Evangelical Free Church of America
Evangelical Free Church of America belongs to the Pietist and Free Church family of churches.
Governance: congregational.
Evangelical Free Church of America reports 1,602 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).
Free churches of the Scandinavian awakening — congregational, believer-centered, and famously disciplined about majoring on the majors, with a seminary that shaped a generation of evangelical scholarship.
Heritage
The Evangelical Free Church of America was formed in 1950 by the merger of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church (organized 1884 at Boone, Iowa) and the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association — free churches, meaning congregations free of state-church control, born of the Scandinavian Pietist awakenings and carried to the upper Midwest by immigrants. Its Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois became one of evangelicalism's most influential seminaries. RCMS 2020 counted 1,602 congregations.
Theological family
Evangelical: a ten-article statement of faith centered on the gospel, believers' church membership, and the authority of Scripture, with deliberate silence on secondary matters — the body historically speaks of the significance of silence, refusing to bind consciences where its statement does not; in 2019 it retired even its required premillennialism in favor of confessing Christ's glorious return.
Who decides what
Congregational: each local church is self-governing and owns its property, associating through districts and a national conference that credentials ministers.
What a first-time visitor would find
A visitor finds mainstream evangelical worship — contemporary music, expository preaching, believer's baptism — in congregations that usually carry local names with EFCA affiliation noted quietly.
What it has always cared about
The gospel at the center and liberty at the edges; church planting; lay ministry in the free-church spirit; and theological education — the Trinity faculty's work traveled far beyond the denomination.
Its gift to the wider church
The discipline of theological triage, practiced as polity: the EFCA built a durable national fellowship by writing down only what is essential and staying genuinely silent on the rest — a model many church networks now imitate without knowing where it came from.
Commonly confused with
With the Evangelical Covenant Church, its Swedish-awakening sibling, warmer to doctrinal breadth; with free churches in the European sense generally; and with independent Bible churches, which share its look but lack its connection.
Range of views inside it
Congregations range widely in size and style within a settled statement of faith; positions on secondary doctrines vary on purpose — that is the design.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation, and because many EFCA churches carry only local names, our data likely undercounts the family. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "EFCA congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.
Sources: Evangelical Free Church of America — statement of faith and history (EFCA) · The Significance of Silence (Arnold T. Olson, Free Church Publications) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)
Where Evangelical Free Church of America churches are on the map
643 Evangelical Free Church of America congregations appear on The Church Map, across 46 states.
- Minnesota — 96
- California — 70
- Wisconsin — 66
- Iowa — 46
- Illinois — 41
- Colorado — 28
- Michigan — 19
- Texas — 18
- North Dakota — 17
- Pennsylvania — 17
More of the Pietist and Free Church story · Find these churches on the map