Hilde Marie Øgreid (she/her) was born in 1974. She is the oldest sibling of three, as she has two younger brothers. Her family lived in Stavanger, which is on the Southwest Coast of Norway. Hilde Marie characterises Stavanger as a city very focused on a missional pietistic society. Her family was Christian by faith, and they were part of the United Methodist Church in Norway (in Norwegian: Metodistkirken i Norge)[1 ], which is denominationally a Free Church.
When she was in school, same-sex relationships were not discussed openly. This was aside from one known gay teacher, who was made fun of, and yet Hilde Marie respected him too. This teacher later moved from Norway to the Netherlands with his partner, which was a sacrifice that was thought-provoking to young Hilde Marie. As a youth, Hilde Marie never regarded gay or lesbian people as being wrong, which was opposed to the conservative Methodist Church's teachings. As a teenager, she felt like she lacked the words to describe her heartfelt conviction to support LGBTQ+ rights. yet she was keenly aware of the United Methodist Church’s same-sex discourse.
Hilde Marie experienced a calling to become a pastor at 14 years old. Later, Hilde Marie was accepted into a Methodist theology seminary program in the midst of 1990s. Hilde Marie was commissioned to work in a large city of Bodø, North Norway. After the commissioned trial years as a minister, Hilde Marie graduated as a pastor in 1998.
In the city of Bodø, she gradually became more outspoken about her support for LGBTQ+ human rights. Hilde Marie was then a young female pastor who tried to fit in with her new congregation. After a year of her ministry, there arose a societal debate over Siri Sunde’s appointment as the first openly lesbian theologian ordained to chaplaincy in the Norwegian Lutheran Church. The ministry of the other Bodø Free Churches promoted the idea of writing and signing a newsletter article against the Church of Norway’s Siri Sunde appointing decision. This was because the conservatives in the Church of Norway found Bishop Rosemarie Köhn’s decision to be unbiblical. Hilde Marie opposed this idea and refused to sign such a public proclamation. She was then about 23 years old. She got support from a few others in her Methodist Church, and looks back on this moment proud of her bravery at the time. Her position as a minister was at stake, yet Hilde Marie believes that her youth protected her from dismissal.
Since 2001, Hilde Marie has been working in the capital city of Oslo, which is a very pro-LGBTQ+ metropolitan city. In the early 21st century, Oslo was a safer space for LGBTQ+ people, and many moved from the countryside to Oslo. Moreover, she started to work in the Metodistkirken Bjølsen. Hilde Marie participated in a 2006 petition to state that there were several opinions within the Norwegian Methodist Churches' approach to same-sex question. This annual conference petition caused turmoil in the church. The annual conference dismissed this petition, as the majority voted to overturn it. As such, after the petition, Hilde Marie started to get hate-filled, unsigned letters from few of her older colleagues, whom she recognized by their handwriting. Hilde Marie thought this was odd and hurtful because there clearly were several opinions in the Methodist Church in Norway on this matter.
The debate within the worldwide United Methodist Church went on, and in 2019, an extraordinary General Conference was held. Intense work was done before the conference to help the church find a way forward that the majority could accept. However, at the conference, the church decided to go in a so-called traditionalist direction. This ruling entailed that the church’s conservative stance was kept, and the punishments for doing anything against church law, such as performing a same sex wedding or hiring a gay pastor, were increasingly stronger than before.
As a response to the decision of the General Conference, the same year. In response, the Methodist Church’s annual conference in Norway voted that their religious community should start a process on a path towards an ‘inclusive’ view of human sexuality in 2019. This led the Methodist Church to officially issue an apology for its past harms and suffering of LGBTQ people on 21st December 2020.[2 ] The question of this apology is very thought-provoking to Hilde Marie. She personally thought the Methodist Church's apology to be a remarkably fast apology, without much self-reflection from the perspective of the church. Hilde Marie evokes that a few youth and scout leader colleagues, whom she knew, had lost their jobs based on their sexual orientation. Therein, the human impact and the emotional wounds that the Church caused in that period to LGBTQ people are still hurting and have not healed.
Nevertheless, Hilde Marie grants that it is hard to apologise for a strand of theology that was common a few decades ago, even if her religious perspective is that of liberal theology. Overall, she has never had a static impression of either the church, the theology, or the world. In the Methodist theology, experience and reason matter as sources of theology alongside with Bible and the tradition. According to Hilde Marie, the Methodists are conscious about social issues, the model to disciple to change the world, and by changing the world, the church changes too. Still, Hilde Marie underlines that the Methodist Church would have benefited from a more in-depth listening reconciliation process in their apology to LGBTQ+ people, like the Church of Norway issued in the middle of its reconciliating process. Nowadays, both the Church of Norway and the Methodist Church facilitate same-sex matrimony ceremonies since 2017.
This was timely also globally, as the international Methodist Church is divided over the issue of homosexuality in 2019, resulting in a deep intra-church split between the conservative and the liberal Methodists in their USA conference. The split is still visible in the USA and Europe as well as several Eastern European countries have left the UMC. Hilde Marie was following this event online, noting with terror the aftermath of this conference, as there were multiple police cars invited to the conference site after. She states that currently, the Methodist Church is struggling with the healing of a broken church. She states that the liberals are now the majority in her pluralistic Church. This gives the liberals a discerning responsibility to be a responsible majority towards the Conservatives, still present at the church too.
Hilde Marie Øgreid began her Ph.D. about the Methodist contemporary theology of Prevenient Grace, after living in Oslo for a decade.[3 ] In 2010, she got married to a man and became a stepmother to two teenagers. Later, she was appointed Rector of The Theological Seminary of the United Methodist Church in Norway, continuing her LGBTQ+ affirming religious work for new generations to come. Hilde Marie Øgreid considers herself fundamentally as the first generation, who was able to keep her position in the church, whilst doing LGBTQ+ affirming religious work.
[1 ] https://www.metodistkirken.no/hoved
[2 ] Methodist Church. 2025. “Norwegian Methodist Church Issues Apology to LGBT Community.” Evangelical Focus. July 25, 2025. https://evangelicalfocus.com/europe/9545/norwegian-methodist-church-issues-historical-apology-to-the-lgbt-community. (Accessed 25.7.2025).
[3 ] Øgreid, Hilde Marie. 2021. “Broadening the Perspective: Prevenient Grace in Contemporary Methodist Theology.” Oslo: MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2763801.
(This biographical statement was written by Elina Mäkinen from an interview with Hilde Marie Øgreid and was edited by Øgreid.)
Biography Date: August 2025