When her husband was dying, the woman who would become bishop of Oslo did not try to save his soul.

Sunniva Gylver remained by her husband’s side as he succumbed to lung cancer in the summer of 2021. But though a longtime pastor, she never tried to impose her Lutheran faith on her partner, a lifelong atheist.

“My experience is that you can never push or manipulate people into a healthy faith,” Bishop Gylver said. Salvation, she added, was the work of a higher power. “I’m not the one to save people.”

Instead, her focus is inclusion, not conversion, and since she became the bishop of Norway’s largest diocese less than a year ago, her calling has been to swing open the doors of the Church of Norway as wide as possible.

Before donning the deep red cloak when she was ordained as Oslo’s bishop in February, Bishop Gylver, 58, often sported a T-shirt that announced PREST, or priest, which she wore instead of a collar. The dreadlocks piled high on her head, as well as a silver ring in her nose, completed the unconventional look for a member of the clergy.

While her public presentation has made her easily recognizable, her atypical approach to evangelism has drawn even more attention in Norwegian media, even before she became bishop. When she was a pastor in a suburban neighborhood of Oslo who was looking to broaden the church’s appeal, she introduced yoga services and started a philosophy cafe.

“She symbolizes that Christianity in Norway is undergoing a big change,” said Aaste Dokka, an academic and an ordained Lutheran pastor. “When a person like her, a modern minister, becomes the official face of the church, I think that helps people recalibrate their image of what the church really is now.”

The Church of Norway was once intricately intertwined with Norwegian identity, and it remained the state church even as Norway transitioned over the centuries from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional democracy. As in much of Western Europe, membership has declined since the 1960s, and in 2012, a constitutional change removed reference to an official religion in Norway.

But since the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a shift. Young people, especially those under 30, have been turning up in the country’s pews more frequently in a time of political and economic anxiety and social disconnection, according to a Norwegian religious journal, The Lutheran Ecclesiastical Times.

Unlike some countries where more orthodox denominations are benefiting, here it is a progressive church that is filling up, in part thanks to leaders like Bishop Gylver.

“When Putin and Trump, in their different ways, are using Christianity, my religion, in a very politicized, destructive way, it’s really important for me that we, as a church, lift up our voices for justice, for solidarity, for welcoming the stranger among us, for less differences between poor and rich.” Bishop Gylver told journalists in the days before her ordination.

Since formally assuming her new role, her public utterances have become a little more circumspect.

“As a bishop, I should not point to specific people or parties to say, ‘This, and not this; that and not that,’” she said during an interview in September. “I don’t even have to name them, but we have quite a few world leaders that are practicing and articulating Christian faith in a way that is very foreign to me.”

As a church leader, she insisted she would always defend her interpretation of Christianity, in which justice is a central theme. The world, she added, did not need a “merciless religion.”

A strict vegetarian, she does not fly to limit her carbon footprint, and she has chosen to live in a studio apartment instead of the bishop’s official residence.

As part of her emphasis on inclusion, she raised the Rainbow flag over the Oslo cathedral to celebrate Pride Week in June. It was a precursor to the church’s formal apology to Norway’s L.G.B.T.Q. community this October for decades of discrimination.

When a member of the Christian People’s Party criticized some parishes for hosting iftar with their Muslim neighbors, the evening meal that breaks the Ramadan fast, Bishop Gylver pointedly shared an iftar meal with a local imam in March, as they discussed fasting at a time when Lent and Ramadan overlapped.

Bishop Gylver’s calling to the ministry was not a sudden, dramatic Damascus moment, but evolved, she said, after run-ins with the kinds of Christians she didn’t want to be. When her younger sister died at 15 after suffering from anorexia, well-meaning adults tried to find a greater meaning in her death.

“I didn’t want them to explain or to reason about it, I just wanted them to be there,” Bishop Gylver said. “I promised myself at this age of 16 that I will never speak easily or superficially about faith or life.”

In high school, Bishop Gylver remembers inviting her best friend, an atheist, to a Church of Norway youth service. She left the service “humiliated on behalf of the church,” she said, after the pastor derided other religions and world views.

More than three decades of marriage to an avowed atheist helped hone her answers to questions about religion’s failings. Her husband, Lars Kristian Gylver, proposed after three dates, when Bishop Gylver was just 20, and before the couple could ask each other life’s big questions.

Now that her three children are adults, she counts among them one who is “half-religious” and “two-and-a-half” who are atheists.

“I always had that outside-in perspective on my own faith,” she said.

Raised in Oslo by a doctor father and a secretary mother who was a committed member of the Church of Norway, Bishop Gylver studied theology because she wanted to be able to talk about her faith in a knowledgeable, respectful way. In 1990, when she was 23, she spent the summer as a substitute pastor. After ministering in a church, she decided to become a full-time priest, as Lutheran pastors in Norway are commonly known.

While a pastor, she was also an occasional talk show host on Norwegian TV, sporting a bleached buzz-cut while discussing life, faith and existence, and fielding religious questions from a live audience.

In 2016, leading a parish in the wealthy neighborhood of Fagerborg, west of the city center, she introduced a yoga service. Bishop Gylver, who is also an aerobics instructor, teamed up with a yoga teacher and laid mats on the grand stone church’s carpeted aisle, and combined asanas with a short sermon. Some conservative Christians accused her of opening the church to competing religions, and some even called her a “child for Satan.”

But the classes, and Bishop Gylver’s unconventional look, intrigued more people than they repelled. In electing her bishop, the council of the Church of Norway described her as a “down-to-earth preacher.”

Walking quickly on Oslo’s streets to an appointment with a philosopher to plan a discussion she was hosting on assisted dying, she was recognized by passers-by. The large wooden cross hanging around her neck and the T-shirt, which now reads BISKOP, or bishop, undoubtedly helped.

The membership of the Church of Norway is still divided on issues like same-sex marriage and the literal interpretation of the Bible, but the bishop has always maintained that, for her, it is right to marry same-sex couples in the church.

In the interview, Bishop Gylver declined to take a definitive position on some of those divisive issues. But her communication style — direct, simple language on the pulpit and on social media — has made her a “bridge-builder,” said Tone Stangeland Kaufman, the editor of the Lutheran journal. “In a way, she’s a populist,” Ms. Stangeland Kaufman said, adding, “in a good way.”

Going forward, Bishop Gylver has a clear sense of her tasks as bishop: “To stand up and to try to be very clear about what I think is the essence of the Gospel,” she said. “Justice and poverty are central themes.”

In her view, continuing her success in connecting with both regular congregants and the newly converted will depend on empathizing with their frustrations without ever condescending or making false promises.

“It is possible to nurture hope without faking, without pretending that life always will be good,” she said. “It will not.”