About the project

The Church of Norway has gone through, and is still occupied with, a profound organizational process wherein the ties to the Norwegian state have been redefined and the church is established as an organization independent of the state. This process does not only affect the structures of the church organization but also its identity and self-understanding. After 500 years where the state and the church has been almost synonyms, The Church of Norway will now establish its own organization and central values need to be renegotiated. In this project I aim at identifying what organizational values and identities have been considered important by central church leaders in the process of establishing The Church of Norway as an independent organization, and in what ways the leaders have worked in definingand implementing these values and identities into to the still ongoing process. Examples would be the understanding of the value democracy and the identity as a folk church (volkskirche/folkekirke).

The study will apply a qualitative approach, and data will be collected through a witness seminar, semi-structured interviews and written documents, especially focusing on the decade before the changes regarding the Church of Norway were made in the Norwegian Constitution in 2012

Background

• Cand.Theol (MF vitenskapelig høyskole, 2011)
• Master in Value-based leadership (VID vitenskapelige høgskole 2019)

Research group

LIVAP – Leadership and institutional values-work in practice