Norwegians, Danes, and the Origins of the Evangelical Free Tradition
    by Frederik Hale (Volume 28: Page 82)

IN HIS RECENT appraisal of neglected aspects of Norwegian-American history, Kenneth O. Bjork lamented that historians have not fully understood the Americanization of Scandinavian immigrant churches, and observed that “the part played by Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, liberals, Mormons, and others in immigrant religions life has been treated only superficially.” {1} Among the “others” one might well include the Evangelical Free Church of America. Although this heavily Scandinavian denomination numbers fewer than 100,000 members, it is one of the fastest growing in the United States. Its seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School at Deerfield, Illinois, is among the largest in the country. It is surprising, therefore, that historians of Nordic immigration have generally ignored its roots. Theodore C. Blegen, despite his willingness to describe non-Lutheran religious movements, did not mention the Norwegian forebears of the Evangelical Free Church in his seminal Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition. {2} George Stephenson referred cursorily to one of its antecedents, the Swedish Evangelical Free Church, in The Religious Aspect of Swedish Immigration, {3} but naturally did not treat the parallel Dano-Norwegian body which played an equally instrumental role in the background of the present denomination. Members of the Evangelical Free Church have also failed to demonstrate much scholarly interest in its historical roots and development. The standard history of the denomination, a sketchy, popular book written to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of its oldest antecedent, contains numerous errors but little of analytical value. {4}

If scholars would examine more closely the forebears of the Evangelical Free Church of America, they would discover not only a colorful segment in the kaleidoscope of Scandinavian immigrant Christianity, but also a fascinating story of international religious influences and ecclesiastical assimilation. These early organizations were composed of revivalistic Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes who in the 1880s and 1890s shared the transatlantic expectations of the imminent Second Coming of Christ then current. In the United States, some of these immigrants founded the Swedish Evangelical Free Church in 1884, while likeminded Norwegian and Danish newcomers formed the Eastern and Western Evangelical Free Church associations in the 1890s. In 1912 the two regional bodies united as the Evangelical Free Church Association, which existed alongside the Swedish-American group until they merged at mid-century to form the present denomination. The formation of the Dano-Norwegian parent, whose origins are even less well understood than those of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church, is the subject of the present essay.

More than any other figure, Fredrik Franson (1852- 1908) deserves to be called the guiding force behind the Evangelical Free Church. {5} This Swedish American gathered many of the congregations on both sides of the Atlantic which eventually constituted the Eastern and Western Evangelical Free Church associations as well as the analogous Mission Covenants of Norway and Denmark. Born on a farm in the southwestern Swedish province of Värmland, Franson emigrated to Nebraska with his family when he was a teenager. Both his mother and stepfather had been active in mid-century revivals in Sweden, and lay preachers and colporteurs frequently visited their rural home. Franson’s own conversion, however, did not occur until he was twenty and suffered a lengthy illness. After his health returned, he joined the Baptist church in Ensteina, Nebraska, and became a lay evangelist among Nordic immigrants in the region.

Franson’s association with the eminent American revivalist Dwight L. Moody made a profound impact on the young Swede and, indirectly, on the Evangelical Free Church. {6} When Moody in 1875 returned from his two-year evangelistic tour of the British Isles - a crusade which made his name a household word in Scandinavia and the United States as well as in Britain - Franson moved to Chicago and joined his new Chicago Avenue Church. During four years of lay work among that congregation’s polyglot members and other Scandinavians in the Windy City, he became proficient in American revival methods, adopting nearly all of Moody’s proven techniques. He conducted awakenings in any edifice that would accommodate him, and addressed his hearers as sinners whose salvation depended on their immediate acceptance of Christ. Whenever possible, Franson supplemented his preaching with the songs of a gospel singer, just as Moody had co-operated with Ira D. Sankey. Finally, like Moody, he organized Bible courses to continue the fruits of his revivals.

Franson also became a millenarian in Chicago. Expectations of Christ’s Second Advent had waxed and waned since apostolic times, but apocalyptic fervor enjoyed a recrudescence during the nineteenth century. {7} Christians who awaited the return of the Son of God debated vigorously such matters as the sequence of apocalyptic events and to what extent, if any, historical phenomena fulfilled Biblical prophecies. But most millenarians agreed that the Second Coming was imminent.

