Maria Jepsen (born 19 January 1945, Bad Segeberg) was the 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 female 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.