It is one of the three churches for the Sortland parish which is part of the Vesterålen prosti (deanery) in the Diocese of Sør-Hålogaland.

The white, wooden, neo-Gothic church was built in a cruciform style in 1901 using plans drawn up by the architects Carl Julius Bergstrøm and Karl Norum.

The first churches in Sortland were located about 300 metres (980 ft) southeast of the present-day church, closer to the fjord.

[4] Together with more than 300 other parish churches across Norway, it was a polling station for elections to the 1814 Norwegian Constituent Assembly which wrote the Constitution of Norway.

Each church parish was a constituency that elected people called "electors" who later met together in each county to elect the representatives for the assembly that was to meet at Eidsvoll Manor later that year.