Interesting article in the Guardian on the decision of the Church in Norway to apologise to LGBTQ+ people for the discrimination and harm it had inflicted.
“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, said. “This should never have happened and that is why I apologise today.” And he acknowledged that this “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused some to lose their faith.
According to the article, the Church of Norway, the country’s largest faith community is an evangelical Lutheran church, which has long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, and refused to allow them to become pastors or to marry in church, at one time describing gay people as a “social danger of global proportions”. Even when Norway became the second in the world to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993, and the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, in 2009, the Church only followed slowly. But in 2007, they began ordaining gay pastors, and same-sex couples have been able to marry in church since 2017.
But there are many Christians and some churches today who continue to want to marginalise LGBTQ+ people. Bishop Sarah Mullally, Archbishop elect of Canterbury, was chosen to be Bishop of London back in 2017. And she was asked what she thought of LGBT people in church, and she replied: “We have to remember this is about people, and the church seeks to demonstrate love to all, because it reflects the God of love, who loves everybody”.
Read the Guardian article here.