National Evangelical Lutheran Church

The National Evangelical Lutheran Church began in 1898 at Rock Springs, Wyoming, where eight laymen and a Finnish Lutheran pastor organized a congregation under the name Finnish Evangelical Lutheran National Church of America. Its founders had either left the Suomi Synod or had never joined it, standing apart over disputes about doctrine and over how much freedom and autonomy a local congregation should hold against synodical authority. Theologically the new body stressed the forgiveness of sins and the certainty of salvation, taught baptismal regeneration, and held that a sinner could receive forgiveness once he had experienced a genuine feeling of his own sin, without the more extended process of preparation some other Finnish Lutheran teaching required. The church grew mainly among Finnish immigrant communities far from Rock Springs, above all in the copper and iron mining country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and along the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota, the same region that produced the Suomi Synod and the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America. It reported 10,300 members in 1902, its first decades of growth. In 1946 it took the name it would carry until its own institutional life ended less than two decades later, the National Evangelical Lutheran Church.

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.