The particular interpretation of Christ’s return that Franson adopted and that became normative in the Evangelical Free Church was developed by an Irish Protestant, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). This millenarian, who founded the small Plymouth Brethren sect, added a number of designs to the apocalyptic consensus. He foresaw both second and third comings. The earlier, which Darby believed would precede the time of troubles, or “tribulation,” mentioned in several New Testament passages, he called the “secret rapture.” It would be perceptible only to the true Christians, both living and dead, who would be united with Christ and protected from the tribulation. This rapture could occur at any time, Darby felt, a belief which added a sense of immediacy to his message. The prophecies relating to non-Christians, such as the binding of Satan and the Battle of Armageddon, would occur later. Christ would come a third time and conclude the history of the world. Furthermore, Darby believed that no denomination could encompass all of the present and past Christians who would be caught up in the secret rapture; hence, he believed that the true church was a spiritual entity, not a physically perceptible structure. Finally, like many other nineteenth-century millenarians and nonmillenarians, Darby divided the history of the world into a series of eras, or “dispensations.” {8}

Probably because of the influence and popularity of Moody, Franson accepted most of Darby’s eschatology. The Irish millenarian co-operated with the noted American revivalist during his visits to Chicago, and Moody gradually became a full-fledged Darbyite millenarian. James F. Findlay has concluded that “it is entirely possible that Moody came under Darby’s direct influence in 1868, and certainly no later than 1872.” {9} From the 1870s until his death in 1899, Moody frequently preached on the Second Advent and, beginning in 1880, held annual conferences in Northfield, Massachusetts, which many leading British and American millenarians attended and frequently dominated. {10} Moreover, William J. Erdman, a prominent Presbyterian millenarian, preached at Moody’s Chicago Avenue Church from 1875 to 1878, while Franson also worked there. It seems plausible that the young Swede became a Darbyite during those years.

In any event, Franson proceeded to Minnesota in 1879, where, equipped with Moody’s methods of winning converts, he worked briefly as a milleranian revivalist. Franson then departed for the lion’s den of Utah, where he spent most of 1879 and 1880 trying to reconvert Scandinavians who had thrown in their lot with the Latter-day Saints. Upon returning to Illinois, he began a short period of fruitful co-operation with another Danbyite, John G. Princell. Princell, himself a Swedish immigrant and a former pastor in the Augustana Synod, the largest Swedish-American Lutheran body, founded in 1884 the Swedish Evangelical Free Church. {11} The two immigrants continued the British and American tradition of prophetic conferences when they staged a “nonsectarian convention” in Chicago in April, 1881, to discuss questions pertaining to the Second Advent. {12}

Shortly after this conference, Franson left for Scandinavia, where he spent several years proclaiming the imminent Second Coming in controversial revival meetings which often surpassed Moody’s awakenings in commotion and the intensity of his personal appeals to those in attendance. Franson’s evangelistic activities in his homeland, which brought him into frequent conflict with the ecclesiastical and civil authorities who regarded him as a threat to the established Lutheran order, need not concern us. In January, 1883, however, he arrived in Kristiania (until 1624 and since 1925 called Oslo) to conduct revivals among certain Norwegian free-church congregations. During a year and a half of evangelistic work in Norway, Franson made a profound impact on many of the scattered Protestant nonconformists who, heeding his prompting, organized in 1884 the Norwegian Mission Covenant. {13}

The dissenters who invited Franson to Norway traced their spiritual roots to the separatist revival that Gustav Adolph Lammers led in Skien during the 1850s. In the wake of Søren Kierkegaard’s virulent attacks on the established Lutheran clergy, Lammers, many of his parishioners, and dissatisfied Christians elsewhere in Norway had severed their ties with the state church and organized independent congregations. Lammers eventually re-entered the established church, but many of his followers remained aloof, and more than thirty “Free Apostolic” congregations continued to function on a free-church basis. They sought to consolidate their work through a series of national conferences in 1863, 1870, 1874, 1877, and 1882. These meetings, which were structural roots of the Norwegian Mission Covenant, confirmed the autonomy of the local bodies but united them in a loose confederation headed by a steering committee. Bernhard Falck, a southern Norwegian teacher and merchant, emerged as a leader in the sporadic conventions that gave the scattered congregations a limited measure of cohesion during these early years. Little was accomplished, however, until Franson arrived in 1883.

