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who also helped in starting Augustana College in Rock Island.
I happened across the Augustana Heritage website and saw photos of the early Swedish-American Lutheran church buildings.
The Swedes came over as unionistic Pietists. Their journal, which I helped archive at the college library, was called The Pietist in Swedish. They soon became disgusted with unionism and revivalism in the General Synod and linked up with the legendary Passavant, who had earlier passed through his stage of revivalism. Passavant and Eric Norelius, among others, helped Augustana become confessional, although they remained Pietistic in many way - and were honest about it.
Most of us at Augustana College did not know about this history, nor did we realize that Augustana was Latin for Augsburg, as in Augsburg Confession. Do not be surprised. One reader said his children, all products of the WELS education system, thought the Book of Concord was a repair manual for the French passenger jet.
Pietism won eventually, in the Augustana Synod, just as it did in WELS. The Wisconsin sect began almost the same way, during the same years. I know the Augustana pioneers fairly well, because of my dissertation on one of their professors.
If you look at the historic Augustana congregations, linked above, you will see the same soaring neo-gothic style of rural WELS and LCMS. They must have sacrificed a great deal to construct those halleluias of brick and stone. They were busy building schools, colleges, nursing homes, hospitals, and missionary societies in those days, too - not tearing them down, brick by brick.
Augustana became LCA, which became ELCA. The Lutheran Confessions mean nothing to ELCA. Their anticonfessional stance has allowed them to adopt the new gospel of pansexual justice. They working toward having open lesbians and homosexuals as ELCA bishops, following the Episcopalian and European models. Trans-sexual ministers are also on the agenda.
ELCA is in unionistic worship services and evangelism with all denominations because of its Pietistic Anticonfessionalism.
WELS is in unionistic worship services and evangelism with all denominations because of its Pietistic Anticonfessionalism.
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