A Congregation Excluded From Communion Becomes a Church

The Apostolic Lutheran Church of America traces its origin to a rupture within the Laestadian revival, the pietist movement begun in Swedish Lapland in the 1840s by the Sami and Finnish pastor Lars Levi Laestadius and carried to America by Finnish and Norwegian immigrants. In December 1872, a group excluded from the sacrament of holy communion by other American Laestadians organized a congregation of their own under the leadership of Salomon Korteniemi, calling it the Salomon Korteniemi Lutheran Society. In 1879 the young body renamed itself the Finnish Apostolic Lutheran Congregation, and it continued under variations of that name as it grew. Similar congregations, organized on the same basis among Finnish and Norwegian immigrant communities, took shape through the following decades in Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota and Oregon, and these joined into a shared national fellowship as the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America. Unlike the Suomi Synod, a body it long stood alongside among Finnish American Lutherans, the Apostolic Lutheran Church never organized around a single denominational headquarters or a seminary of its own. Its congregations shared instead a common insistence on Laestadian doctrine and practice, holding to the creeds of the Evangelical Lutheran church and to Luther's Small Catechism while emphasizing repentance, the felt experience of sin and the spoken assurance of its forgiveness.