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Against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“The national church has caused LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, declared during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I offer my apology now.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” led to a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to come after the apology.

The apology took place at the London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday elicited a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “powerful and significant” but arrived “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the disease as punishment from God”.

Internationally, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to make amends for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, England's church apologised for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, although it continues to refuse to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but stayed firm in the view that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”