Lutheran

Churches confessing the Augsburg Confession, from the German and Scandinavian Reformation.

The first Protestants: churches of the Augsburg Confession, still insisting — to everyone, including each other — that sinners are justified by grace alone, through faith alone.

Heritage

Martin Luther's protest of 1517 became a confessing church at Augsburg in 1530; the Book of Concord (1580) gathered the Lutheran confessions. Lutherans worshiped in the American colonies from the 1600s; Henry Melchior Muhlenberg organized the first American synod, the Ministerium of Pennsylvania, in 1748; and massive German and Scandinavian immigration planted Lutheranism across the Midwest. A long century of mergers produced the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1988, while the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (1847) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod continue as confessionally stricter bodies apart.

Theological family

Justification by grace through faith as the article by which the church stands or falls; Law and Gospel as the way to read all of Scripture; the real presence of Christ in the Supper; baptism, including of infants, as God's act. The Augsburg Confession defines the family; how strictly the full Book of Concord binds is part of what divides its bodies.

Who decides what

A family mix: the ELCA has bishops, the LCMS and WELS elected presidents; everywhere congregations call their pastors and synodical assemblies decide together. No Lutheran body answers to any authority overseas.

What a first-time visitor would find

Liturgical worship: confession and absolution, the lectionary, the creed, strong congregational singing — Lutherans wrote the chorales, and "A Mighty Fortress" is the family anthem — with communion weekly or frequent, and preaching that distinguishes Law from Gospel on purpose.

What it has always cared about

Catechesis — generations have memorized Luther's Small Catechism; church music from chorale to cantata (Bach was a Lutheran parish musician); vocation, the teaching that ordinary work is holy calling; schools and colleges; and social ministry — Lutheran service agencies are among the nation's largest.

Its gift to the wider church

The doctrine of justification on which the whole Reformation stood; the chorale, which taught Protestantism to sing its theology; the theology of vocation, which dignified every layperson's Monday; and the catechism as a model of Christian instruction that traditions far from Wittenberg still imitate.

Commonly confused with

The bodies with each other — the profound ELCA/LCMS/WELS differences are invisible in the word "Lutheran" on a sign. The word "evangelical" in Lutheran titles is the old European term for Protestant, not the American movement. And German Reformed heritage (the E&R stream now in the UCC) is a different family despite shared immigrant geography.

Range of views inside it

Real and public: the ELCA ordains women, is in full communion with several Reformed, Anglican and Methodist bodies, and takes progressive positions; the LCMS and WELS practice closed communion and a male pastorate and hold Scripture's inerrancy confessionally. Each position is attributed to its body; none is family-wide.

A note from the mapmakers: A congregation's Lutheran body can rarely be read from its name, and everything contested above differs by body: assert nothing of a specific congregation. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Lutheran congregations typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.

Sources: The Book of Concord (Fortress Press) · Lutherans in America: A New History (Mark Granquist, Fortress Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where Lutheran churches are on the map

15,905 Lutheran congregations appear on The Church Map, across 54 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1839–1890 — The Lutheran migrations

    Waves of German and Scandinavian immigrants carried confessional Lutheranism into the Midwest — Saxons to Missouri in 1839, whose leaders founded the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1847; the Wisconsin Synod in 1850; Norwegian, Swedish and Danish synods after them. For decades each worshiped in its own language, a family of parallel churches divided mostly by the boats their founders arrived on.

    Most Lutheran division in America was never doctrine — it was language and distance, and the twentieth century spent itself mending it.

  • 1960–1977 — The charismatic renewal crosses every border

    When Episcopal rector Dennis Bennett told his Van Nuys congregation in 1960 that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal experience jumped the denominational fence — into Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and, from the 1967 Duquesne weekend, Catholic life. The 1977 Kansas City conference drew some fifty thousand charismatics, roughly half of them Catholic, worshiping in one stadium.

    A renewal that began at a segregated-out revival in 1906 ended up praying in every tradition's sanctuary — the most border-crossing spiritual movement in American history.

  • 1960–1963 — The Lutheran consolidations: many synods become three

    Lutheran America had arrived synod by synod, language by language — Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Finnish, Slovak. Between 1960 and 1963 most of them consolidated: the American Lutheran Church in 1960, the Lutheran Church in America in 1962. What had been a scattered map of ethnic synods became three large bodies, and two of the three merged again in 1988.

    A generation of mergers turned a dozen immigrant synods into a church that no longer needed to ask which boat you came on.

  • 1962–1965 — Vatican II opens the ecumenical era

    The Second Vatican Council transformed Catholic relations with other Christians: its Decree on Ecumenism spoke of other believers as separated brothers and sisters, commended shared prayer, and launched formal dialogues with Lutherans, Anglicans, Orthodox, Methodists and Reformed churches that continue today. In America, Catholics and Protestants began praying, studying and serving together in ways illegal to imagine a generation earlier.

    The largest church in the country turned toward the others and called them family. Almost every unity story after 1965 runs partly through this door.

  • 1973 — Key 73: a continent called to Christ together

    More than 140 denominations and church bodies — evangelical, mainline, and dozens of Catholic dioceses — undertook simultaneous evangelism across North America in 1973 under the theme "Calling Our Continent to Christ." It was the broadest formal evangelistic cooperation in American history, and Catholic participation in a joint evangelistic year was without precedent.

    For one year, nearly the whole width of this taxonomy knocked on doors at the same time, on purpose.

  • 1976 — Habitat for Humanity

    Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity in 1976 out of Koinonia Farm — Clarence Jordan's interracial Christian community in south Georgia, planted by a white Baptist preacher in 1942 at real personal cost. "The theology of the hammer": people who disagree about nearly everything can drive nails side by side.

    Fuller's phrase says the whole thing: whatever divides the traditions, the hammer does not ask.

  • 1988 — Lutherans gather the migrations into one church

    The Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches — themselves the products of a century of smaller unions across German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish synods — merged in 1988 into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran body in the hemisphere.

    Dozens of immigrant synods, divided mostly by language and memory, finished a hundred-year walk into one church.

  • 1996 — Alpha crosses the Atlantic

    The Alpha course — a dinner-table introduction to Christianity from Holy Trinity Brompton, an Anglican parish in London — spread through the US from the mid-1990s into tens of thousands of congregations: Catholic parishes run it, as do Baptist, Pentecostal, Lutheran and non-denominational churches, largely unaltered.

    A single Anglican parish's supper course became common property of nearly every tradition in this taxonomy — proof that the traditions will gladly borrow from each other when the gift is good.

  • 1997–2009 — The healing documents

    On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

    The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.

  • 2001–2010 — The Lutheran realignment

    Congregations departing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America formed two new bodies: Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ in 2001, out of the WordAlone movement's objections to the 1999 full-communion agreement with the Episcopal Church, and the North American Lutheran Church in 2010 at Columbus, Ohio, after the ELCA's 2009 decisions on sexuality. Hundreds of congregations realigned; all three bodies continue to confess the Augsburg Confession.

  • 2009–2016 — Repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery

    One after another — the Episcopal Church (2009), the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterians, the ELCA (2016), and others — American denominations formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, the centuries-old legal theology used to justify the seizure of Native lands, and began reckoning publicly with their own missions' entanglement in it, including the boarding schools.

    Repentance became something traditions did in each other's sight — each repudiation citing the others, a chain of confession running across the mainline.

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