Copper Country Immigrants Organize a Finnish Lutheran Church

In the 1880s, tens of thousands of Finns crossed the Atlantic to work the copper and iron mines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, settling in company towns such as Calumet, Hancock, Ishpeming and Negaunee. Many had belonged to the state Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland at home, and in America they found themselves without pastors who spoke their language or understood their circumstances. On 25 March 1890, delegates from Finnish immigrant congregations across the district met at Calumet, Michigan and organized the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The delegates elected the Reverend Juho Kustaa Nikander as the new body's first president. The church became known informally, and almost universally, as the Suomi Synod, from Suomi, the Finnish name for Finland. It grew alongside the mining communities that had produced it, reaching roughly 36,000 members in about 153 congregations by the early 1960s, and it functioned as more than a denomination: its Finnish language services, its newspapers and its mutual aid work helped an immigrant generation hold onto a language and an identity while learning to live in America. It was never the only Finnish Lutheran body in the country. The Laestadian revival produced its own Finnish Apostolic Lutheran congregations from 1872 onward, growing under a national governing board into the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America, and a smaller breakaway body organized in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1898 eventually took the name National Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Suomi Synod was consistently the largest of the three.