Church of Norway and other religious and life stance communities
07.02.10 - Membership in organizations, religious and philosophical communities
Yearly except for 2005
National and county level
360 - Division for education statistics
Act of 13 June 1969 about religious communities and various others, in addition act of 12 June 1981 and act of 19 April 2005. Data is collected pursuant to § 2-2 of the Statistics Act.
Irrelevant
Irrelevant
The main purpose of these statistics is to show how many people are members of religious and life stance communities outside the Church of Norway. Statistics on religious and life stance outside the Church of Norway are based on reports from county governors. From 2005, the list of members have been sent via the county governors to the Brønnøysund Register Centre for control and elimination of duplicates. All religious and life stance communities that have been approved by the county governors and receive state subsidies are represented in the statistics. The statistical unit is the individual community. The statistics do not include information on the number of congregations and do not distinguish between registered and unregistered communities.
Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs, other government services, research institutions, media, students and others.
Including only communities for whom government subsidy is received. (All religious and life stance communities outside the Church og Norway have the same right to apply for government subsidy, but some communities do not make use of this right.)
Electronic data from the Brønnøysund Register Centre.
Irrelevant
The data file is sent electronically from Brønnøysund Register Centre to Statistics Norway when they have completed the necessary control of the member lists received from the county govenors.
Control is mainly to check up on double membership (at the individual level) between all religious and life stance communities and the Norwegian Church (DNK). The data file that Statistics Norway receive contains information on the organizational level per municipality. Data is compared with data the year before. Figures that differ too much from earlier, will be checked particularly.
Statistics on religious and life stance communities is a summary statistic. Apart from summary of reported figures, no special analysis is made.
The data can be defined as sensitive and figures will be replaced with dots if there are fewer than three observations in a cell.
Religious community: Approved religious community according to act of 13 June 1969.
Life stance community: Approved life stance community according to act of 12 June 1981.
Classified by the major world religions and belief (based on the form from the communities). Otherwise, no standard classification. Statistics Norway has been responsible for the categorization of communities at the organizational level, partly based on the new application form (from communities to the county governors) and after a compiled code system.
The statistics for the religious and life stance communities comprises only the community of members that has requested for state grants and tells nothing about the number of members of other registered communities. As from 2010 the statistics contains members with valid residence address. Example of a religious community that do not apply for public subsidies, is the Jesus Christ Church of Latter Day Saints with about 3 900 members in 2009 and 4 300 members in 2010.
Irrelevant
Cf. section. 5.2.
Irrelevant
Statistics Norway has produced official statistics on members of religious and life stance communities since 1971 based on questionnares that county governors receive in connection with the awarding of state grants. As members are considered those who have affiliation with a church, ie children under 16 years, when they are not enrolled in Church of Norway. The distribution by county is where congregations are registered, and do not always mach county of residence to each member.
From 2005 the number og members is based on a new registration system. One can not compare the statistics with previous years. One should also be careful not to make comparisons between the last three years (2005-2006-2007) when cleanup work with the control of dual membership is made until 2007. The distribution by county is from 2006 based on county of residence to members
These statistics can be seen in connection with statistics on service statistics of the Norwegian Church.
The statistics are published electronically via Dagens statistikk and Statistikkbanken's website (see section 1.2.). Selected results are also published on paper in Statistical Yearbook.
All statistics on religious and life stance communities in Statistics Norway is stored in a responsible and standardized manner in consultation with Datatilsynet
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