Norway’s State Church Opt-out Sees 15,000 Members Leave in Four Days
By Maynard van der Galien
Did you hear about the church with squirrel problems? There were three country churches in a small Ontario town: Presbyterian, Catholic and Baptist. Each church was overrun with pesky squirrels. One day, the Presbyterian church called a meeting to decide what to do about the squirrels.
After much prayer and consideration they determined that the squirrels were predestined to be there and they shouldn’t interfere with God’s divine will.
The Catholics got together and decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God’s creations. They discussed birth control methods for the squirrels but it was decided they humanely trap the squirrels and set them free a few miles outside of town. Three days later, the squirrels were back.
It was only the Baptist who were able to come up with the best and most effective solution: They baptized the squirrels and registered them as members of the church. Now they see them only on Christmas and Easter.
Many churches are having difficulty paying the bills to keep the church open as membership continues to decline. Churches that have been a landmark for more than a century are closing. The faithful members pass on and younger folks are not interested in church. What do you do with people who are registered as members but they seldom show up and don’t contribute financially towards the church? Norway had a solution that is unique.
In Norway, 15,000 so-called members left the church in four days. As part of a plan to organize its records, the five-centuries-old Lutheran Church in Norway –the state church – put up a web page last August that allowed people to verify their status with the church. They could sign up, confirm their membership or deregister, according to the international news agency AFP.
Some 15,053 members of the flock opted to leave with the bulk of that number, 10,854, choosing to drop their membership in the church on one day. By the end of the month just over 25,000 people had dropped their membership.
Reacting to the sudden purging of its rolls, Church council stated that: “We will continue to have a broad and open national church. But no one should be a member of a religious community against their will. Those who mistakenly listed as a member of the Norwegian Church or who do not wish to be members can now easily change their status, and it will give us a more accurate registry.”
The Church Council attributed the exodus of members to those who had already decided to leave the church long ago. The new online registration system just gave them an easy opportunity to make that decision official.
.According to Statistics Norway, both the number of services and persons attending the services has declined in recent years. Attendance has fallen every year since 2005, except in 2011. In the last 10 years, church attendance figures had fallen by almost a million. Until 2012, according to AFP, Lutheranism was Norway’s official religion
I toured Norway a few years ago. Old churches in Norway are different and weird looking wooden structures. The stave church of timber is the typical Norwegian church architecture of the Middle Ages. The one we were in was perched in a mountainous valley. The roofs of the stave church have layers of roof going up quite high. It’s very picturesque!