Franson’s American revival techniques breathed new life into these Norwegian free churches. The peripatetic Swede traveled as far south as Arendal and north to Tromsø, leading awakenings in sanctuaries of several denominations, including, on occasion, prayer chapels of the state church. He also recommended house visits as a means of supplementing revivals. This, too, was an evangelistic method taken from Moody. “A few years ago, when Moody and Sankey conducted awakenings for three months in Chicago,” Franson wrote, “every home in this metropolis with its 500,000 inhabitants was visited.” He urged that this effort be emulated in Norway. With a note of urgency, he reminded his followers that “the sinner is dear, the time is costly and short, and the work to be done is spread over the whole world.” {14} To assure that there would be a sufficient supply of millenarian preachers in Norway, Franson designed and led short Bible courses. He held the first one in Kristiania for sixty Norwegians and Swedes in 1884. Franson described the backbone of the course as the “study of 100 to 200 of the simplest and most practical Bible texts, which can be best used as revivalistic arrows against those who are dead in sin and against backsliding.” {15}

Franson continually encountered stiff opposition from the state church during his year and a half in Norway and after he left that country. Hostile observers described him as an ecstatic and unstable intruder who showed no respect for traditional Norwegian forms of worship. They also depicted his revivals as chaotic assemblies where those in attendance were compelled against their will to participate in rowdy procedures. Spearheading the attack, the editor of the conservative journal Luthersk Kirketidende declared that the meetings had “considerably more in common with Franson’s spirit than God’s spirit.” He charged, further, that the Swedish-American evangelist relied on theatrics because he “does not possess real talent as a preacher, nor is a serious, thorough, and comprehensive proclamation of God’s Word his concern, His method, his procedure - if that is removed, Franson is nothing.” {16}

The same editor quoted approvingly a bitter article in the Methodist organ, Kristelige Tidende, which lamented that the revivalist had not emulated his teacher’s ecumenism. “When Franson came to Norway it was said that in his activities he would follow Moody’s example,” the Methodist newspaper reported. But “it was not long before he began to form mission societies with the goal of gathering all of the converts into a new kind of church with its own polity and activities.” {17} Franson was compelled to ward off such charges of sectarianism throughout his long stay in Scandinavia.

In the summer of 1884, shortly before the Norwegian Mission Covenant was officially constituted, Franson departed for Denmark, where he spent approximately six months attempting to awaken Danes with his millenarian message. Estimates of his success vary, but even his sympathetic Danish biographer agrees that he made few conversions. {18} Hampered by legal difficulties and state-church hostility, Franson was deported before he and his followers could give their evangelism the kind of structure needed to assure its continuation. Nevertheless, Franson and his associates, some of whom were Norwegians and Swedes who remained in Denmark, paved the way for the Danish Mission Covenant, which was organized in 1888. Consequently, his brief stay in Denmark merits examination.

To a small degree, the remnants of a separatist revival movement of the 1850s in Denmark, related to that which Gustav Adolph Lammers led in Skien and other Norwegian communities, supplied a basis for Franson’s evangelism there. Mogens Abraham Sommer, a Jewish teacher who had converted to Christianity, gathered several small congregations in Jutland and a larger one in Copenhagen during the mid-1850s but, like Lammers who ordained him, soon abandoned the movement which he had fostered. Some of the “Free Apostolic Churches in Denmark” dissolved, while others continued to function for several decades. The historian of the Danish Mission Covenant has asserted that “many” of Sommer’s followers affiliated with the denomination when it was organized in places where the Danish Jew had led awakenings. {19} The absence of detailed records of these loosely structured congregations, however, precludes any systematic analysis of the historical link between Sommer’s revivals and those of Franson in Denmark.

