Maria Jepsen

Maria Jepsen (born 19 January 1945, in Bad Segeberg) is the former bishop of Hamburg in the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church. On 4 April 1992 the synod of the Hamburg Ambit elected her bishop, the first Lutheran 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.