Maria Jepsen (born 19 January 1945, in

Bad Segeberg Bad Segeberg (; ) is a German town of 16,000 inhabitants, located in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, capital of the district (Kreis) Segeberg. It is situated approximately northeast of Hamburg, and west of Lübeck. It is famous for its annual ...

) is the former bishop of Hamburg in the

North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church The North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church (; NEK) was a Lutheran regional church in Northern Germany which emerged from a merger of four churches in 1977 and merged with two more churches in 2012. The NEK largely covered the area of the stat ...

. On 4 April 1992 the synod of the

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

Ambit elected her

bishop A bishop is an ordained member of the clergy who is entrusted with a position of Episcopal polity, authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance and administration of di ...

, the first

Lutheran Lutheranism is a major branch of Protestantism that emerged under the work of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German friar and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practices of the Catholic Church launched ...

woman to be a bishop worldwide, and since then she has been re-elected for a second ten-year period. On 16 July 2010 she resigned due to allegations that she did not act on information about an abuse case in her ambit of the church in 1999.

References

External links

Official Biography of Maria Jepsen
(German) 1945 births Living people Bishops of Hamburg Women Lutheran bishops 20th-century German Lutheran bishops 21st-century German Lutheran bishops People from Bad Segeberg {{Germany-Lutheran-bishop-stub