It is known, however, that Franson conducted awakenings in nonconformist churches of several denominations in Copenhagen and other Danish communities, and that his preaching again incurred the wrath of the Lutheran clergy. Vilheim Beck, a nationalist Lutheran zealot who headed the Danish Inner Mission and resented all foreign and sectarian intrusions into his country’s religious life, personally led the attack. {20} He accused the Swede of posing as a Lutheran to win the confidence of Danish state-church members. “Which church Franson belongs to is not known,” Beck wrote; “the Methodists refuse to co-operate with him, but he uses the American Methodist type of preaching while wanting to give the impression that he belongs to the Lutheran state church or accepts teachings.” He ordered pastors in the Inner Mission not to co-operate with this Swedish “nuisance.” {21}

One of Beck’s colleagues, Peter Krag of Copenhagen, questioned the sincerity of the conversions which Franson had ostensibly effected. “It is certainly that way at a paper factory, where one can see a soiled cloth go into one end of the machinery and come out at the other end clean white paper,” he commented. “But whether an ungodly man can go into a meeting hall one evening and emerge a few hours later a saved person, who has found rest in God because of faith in the forgiving of sins, ought to be doubted seriously.” {22}

The attacks on Franson’s revivals, designed to hinder the proliferation of religious dissent in Denmark, were counterproductive. Franson had hoped to co-operate with Danish churchmen, but as Emil Larsen has pointed out, their rejection forced him to work with independent groups and organize mission societies to proclaim the millenarian doctrines that the state church’s pastors seldom preached. {23} These local bodies did not coalesce to form the Danish Mission Covenant until 1888. Nevertheless, Franson’s influence on the larger organization is unmistakable. It embodied and preserved the Anglo-American revival methods which state churchmen disliked, and it added another facet to the religious pluralism which they feared.

Millenarianism was a second characteristic that both the Norwegian and Danish Mission covenants inherited from Franson and the tradition of Dwight Moody. Indeed, even before the former body was officially constituted, the journal which became its organ, Morgenrøden (The Dawn), devoted much of its first issue to one of Moody’s sermons on Christ’s Second Coming. Moody had assured his audience that it was “completely safe to take God’s Word just as we find it,” and quoted extensively from Revelation as well as from the New Testament epistles to stress the imminence of the Second Advent and to describe the secret rapture of the saints. “There will be a short period between his meeting the saints in the sky and his arrival with all his saints to exercise judgment over the ungodly, to bind Satan for a thousand years and erect a thousand-year reign of power and majesty.” {24} These Darbyite words echoed the message that Franson had brought to Norway only a few months before.

The editor of Morgenrøden, who stated that one of his central purposes was to propagate “the great and significant truth of the Lord’s return,” {25} printed many of Franson’s shorter millenarian works, often as serials. One series, for instance, taken from Franson’s lectures in a workers’ auditorium in Kristiania, began with a discussion of the Darbyite notion that Christ could return at “any moment.” “There has not been a single day or hour since the days of the apostles, when the remarkable occurrence which is discussed in I Corinthians 15:51 and I Thessalonians 4:15-18 or the resurrection of the justified and the transformation of the living believers could not have occurred,” Franson declared. “The bride must not wait for a sign, but for the bridegroom.” {26}

The leaders of the Danish Mission Covenant also generally adhered to the Darbyite position. “We have reason to shout ‘Alas!’ a thousand times at those who have no desire to come along and meet Him in the sky,” stated their newspaper, Morgenstjernen (The Morning Star). {27} This journal repeatedly stressed the imminence of Christ’s return: “The great communion of the Lord’s wedding will soon be held,” it announced; “there is still room for many guests.” {28} One Darbyite writer warned that those “who do not come along will find it hard to live on earth during this great, great tribulation.” {29} More frequently than its Norwegian counterpart, the Danish Mission Covenant warned its members that participation in worldly pleasures might prevent them from sharing the glory of Christ’s return. In one typical jeremiad, a preacher asked his congregation: “Do you want Jesus at an entertainment place? At the club, the theater, or a masquerade ball?” He warned that Christ would judge those whose ways had “led down to the boggy swamp of drunkenness and immorality, from which hell is the only exit.” {30}

