It is liturgically and theologically "high church", having retained priests, vestments, and the Mass during the Swedish Reformation.

It further states that this does not serve to create a new, confessionally peculiar interpretation, but concerns the apostolic faith as carried down through the traditions of the church,[10] a concept similar to the doctrine of "reformed and catholic" found within the Anglican Communion.

[12] According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2009, 17% of the Swedish population considered religion as an important part of their daily life.

At this synod, it was decided that the church would retain the three original Christian creeds: the Apostolic, the Athanasian, and the Nicene.

In 1686, the Riksdag of the Estates adopted the Book of Concord, although only certain parts, labelled Confessio fidei, were considered binding, and the other texts merely explanatory.

Confessio fidei included the three aforementioned Creeds, the Augsburg Confession and two Uppsala Synod decisions from 1572 and 1593.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, a variety of teachings were officially approved, mostly directed towards ecumenism: In practice, however, Lutheran creed texts play a minor role, and parishes instead rely on Lutheran tradition in conjunction with influences from other Christian denominations and diverse ecclesial movements, such as Low Church, High Church, Pietism ("Old Church"), and Laestadianism, which locally might be strongly established, but have little nationwide influence.

In 1957, the General Synod rejected a proposal for the ordination of women, but a revised Church Ordinance bill proposal from the Riksdag in the spring of 1958, along with the fact that, at the time, clergy of the Church of Sweden were legally considered government employees, put pressure on the General Synod and the College of Bishops to accept the proposal, which passed by a synod vote of 69 to 29 and a collegiate vote of 6 to 5 respectively in the autumn of 1958.

[14] Since 1960, women have been ordained as priests, and in 1982, lawmakers removed a "conscience clause" allowing clergy members to refuse to cooperate with female colleagues.

[15] A proposal to perform same-sex weddings was approved on 22 October 2009 by 176 of 249 voting members of the Church of Sweden Synod.

[16] In response to the rise of theological liberalism in the denomination, traditionalist clergy and laity from the Church of Sweden established, in 2003, the Mission Province of the Church of Sweden, a nonterritorial ecclesiastical province that only ordains men to holy orders and does not perform same-sex marriages.

There are many infants baptized and teenagers confirmed (currently 40% of all 14 year olds[18]) for families even without formal church membership.

However, Norse paganism and other pre-Christian religious systems survived in the territory of what is now Sweden later than that; for instance the important religious center known as the Temple at Uppsala at Gamla Uppsala was evidently still in use in the late 11th century, while there was little effort to introduce the Sámi of Lapland to Christianity until considerably after that.

In 1526, all Catholic printing presses were suppressed, and two-thirds of the Church's tithes were appropriated for the payment of the national debt.

A final breach was made with the traditions of the old religion at the Riksdag called by the king at Västerås in 1544.

The last of these is ecumenical, and combines traditional hymns with songs from other Christian denominations, including Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Catholic, Mission Covenant, Methodist, Pentecostal, and the Salvation Army.

This escalated to a point where its ministers were even persecuted by the church for preaching sobriety, and the reactions of many congregation members to that contributed to the desire to leave the country (which, however, was against the law until 1840).

After the formal separation of Church of Sweden from the State of Sweden, the growing tendency in the elections is towards independent parties forming for candidature, either based on a political conviction, for example Folkpartister i Svenska kyrkan founded by Liberal People's Party members, or a pure church party such as the political independents' Partipolitiskt obundna i Svenska kyrkan (POSK) and Frimodig kyrka.

The Church of Sweden maintains the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons, and has approximately 5,000 ordained clergy in total.

[29] In the Evangelical Lutheran churches, including the Church of Sweden, ministerial function is indicated by the usual vestments of western tradition, including the stole, worn straight by bishops, crossed by priests (wearing the stole straight by priests is only permitted when in choir dress, i.e., a surplice rather than an alb, as no cincture is then used that would permit crossing the stole), and diagonally across the left shoulder by deacons.

Tiit Pädam of Uppsala University and a Swedish-based priest of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church writes: "At the beginning of the [Evangelical Lutheran] ordination service, the candidates are dressed in white albs and no one wears a stole at the beginning of the rite.

"[30] The Church of Sweden employs full-time deacons to staff its extensive outreach and social welfare diakonia programme.

In addition to the 13 dioceses, the Church of Sweden Abroad (Swedish: Svenska kyrkan i utlandet – SKUT) maintains more than 40 overseas parishes.

Originally a collection of overseas churches under the direction of a committee of the General Synod, SKUT was reorganised on 1 January 2012 with a quasi-diocesan structure.

Under this reorganisation it gained a governing council, constituent seats on the General Synod of the Church of Sweden (like the 13 mainland dioceses), and for the first time, full-time deacons to provide a programme of social welfare alongside the work of priests and lay workers.