Østre Porsgrunn Church (; also known as Østsiden kirke) is a parish church of the Church of Norway in Porsgrunn Municipality in Vestfold og Telemark county, Norway. It is located in the town of Porsgrunn. It is one of the two churches for the Porsgrunn parish which is part of the Skien prosti (deanery) in the Diocese of Agder og Telemark. The white, concrete church was built in a modern, rectangular design in 2019 using plans drawn up by the architect Espen Surnevik. The church seats about 500 people.
The church is located in the Kirkehaugen district of Eastern Porsgrunn. The church sits just east of Fylkesvei 356 at Kirkebakken 17. In 2011 the old Rococo style church that was built in 1760 was completely destroyed by a fire. A new building was completed on the same site in 2019.
History
First church
Planning
In the mid-1700s, the wealthy population of Porsgrunn wanted a new church on the east side of the growing urban area. The reason for this was mainly prestige but also politics, as the building of a grand church in Porsgrunn would prove that the growning village was prosperous enough to be a town in its own right (Porsgrunn is located a short distance from the city of Skien). Also, despite the fact that Vestre Porsgrunn Church had recently been built, there was no bridge across the Porsgrunn River, so the residents of eastern Porsgrunn had to travel all the way to Eidanger Church in Eidanger to worship.
The idea for a church on the east side of Porsgrunn was a few years in the making, but came to fruition due to the influence and capital of a few of the area's wealthy merchants, shipowners, and ironworks owners. On 9 August 1754, a message urging residents to donate towards a new church was sent out by four of Porsgrunn's most important men, all of whom were successful businessmen with connections to Danish royalty. The men were: Danish brothers Carl Deichman and Wilhelm Deichman, literary publishers and co-owners of Fossum Ironworks in Skien, Ulrich Frederik Schnell, owner of Næs Ironworks in Holt, and customs officer Thomas Lange. The fundraising campaign was a huge success, and within a short time, the men had collected between four and five thousand rigsdaler for the church. The land that was to be the future site of Østre Porsgrunn Church was donated by Friederich Biener, who owned the land as part of his Jønholt farm and used it as a pen for his horses.
Since they now had the land and the funds required, the new committee for Østre Porsgrunn Church just needed permission from the Dano-Norwegian government to begin construction. In 1755, they sent a petition to King Frederik V in Copenhagen. After four years, on 16 March 1759, they finally got a response, with the king giving the plan his endorsement. The plan would also need to be signed by the local government, and Bent Bentzen, who was the stadtholder in Skien at the time, reluctantly agreed, saying, "I cannot see why the construction of a church in the suburb of Porsgrunn would be necessary, except to reduce Skien, one of the oldest cities in the country, into a pile of rubble."
The merchants who funded the church enlisted local Skien resident Joen Jacobsen as the master builder for this project, who had proven himself a capable engineer and builder working on Brevik Church and Langesund Church in the years prior. Jacobsen had just finished work as master builder on the Vestre Porsgrunn Church in 1758 when he drafted up architectural plans for the new church in eastern Porsgrunn. However, when he sent his drawings in for approval, he was puzzled to find that the Danish architects had sent them back marked full of corrections.
Jacobsen had originally planned to make the church very similar to his previous one in western Porsgrunn, with a traditional Norwegian rectangular long church floor plan that represented the sacred road. However, the architects who were responsible for reviewing the plans, renowned architect Lauritz de Thurah and his apprentice Andreas Pfützner, wanted the church much bigger and with a cruciform floor plan. The architects assumed the church would be built using stone as most were in Denmark, and completely overlooked the limitations of wood in construction. Not wanting to upset the elite in Denmark, Jacobsen kept the revised plans. This meant the church was the largest wooden church in Telemark, but also one of the largest in all of Norway.