Although Darbyism became the normative eschatology of the Danish and Norwegian Mission covenants, other forms of millenarianism also made minor inroads during the 1880s and 1890s. Among these was a school known as “historicist millenarianism.” In contrast to the Darbyite position, historicists believed that the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments were already being fulfilled, and they consequently interpreted such phenomena as Zionism and the rise of Louis Napoleon as signs of the imminent Second Advent. So many types of eschatology came from the United States and Great Britain to Scandinavia after 1880 that few could sort out the often contradictory messages associated with them. {31} Even Franson was temporarily confused. Although he remained a Darbyite, he briefly recognized the “year-day” theory usually associated with the historicists. According to this understanding of prophecy, “day” should be construed as “year” in Biblical passages referring to Christ’s return. Franson stated in 1884 that “the 1260 prophetic days or 1260 years” of papal power had ended and that therefore the events relating to the Second Advent were already unfolding. {32}

The evangelist soon abandoned this argument, however, because he regarded the year-day theory as a violation of the literalist Biblical hermeneutics which he espoused. But during the first few years of Franson’s revivalistic work in Scandinavia, he eclectically reproduced almost any shred of evidence that seemed to point to Christ’s imminent return. Morgenrøden carried his favorable comments about astronomical speculation in this regard. “It is a noteworthy fact which the astronomers mention, that the star of Bethlehem, or the same star visible at Jesus’ birth and which comes into view from our earth every 315th year, will again appear in the year1887.” {33}

The prediction of the influential English historicist Michael Baxter, that Jesus would return in March, 1896, and that the great tribulation would begin shortly thereafter, also found some acceptance in the Mission covenants. J. Madsen, chairman of the Danish body, translated Baxter’s “prophetic calendar” for 1890-1901 into Danish and published it in Morgenstjernen. {34} In response to the objections of some readers, the editor disavowed any firm commitment to the apocalyptic chronology, but did not explicitly disown historicist millenarianism. He regretted, however, that the Englishman had set a date, because “we believe it best to emulate those who expect our Lord and Master every day.” {35} The Danish Mission Covenant apparently lost interest in Baxter’s prognostications by the turn of the century, perhaps because his prediction of a French conquest of Germany in the 1890s failed to materialize.

As Ernest Sandeen has pointed out, a literalist interpretation of the Bible was a conditio sine qua non for nineteenth-century millenarianism. Inheriting a view of the Scriptures which antedated most modern Biblical criticism, “the millenarians assumed that divine inspiration had so controlled the writing of the Bible that the resultant text was free of error or fallibility and that this freedom guaranteed them a divine, not a human source of truth - an immediate and not a mediated revelation.” {36}

Franson’s view of Scripture, which he instilled in the Mission covenants of Norway and Denmark, fit this mold. His eschatology was rooted in thoroughly literalist hermeneutics, a rule which he sometimes accused other millenarians of violating. In his treatise on the Antichrist, for example, he challenged the historicists’ identification of the papacy with this archenemy of Christ. “In Revelation 13:18 he is called a ‘person,” Franson pointed out. “If the Antichrist is a person, then this expression cannot refer to the papacy, for that is not a person.” He also denied explicitly that “God’s temple,” in which the Antichrist would place himself, meant a church. “What is meant by ‘God’s temple?’ Answer: Just what it says. . . . To call Christians’ meeting places temples is completely foreign to the Bible. Nor is this any figurative language. . . and there is not the slightest hint of allegory.” {37}

Franson stressed repeatedly that the Bible alone should be the foundation of Christian doctrine and discipline, {38} a position that the Mission covenants always sought to follow. Biblical faith had long been a characteristic of free-church movements as well as lay movements in Scandinavia. But Franson’s heavy reliance on the Scriptures reinforced this trait, as was true of his preoccupation with eschatology. The close relationship of the Covenants to Franson tied them to the transatlantic community of Biblical millenarians during the last years of the nineteenth century, when many traditional views of the Scriptures were under fire. Both of these twin denominations firmly resisted the progress which radical Biblical scholarship was making in Scandinavia. As neither body had a theologian of any stature, they were compelled to turn to conservative arguments written by like-minded foreigners, particularly Franson, Moody, and the renowned London evangelist, Charles Spurgeon.

