Grip Stave Church belongs to the More type of stave construction, sharing its structural DNA with the larger Kvernes and Rodven stave churches on the mainland. Its single nave measures just 12 meters long, 6.5 meters wide, and 6 meters high, making it one of Norway's smallest churches. The builders placed it at the island's highest point not for grandeur but for survival: in an archipelago where storm surges had repeatedly devastated the village, elevation was the closest thing to safety. Major modifications came in 1621, when portions of the walls were rebuilt and a fleche, a slender spire, was added to the roof. New windows arrived in the 1870s, along with a weaponhouse and sacristy. A 1933 restoration led by John Tverdahl gave the church a new foundation and paneled its exterior walls, but most of the original walls and roof survive to this day.

The church's most remarkable treasure is its altar, a triptych from Utrecht in the Netherlands dating to around 1520. The central panel holds a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, flanked by Saint Olaf of Norway and Saint Margaret the Virgin, known locally as St. Maret. According to legend, the triptych is one of five altars donated to Norwegian coastal churches by Princess Isabella of Austria. In 1515, Isabella was being escorted to Copenhagen for her wedding to the Danish king Christian II by Erik Valkendorf, Archbishop of Norway, when they encountered terrible weather. The grateful princess donated altars to churches along the route that had sheltered or guided them. The other four went to Kinn, Leka, Hadsel, and Rost churches. Art historians call them the Leka group, and while four of the five original altars survive, Grip alone retains its complete altar in the church for which it was intended.

The triptych's survival through the Protestant Reformation of 1537 is something of a puzzle. Across Norway, images of saints were stripped from churches, and altarpieces were destroyed or defaced. Grip's remoteness may have been its salvation: reformers may simply never have bothered to sail twelve kilometers into the Norwegian Sea to purge three medieval saints from a tiny island church. The church played its own small role in Norwegian independence when it served as an election church in 1814, one of more than three hundred parish churches where citizens voted in Norway's first national elections for the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution at Eidsvoll Manor. After the fishing village began to decline following World War II and was finally abandoned in 1974, the church found a new rhythm. A priest from Kristiansund leads worship services every third Sunday during summer, attended by seasonal residents and tourists who arrive by ferry.

In 2006, the church received a new pipe organ from the Netherlands, custom built with 270 wooden pipes. But because the island's damp, salt-laden air would damage the instrument if left year-round, the organ lives a migratory existence. Each summer it is installed in the stave church for the season; each autumn it returns to Kirkelandet Church in Kristiansund, where it continues to be played through the winter months. The church also holds an altar cup from 1320, predating the building itself, a sixteenth-century double-sided painting on canvas, murals from the 1621 renovation, and two votive ships hanging from the ceiling, the traditional offering of fishing communities who depended on the sea for their lives and livelihoods. Together, these objects form a collection out of all proportion to the church's size, a reminder that remoteness and poverty did not mean cultural poverty.