The Parishes of the Church of Sweden ( sv, Svenska kyrkans församlingar) are subdivisions within the

Church of Sweden The Church of Sweden ( sv, Svenska kyrkan) is an Evangelical Lutheran national church in Sweden. A former state church, headquartered in Uppsala, with around 5.6 million members at year end 2021, it is the largest Christian denomination in Sw ...

that historically were called ''socken'' but nowadays are called ''församling''. Similar units were used for

municipal A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...

(''landskommun'') and

cadastral A cadastre or cadaster is a comprehensive recording of the real estate or real property's metes-and-bounds of a country.Jo Henssen, ''Basic Principles of the Main Cadastral Systems in the World,'/ref> Often it is represented graphically in a cad ...

purposes (''jordebokssocknar'' or ''jordregistersocknar'') until the 20th century. After the

Protestant Reformation The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation) was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and ...

in the 16th century the church also became a state church and as such was charged with administrative tasks like as keeping the civic registry. Parishes were also used as cadastral units (''jordebokssocknar'', later ''jordregistersocknar''), sometimes with slightly different borders. Eventually religious and civil matters became separated in two entities within the same district (in 1863), the religious congregation (''församling'') and the

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

rural municipality A rural municipality is a classification of municipality, a type of local government, found in several countries. These include: * Rural municipalities in Canada, a type of municipal status in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, ...

(''landskommun''). The civil parish handled municipal tasks, but the congregation still retained a significant share of influence, including responsibility for schools. The civil parishes were merged to larger municipalities, in most cases in 1952. Some civil parishes remained as separate municipalities until the mergers of 1967–1974 and in a few cases even after that. The cadastral parishes remained until a reform between 1976 and 1995, where they were replaced by the municipalities. On July 1, 1991, the Swedish Tax Agency took over the remaining duties related to the population register from the parishes. The Church of Sweden was separated from the Swedish state on 1 January 2000, but its parishes are still used in official statistics. The parishes have seen major geographical changes since that date, so records are kept for both parishes as of 2000 and parishes as of today. However, this ended on 1 January 2016 when Sweden introduced secular registration districts instead.SFS 2015:493 Förordning om distrikt.
Svensk författningssamling, 17. Juni 2015. Retrieved 19 May 2016.

References

See also