The organ of the Danish Mission Covenant, for example, quoted at length Moody’s statement that the Bible’s inexplicable passages were proof of its divine origins. “I am glad there are heights in the book that I haven’t been able to climb,” he proclaimed; “I am glad there are depths whose bottom I haven’t been able to reach. This is the best proof that the book came from God.” In the same article, Morgenstjernen printed his advice that “the best way to convert a nonbeliever is to show him the fulfilled prophecies.” {39} Borrowing this intransigent stance against the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible, which tended to view the Scriptures as being in part products of the cultures. from which they emerged, the Covenants placed themselves squarely in the camp of what is now widely known as “evangelical” Protestantism. Both denominations have maintained their commitment to Biblical literalism right down to the present.

Franson’s concept of the church was the fourth major element of his legacy which the Norwegian and Danish Mission covenants inherited. His ecclesiology revealed the influence of both Darby and Moody. To the former, the church was the invisible company of saints whom Christ would take up in the secret rapture. The visible churches of the world played no positive role in his theology. Franson accepted this notion of the church as an eschatological community whose members were often unknown to one another. But his understanding of this idea was tempered by the practicality that he gained from Moody. As the American evangelist’s biographer has observed: “In a strict sense he did not possess a doctrine of the church. . . . Rather, he simply paid little attention to it in a formal way, for his concern was to achieve conversions and to work with individual believers.” {40}

The same also seems true of Franson. Like his Chicago mentor, he was prepared to co-operate with any church - including that of Rome - and to hold revivals in any available sanctuary. His purpose, however, was to gather sinners into the spiritual church which anticipated the secret rapture. He initially advised converts in Norway not to secede from the established church. Rather, those “who cannot [conscientiously] commune with the unregenerate” should “let them, if they think fit, exclude you.” He maintained that “the dissenters in Norway have committed an error by seceding from the state church. It would have been better if they had all stayed there, even if some had been imprisoned like Hans Nielsen Hauge.” Christians hamper evangelization when they leave the established church, “for the moment they do that, they lose their influence on the state church’s members.” {41}

Franson’s ecclesiology, which evolved during his stay in Norway, directly shaped the Norwegian Mission Covenant. To this revivalist, the inclusive state church meant little. The independent congregations, or “mission societies,” which he helped gather, were the visible manifestation of Christ’s true church in Norway. Franson suggested modeling them after the Swedish Mission Covenant. {42} The Swedish mission societies, he remarked, did not allow nonessential matters to prevent various kinds of converts from uniting. Swedish Covenanters, he related, were tired of being told by some denominations that “you cannot be one of us because our confessions and statutes forbid us to accept those who do not believe this and that regarding baptism, communion, the state church, Luther, and so on.” He added, however, that the Swedes were “very particular about not allowing anyone who did not have life in God to become a member.” {43}

The Norwegian Mission Covenant adopted these principles at its organizing convention in 1884. According to its third rule, admission of either societies or congregations to the Covenant could occur “without regard to varying perceptions of those things which are less important for salvation [and] which do not conflict with life in God.” {44} The Covenant’s constitution did not specify these adiaphora, which Franson seems to have construed to include nearly all religious matters save Darbyite millenarianism and Biblical literalism. Given his key role in its founding, however, they almost certainly included the sacraments and membership in the established church, for these two matters have never determined membership in either the Norwegian or the Danish Mission Covenant. To millenarians, they are of little importance compared to the urgent task of proclaiming Christ’s imminent return. Even the form of baptism, crucial in many free churches, is a matter of considerable personal freedom in these two denominations.

