The General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland did not open the priesthood to women on its first attempt, or its second, or its third. Each time the question came to a vote, it needed a three quarters majority to pass, a high bar written into the church's own constitutional process precisely because the change was contested. It finally cleared that bar in 1986, and two years later, on March 6, 1988, the church ordained its first women priests, 94 of them from parishes across the country in a single coordinated wave rather than a scattering of individual cases.
The episcopate took longer to follow. Ordaining women as parish priests was one threshold; consecrating a woman as bishop, with authority over other priests including men, was a second one the church crossed only in 1993, five years after that first class of 94. The pace looks slow only in hindsight; at the time it placed Finland among the earlier Lutheran national churches to open ordained ministry to women at all, ahead of several sister churches elsewhere in the Lutheran World Federation. The church itself marked the thirtieth anniversary of that first ordination class in 2018, describing the road to it as a genuine institutional struggle rather than a foregone conclusion, the same three-vote history the 1986 synod finally resolved.