The first church at Kinsarvik was a small wooden church with roof and walls supported by poles dug into the ground. This church must have been built already around the year 1000. It was replaced by the present stone church towards the end of the 1100s. The west portal of the nave and the south portal in the chancel have details that show a relationship with the transitional style between the Romanesque and Gothic styles, as we know them from England in the second half of 1100. It may have been the Cistercian monks at Lyse Monastery who brought this style to the west of Norway.
In the nave are remains of medieval frescoes; a domes-day depiction of the Archangel Michael, “St. Michael” who weighs souls in a pair of scales. The alter piece is from the 1690s, the christening font, of steatite, is from the Middle Ages. The pulpit has a special shape. Originally it may have stood in front of the chancel arch as a so-called lektoriepreikestol; a pulpit that is unusual in Norway. The pulpit, painted by Petrus Reimers from Neustadt in 1609, was donated to the church by the king’s servant Jørgen Brockenhuus. During the restoration in 1961 the old gallery front was put back in place.
