The earliest existing historical records of the church date back to the year 1307, but there is reason to believe that the stave church present then was already old. The church was likely built during the 12th century. According to local tradition, the oldest church must have stood on Monen, a former arid area about Шаблон:Convert south of the current church, by the river Mandalselva. Around the year 1550, an old Holum Church was torn down and replaced with a timber-framed building with a long church design on the same site where the present church sits.[3][4]
In 1814, this church served as an election church (Шаблон:Lang-no).[5] Together with more than 300 other parish churches across Norway, it was a polling station for elections to the 1814 Norwegian Constituent Assembly which wrote the Constitution of Norway. This was Norway's first national elections. Each church parish was a constituency that elected people called "electors" who later met together in each county to elect the representatives for the assembly that was to meet in Eidsvoll later that year.[5][6]
In 1823, the church was again torn down and a new cruciform church was built on the same site. The new church was mostly completed in 1824 and consecrated on 4 September 1825 by the Bishop Johan Storm Munch.[3][4]
