Lurs kyrka

The parish's ecclesiastical history stretches back to the Middle Ages: an earlier church, thought to have stood just southwest of the present building, is recorded in visitation documents from 1391. Following a bishop's visitation in 1854, the decision was taken to build anew, and the present church was completed in the 1860s (sources differ slightly, giving either 1862 or a consecration spanning 1862–68) to designs by the architect Johan Erik Söderlund. It has been renovated several times since, most notably between 1995 and 1997, when the colourful decorative scheme seen today was reintroduced based on earlier colour schemes.

The building is a late neoclassical structure with white roughcast walls, a stone tower to the west, and a chancel projection to the east housing a rounded sacristy. Round-arched windows and doorways, copper cladding on the spire, and a red-tiled roof over the nave give the exterior its restrained, classical character. Sources vary on whether the sacristy dates from the 1860s rebuilding or preserves fabric from a much older, possibly thirteenth-century, structure; this point of origin is not entirely settled.

Inside, the church is light and spacious, with white walls, a green ceiling, and wooden floors that are painted in the pews and carpeted along the aisles. The chancel is not raised above the nave but is distinguished by a vault over the sacristy area. Fittings from the earlier church were retained, giving the interior a sense of continuity across several centuries.

Among the notable furnishings is a soapstone font from the thirteenth century, decorated with cord-like carving and a drainage hole, thought to belong to a group of similar fonts associated with a Norwegian workshop tradition. The altarpiece and pulpit both date from the seventeenth century: the altarpiece, in Baroque style, carries three religious oil paintings within gilded ornament, while the octagonal pulpit is painted brown with gilded details and painted figures of the evangelists, its sounding board added later, in the nineteenth century. The pulpit stair balustrade was adapted in the early 1930s, and the pulpit itself was last conserved in 1996–97.

The pews retain old panelled doors, though the pews themselves are of more recent date, and the choir stalls, also originally seventeenth century, have since been altered. The west gallery is carried on six green-painted wooden columns. The organ, built in 1891 by the Magnusson workshop, has a decorative case with carved ornament and has been renovated more than once. Two bells hang in the tower, one cast in Jönköping in 1874 and the other in 1959.