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Set against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“Norway's church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to a loss of faith for some, the bishop admitted. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to take place after his statement.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub, one among two bars involved in the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, Norway's church commenced the ordination of homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples could have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received differing opinions. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “a significant step toward healing” and a point in time that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have attempted to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, even as it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”