When her husband was dying, the woman who would become bishop of Oslo did not try to save his soul.
Sunniva Gylver remained by her husband’s side as he succumbed to lung cancer in the summer of 2021. But though a longtime pastor, she never tried to impose her Lutheran faith on her partner, a lifelong atheist.
“My experience is that you can never push or manipulate people into a healthy faith,” Bishop Gylver said. Salvation, she added, was the work of a higher power. “I’m not the one to save people.”
Instead, her focus is inclusion, not conversion, and since she became the bishop of Norway’s largest diocese less than a year ago, her calling has been to swing open the doors of the Church of Norway as wide as possible.
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