Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church

▪ Protestant church, United States

      church organized in the United States by Norwegian and Swedish immigrants in 1860 in Jefferson Prairie, Wisconsin, as the Scandinavian Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Tufve Nilsson Hasselquist, an ordained minister in the Church of Sweden, was the first president. It took its name from Confessio Augustana, the Latin name for the Augsburg Confession, written in 1530 by German Lutheran Reformers. After its Norwegian membership withdrew in 1870, the church was composed primarily of Swedish immigrants and their descendants.

      The first congregations were organized in New Sweden, Iowa (1848), served by a lay pastor, and in Andover, Illinois (1850), served by Lars P. Esbjörn, the pioneer Swedish missionary pastor to the Swedish immigrants of the Midwest. Under the leadership of Esbjörn and Hasselquist, many congregations were started, and Augustana College and Theological Seminary, in Rock Island, Illinois, was organized, with Esbjörn as its first president.

      A member of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of North America, an association of Lutheran synods organized in 1867, Augustana withdrew when that group became part of the United Lutheran Church in America in 1918. In 1962, however, the Augustana church (with more than 600,000 members) merged with the United Lutheran Church in America, the American Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church (Suomi Synod) to form the Lutheran Church in America, which in turn merged into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1988.

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