The 1964 Merger and the Congregations That Declined It

By 1962, on the eve of its merger into a larger Lutheran body, the National Evangelical Lutheran Church counted 11,142 members in 53 congregations served by 35 pastors, a body a fraction of the Suomi Synod's size that decade but a real presence in its own right among Michigan and Minnesota's Finnish American communities. On 1 January 1964 the National Evangelical Lutheran Church merged into the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, its congregations becoming members of whichever Missouri Synod district covered their location. The merger was not unanimous. Three congregations voted against joining the Missouri Synod and stayed outside it: Hebron in Toronto, Bethany in New York City, and National in Calumet, Michigan, the same copper country town where the Suomi Synod had organized in 1890. Hebron eventually joined the Lutheran Churches of the Reformation, a small confessional body formed by congregations that would not accept the doctrinal positions of the larger Lutheran bodies of the day; the other two continued on as independent congregations, outside any denominational structure at all. Of the three major Finnish American Lutheran bodies, the National Evangelical Lutheran Church was the last to lose its separate identity, following the Suomi Synod, which had merged into the Lutheran Church in America two years earlier; only the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America continued as an independent Finnish Lutheran denomination.