Sweden's national church has taken a first step towards allowing gay marriages after senior clerics voted to draft an order of service for such a ceremony.
The Lutheran Swedish Church stopped short of promising to vote on the issue next year, but pledged to look at the document when its synod's meets again in 2004.
While any final ruling is still a long way off, advocates of gay weddings celebrated the decision by the General Synod, the supreme church body consisting of about 250 clerics and lay officials.
"The Swedish church has thus taken a prophetic role upon itself," lesbian pastor Ann-Cathrin Jarl told Reuters at the assembly in Uppsala, north of Stockholm, on Thursday. "We are the first major church that has come to that point."
A blessing ceremony for gay partners already exists in the Swedish church but it is not legally binding.
Church anguish over homosexuality has deepened, with the Anglican Church just managing to avoid a formal rift in London last week over gay clergy.
The head of the Swedish Church, in which most native Swedes are baptised, married and buried but which has some of the lowest church attendance rates in the world, warned there was still work to do before gay weddings went ahead.
"It is a step towards making this reality but a solid theological foundation is needed before the church can go further," Archbishop K G Hammar told a news conference.
Opponents to gay marriage have put forward a counterproposal for the church to only recognise marriage as a union between men and women -- which was rejected by the assembly.
"I feel disappointed. Although they had a majority here at the annual meeting, I do not think the majority of active church members will support this decision," said Nils Arne Rehnstrom, a priest from the town of Pitea in northern Sweden.
The Swedish Church, formed soon after German cleric Martin Luther split with Roman Catholicism in the 16th century starting the Reformation, is one of the world's most liberal on sexual issues, allowing gay ministers and gay marriage blessings.
But parishes and congregations on the west coast and in the north are more conservative than in Stockholm, which has a woman bishop. About 25 pastors are threatening to form a schism in opposition to ordaining women, which began over 40 years ago.