The Norwegian Lutheran Church in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Norwegian Lutheran Church in Irwin, Iowa in 1941.
Norwegian Lutheran Church in Irwin, Iowa in 1941.

Most Norwegian immigrants to the United States, particularly in the migration wave between the 1860s and early 20th century, were members of the Church of Norway, an evangelical Lutheran church established by the Constitution of Norway.

As they settled in their new homeland and forged their own communities, however, Norwegian-American Lutherans diverged from the state church in many ways, forming synods and conferences that ultimately contributed to the present Lutheran establishment in the United States

[edit] Early foundations

The first organized emigration from Norway to the U.S. were the so-called "sloopers" on the Restauration were religious dissenters. It is widely considered that many of them had Quaker sympathies, but it is also clear that many where adherents of the lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge, who was a devout Lutheran but at odds with the established church in Norway. By all accounts, the first preacher at the Fox River Settlement, where the sloopers ended up, was a layman by the name of Ole Olsen Hetletvedt, and in the Muskego Settlement, Even Heg's barn served as a place of assembly.

In 1839, Elling Eielsen, also a lay preacher, arrived in Fox River, but made it his mission to return the growing Norwegian colony to the Lutheran fold. He organized a house of assembly and was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1843, in the German-Luther tradition. Eielsen organized a synod among the Norwegian-American religious communities that was named The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but was usually known as the Eielsen Synod, its adherents as Ellingians. This was a decidedly low-church movement, with Eielsen himself refusing to wear ecclesiastical garb.

Eielsen's Synod struck an uncompromising doctrinal line for many Norwegian immigrants, and in in 1848, Paul Andersen and Ole Andrewson broke out of Eielsen's Synod and started the first Norwegian and Scandinavian Church in Chicago, joining the Franckean Synod. They stayed in this synod for only three years before joining the Northern Illinois Synod. In 1860, the same group started yet another synod, the Scandinavian Augustana Synod over theological differences with English Lutherans, who they believed were not faithful to Augsburg Confession.

[edit] Norwegian Language Churches

Although many churches in America have their roots with Norwegian settlers, most have abandoned the Norwegian language in the primary service. Two churches in the United States still use Norwegian as a primary liturgical language. They are Minnekirken,built in 1912 in Chicago, Illinois and Mindekirken in Minneapolis, Minnesota formed in 1922. [1]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Grodahl Biever, Joe (2004). "The Founding of Mindekirken" University of Minnesota.