A parish church is thought to have stood at Kville since the 11th or 12th century, built around the same time as nearby Svarteborg Church, though the exact date cannot be confirmed. That medieval building was eventually demolished to make way for the present church.
In 1853 Johan Henric Holmqwist became vicar of Kville, bringing with him the fervour of the Schartauan revival movement within the Church of Sweden. His powerful preaching drew such large congregations that the old church could no longer cope, and on his initiative a vast new church was built to seat 1,800 people. Completed in December 1864 to designs by the architect Hans Jakob Strömberg, it stands as a striking record of the strength of religious feeling in nineteenth-century Bohuslän.
The building has a cross-shaped plan with clear medieval echoes, dressed in an early Gothic Revival style. The chancel ends in three sides, the transept arms are unusually wide with stepped gables, and a heavy west tower rises to a slate-clad spire with pointed gables. Tall, round-arched windows sit in recesses along the outer walls, while inside the whitewashed walls are set off by well-preserved yellow-grey joinery.```
A persistent local legend claims that the church's plans were mixed up with those intended for a new cathedral in Härnösand, with the Kville drawings said to have gone astray and ended up used here by mistake — an amusing story, though its accuracy cannot be verified.
Among the church's furnishings, the six-sided font dates from the late 1600s and carries a carved frieze, while the silver communion vessels are eighteenth-century. The most historically striking object is the smaller of the two bells, cast in 1527 and bearing a two-line Latin inscription along with carved animal figures, including eels and long-tailed creatures depicted walking on two legs. The church interior was restored in 2014, when the original colour scheme was reinstated, and the church also has a mid-twentieth-century organ built in 1957 by John Grönvall's workshop, replacing an 1872 instrument.