Forty-two year old Mari Leppänen was consecrated on Sunday as the first female Bishop of Turku. She is the third woman to become a bishop in Finland’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.
The first to break the mould was same-sex marriage proponent Irja Askola, who served as the bishop of Helsinki from 2010-2017.
The Church has been ordaining women as ministers for 32 years. However, Leppänen is the first woman from the Conservative Laestadian movement to become a minister. She broke ties with the fundamentalist group after her 2012 ordainment as the sect does not approve of female clergy.
While half of new ministers today are women, they make up a small share of leadership positions within the church. Women make up a fifth of vicars, for example. But Leppänen said the pace of change can quickly hasten, pointing out that the Christian church would not have survived for thousands of years were it not for its ability to reinvent itself.
Gay marriage divide
Finland legalised same-sex marriage in 2017, but the state-funded church is struggling with the new rule. At the end of last year, a group of official representatives of the Lutheran Church filed an appeal with church leadership calling for stricter enforcement of official policy on the marriage of same-sex couples. They pointed out that the church officially defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
When probed about the church’s internal debate on same-sex marriage, Leppänen said she "hoped to play a part in promoting equality", but did not provide further details.
The church doesn’t wield as much power in Finnish society as it used to--something Leppänen said wasn’t necessarily a bad development.
"This can be a good thing for us, and it means we have to be able to have an open dialogue with people who think and believe differently from us," she said.
Leppänen received some 54 percent of the votes in the second round of the episcopal elections last December.
The national church is Finland's largest religious body and one of the largest Lutheran churches in the world.