The Danish Mission Covenant adopted similar views. Like its Norwegian counterpart, it was initially a very loose confederation of the independent mission societies which Franson and his associates had helped organize, and not all of these approved the formation of a closer union. The reasons for their opposition are not recorded. In any case, only five societies sent representatives to the organizational meeting in Ålborg in 1888, and the new denomination initially numbered only 695 members. {45} Although documents for its early years are sparse, it seems clear that the body followed Franson’s guidance along a path similar to that of the Norwegian Mission Covenant. His friend, F. Johanson, came to Denmark in 1884; shortly after Franson was expelled, Johanson sent to Copenhagen another Swedish revivalist, Carl Wiktor Gillén. {46}

The handful of lay evangelists who formed the Danish Mission Covenant expressed the wish “that all partisan walls, which the devil has built, may fall” and that all true Christians could unite. {47} Jens Jensen-Maar, a fisherman who came into contact with Gillén in the mid- 1880s and later served as the Covenant’s chairman, expressed a view of the church which characterized Covenant ecclesiology throughout Scandinavia. “The church which opens its doors to unconverted people cannot be God’s church, but neither can one which excludes any of them whom God has accepted as his children.” He added that “any congregation which consists 0f truly faithful and broad-minded people can become a member of this Covenant, regardless of its views on sacramental questions and minor matters.” {48}

The revivalism and renewed interest in millenarianism which led to the formation of the Mission Covenants in Norway and Denmark influenced Scandinavian-American Christians as well. In the 1880s several lay evangelists who had been active in Franson’s crusades in northern Europe emigrated to the United States, while other Nordic immigrants came into contact with Darbyite eschatology through the proclamations of John Princell and his associates, who founded the Swedish Evangelical Free Church in 1884. Severin Didriksen, for example, who had worked with Franson in Norway and preached at Bethlehem Church in Kristiania during the early 1880s, left his homeland soon after the Norwegian Mission Covenant was founded to join his older brother in Boston. Ludvig Ellingsen, a young Norwegian vocalist who also had co-operated with the Swedish evangelist, followed shortly thereafter and in the late 1880s took pastorates in Boston and Providence. N. P. Lang, a Dane who had been associated with Moody’s church in Chicago from 1864 until he returned to Denmark in 1882, went back to that city two years later; there he resumed his career as a revivalist.

These men quickly generated among other Scandinavian newcomers the same kind of religious movement they had been involved in Europe. In a letter to Missionæren, the organ of the Norwegian Mission Covenant, Ellingsen described his evangelism among Swedes and Norwegians in Rhode Island in 1890. “We have had blessed meetings here and there,” he remarked. “In one place God saved more than 20 children from 12 to 20 years of age, mostly boys.” {49} Lang reported that he had spent seven months in 1889 and 1890 traveling “over 2,000 miles in 3 states, holding revivals nearly every evening and often 3 times on Sunday.” He had also made “countless home visits in all of the communities which I have visited [and] where Scandinavians live.” Lang had preached in the forests of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula as well as in the cavernous Swedish Tabernacle in Minneapolis, where he worked briefly with Franson. {50}

As in Norway and Denmark, millenarianism furnished much of the impetus for this immigrant revivalism. Correspondence from the 1880s reveals that even in rural Midwestern settlements many Scandinavian newcomers shared the transatlantic eschatological community. Writing from Alta, Iowa, in 1884, Christian Corneliussen disclosed that Darbyite millenarianism dominated his view of the world’s destiny. “The times are bad,” he wrote the Norwegian Mission Covenant, “but the Lord will come soon to fetch His own and protect them in His abode until the tribulation is over.” Corneliussen had been in the New World for at least a decade and appears to have been unaware that a series of millenarian waves had arrived in Norway since his departure. During his youth, he complained, “this glorious hope had been lost or buried in form Christianity and explained away. . . . I never heard a word or received a writing by any pastor or teacher about this matter.” {51} Meanwhile, in Rhode Island Ellingsen, like Franson, pointed to signs of Christ’s imminent return, as did the Dane J. C. J. Klim in Iowa. {52}

The congregations that men like Ellingsen and Didriksen gathered remained relatively isolated for several years. They did not have a newspaper until American Congregationalists, from whom they began to receive educational and financial assistance in the inid-1880s, first published one for them in 1890. Shortly thereafter, members of that Yankee denomination assisted them in forming the Eastern and Western Evangelical Free Church associations, their first inclusive organizations. This initial lack of structure, and their millenarianism which seems to have discouraged preservation of church records, make it difficult to examine the origins of the earliest congregations. Consequently, the historian is often forced to rely on contemporary observations by native Americans.

