After VG (a Norwegian nationwide tabloid newspaper) reported people registered in faith communities without their consent, Norwegians checked the public register. The lutheran Church of Norway (Den Norske Kirke) and the Norwegian Humanist Association (Human-Etisk Forbund) are now being contacted by people who say they are listed in error. Oslo Catholic Diocese reports an unusual number of resignations in the same week.

Norway pays faith and life-stance communities by the head. In 2026 the rate is 1,611 kroner for each approved member. The communities submit the personal identification numbers. The state can catch invalid numbers and double registrations. It does not, as a rule, check how a person came to be on the list.

That arrangement is now under public pressure.

Late in September, VG reported cases of people listed as members of faith communities they say they never joined. One was Conservative MP Mahmoud Farahmand, who found he had been registered with the Rabita mosque in Oslo since 1995. The mosque confirmed the registration and said it would repay the support it had received for him — at least 17,611 kroner on VG’s calculation. Rabita had 4,344 approved members for 2026, worth close to seven million kroner at this year’s rate. Other cases involved the Moroccan faith community in Oslo.

The Brønnøysund Register Centre (Brønnøysundregistrene), where people can see which community the state has them listed under as of 1 January, was overloaded. The County Governor in Agder, which handles faith communities in eleven counties, told Vårt Land it had already received 19 enquiries after the VG coverage: people who say they were never enrolled, and people who say they left and are still listed. An enquiry is not a finding. The County Governor said the contacts do not show that an illegal enrolment has been established, and that the number is small set against roughly 800,000 funded members outside the Church of Norway.

The Brønnøysund Register Centre’s current building, Havnegata 48. Photo: Skoggles, 2 June 2021, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

On 1 October, Vårt Land reported the next stage. The Church of Norway (Den Norske Kirke) and the Norwegian Humanist Association (Human-Etisk Forbund) are being contacted by people who believe they are wrongly registered. The same paper also reported an unusual number of resignations that week from the Church of Norway, the Humanist Association, and the Catholic Church. Oslo Catholic Diocese reported an unusually high number of resignations that same week.

The Humanist Association has not treated this as someone else’s problem. After one person reported still being listed after resigning, the organisation found a technical failure at its supplier: some resignations had been received and started, but not completed in the membership system. It has notified the Data Protection Authority and the County Governor, and says it will repay about 60,000 kroner in support it was not entitled to. It cannot rule out further errors. It is also asking for a one-off clean-up of every membership list that draws public money, with notice to those registered, and for verified enrolment — BankID or equivalent — for the Church of Norway and every subsidised community.

Around 25,000 of its own members are also registered somewhere else. On its account, most of them did not know.

None of this is new in kind. The Church of Norway’s central register was built in the late 1990s from a copy of the national population register, and resignations were still failing to stick years later. In 2015 the state accused Oslo Catholic Diocese of systematic over-registration, including people entered on the basis of names that suggested a Catholic country of origin, without individual confirmation. The diocese was ordered to repay around 40 million kroner in state support for 2011–2014. The present cases have different causes. The weakness is the same: public money follows a list the community largely controls.

Anyone who believes they are wrongly listed can contact the membership centre of the Oslo Catholic Diocese (Medlemssenteret, Akersveien 5, or medlemskap@katolsk.no). The diocese administers the national membership register for Catholics in Oslo, Trondheim and Tromsø. The public check is available on Min side at the Brønnøysund Register Centre. Note that the overview only shows membership status as of 1 January 2026; changes made later in the year do not yet appear. A clean and accurate membership list is simply the basic condition for receiving public funding without counting people who never asked to be included.

Check where you are listed as a member of faith and life stance communities:

  • Log in to My Page on the Brønnøysund Register Centre – person.brreg.no/nb/minside
  • Scroll down on your main page and click on “Faith and life stance communities”.

If you resigned during 2026, this is not shown at the Brønnøysund Register Centre. The overview shows membership status as of 1 January 2026.

Sources

The per-member grant itself is the same for every community outside the Church of Norway. A separate note on how that money, the buildings and the registered numbers compare is here: https://katolskblikk.no/catholics-vs-muslims-in-norway-buildings-money-and-the-numbers-that-matter/

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