A youth survey to be published today, Wednesday, indicates that young people who have been through confirmation school tend to feel close to their local Lutheran congregations. Armed with this finding, a number of delegates to the ongoing Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland are calling for a reduction in the voting age in parish elections from 18 to 16.
If the Synod approves the initiative at its meeting in Turku, those who attend confirmation school next summer will be allowed to vote in the parish elections of 2010. A minimum age of 18 would still apply for candidates in the elections elections for the parish councils.
The first signatory of the initiative, theology student 27-year-old Antti Siukonen, was critical that the version put forward by the Church Council would not allow the younger voters the right to vote in elections for vicar.
In some comments there were calls to allow children to have a sufficiently long childhood, and suspected that the proposal to bring down the voting age amounted to pandering to youth.
A recent study shows that only five per cent of eligible voters aged 18 to 24 cast ballots in the parish elections of 2006, while the turnout was 70 per cent for those over 50.
The Synod also discussed a proposal to apply the rules pertaining to terms of employment of civil servants to church employees.
The proposal contains a seed of controversy, as it means that rules against discrimination on the basis of age and sexual orientation would apply to church positions.
Conservative critics object to the idea that Lutheran parishes would have to approve hiring of people living in a couple relationship with someone of the same gender.
On Tuesday the Synod gave its approval to the new translation into Finnish of the Apocrypha of the Old Testament.
