and the bishops were not replaced by superintendents, so the church claims an episcopate continuous with the medieval one, and it retained a good deal of the older liturgical shape, vestments and ceremonial included. Uppsala remains the primatial see.

That inheritance had a consequence four centuries later. The Porvoo Common Statement, agreed in the early 1990s between the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland and most of the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches, established full communion between them, with interchangeable ministries and mutual participation in episcopal consecrations. Sweden could enter it because it had something the Anglican side recognised, which churches that had let the succession lapse could only join by receiving it afresh.

The other modern change is constitutional. The Church of Sweden ceased to be the state church at the end of the year 2000, becoming a distinct legal body with its own governing structures, though it retains a special status in Swedish law and a very large nominal membership acquired mainly through infant baptism and inherited registration. Its own decision-making runs through a general synod elected in a national vote in which nominating groups, some of them tied to political parties, contest seats. Women have been ordained since 1960, and the first woman was elected archbishop in 2013.