One Congregationalist described the genesis of a Danish free church in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1882 a group of about fifteen Danes living there began to hold occasional meetings. They arranged for a Lutheran pastor to visit them monthly, but his inclusive concept of the church clashed with their ideal of a congregation composed exclusively of born-again Christians. A lay member of the group, a watchmaker named L. C. H. Haubroe, then assumed the pastoral duties. His ministry apparently sparked the little congregation, which began to hold several meetings each week. Haubroe began to preach in Bridgeport, Hartford, and other neighboring communities. He claimed to draw approximately one third of New Haven’s Danes and half of those in Bridgeport to his worship services, but admitted that attendance in Hartford was much lower. “Only a few are yet converted there.” {53}

In Boston, David Didriksen and Olai Johansen were the prime movers in founding a Norwegian free congregation. They first attended a Norwegian Lutheran church in that city, but were disenchanted with the failure of its pastor to stress the need for conversion. When Didriksen’s brother, Severin, emigrated to Boston, the three began to hold meetings in a Congregationalist church in Roxbury. The small congregation also soon encompassed several Swedish Americans. {54}

The Scandinavian Evangelical Church of Tacoma, Washington, was also a product of lay initiative. In 1884, sixteen Norwegian Americans in that harbor city began to worship together in a private home. They called as their pastor L. P. Paulson, a Norwegian Lutheran. The congregation soon affiliated with the Washington Congregationalist General Association. Lack of funds almost forced the group to disband, but a grant of $500 from the American Congregational Union allowed it to build a chapel and call a pastor. {55} In 1890 Paulson claimed that there were “many small brother congregations in the area.” {56}

These scattered Danish and Norwegian congregations, which probably did not number more than two dozen before the 1890s, emulated their counterparts in Scandinavia in striving to rise above sectarianism. Like Franson and Princell, they had little use for denominations and professed to abhor sectarian bickering. A Danish immigrant churchman complained that in the United States “one says: ‘I am a Lutheran,’ the other: ‘Methodist’ or ‘Baptist’ and so on.” {57} One of his countrymen in Iowa lamented to the editor of the Danish Mission Covenant’s newspaper that whenever he spoke about Christ, he was immediately asked, “What denomination do you belong to? What is the name of the church, the society of Christians, to which you belong?” When he answered “I belong to the same one as Paul, Peter, James, and John,” his inquirer expressed “doubt, astonishment, and scorn, as though such an answer were one of the stupidest which a person could give.” {58}

In line with their opposition to denominational zealotry, these immigrant preachers changed their affiliation from one communion to another with surprising frequency. John Hanson Meyer, for example, studied at the Baptists’ Morgan Park Theological Seminary in Chicago before his ordination at the Bridgeport Scandinavian Mission in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He subsequently organized Norwegian Congregationalist churches in Jersey City and Hoboken and held several Lutheran pastorates. {59} Another Norwegian immigrant, L. P. Paulson, was ordained a Lutheran pastor before taking the pulpit of the Scandinavian Evangelical Church of Tacoma. In the 1890s he served a Norwegian Presbyterian congregation in Minneapolis {60}

Millenarianism, the chief stimulant of the revivals that led to formation of the Norwegian and Danish Mission covenants as well as the antecedents of the Evangelical Free Church, became a chief characteristic of the latter from their inception in the 1880s. It was thus an element of continuity between the European and American wings of this transatlantic tradition. During the 1890s few of the Congregationalists who helped support the Eastern and Western Evangelical Free Church associations accepted the eschatology which was normative in them. Rather than awaiting the return of Christ and the end of history, most prominent Congregationalists of the Gilded Age optimistically perceived progress in the history of the world in general and the United States in particular.

Even Reinert Jernberg, a Norwegian-American Congregationalist minister who trained clergymen for the Free Church associations at the Congregationalists’ Chicago Theological Seminary, accepted the myth of progress. As editor of Evangelisten, the unofficial organ of the associations, he gave those two regional bodies a much less millenarian image than they deserved. Rather than continually urging his fellow Nordic immigrants to await the Second Advent, Jernberg pleaded with them to co-operate more closely with Congregationalists to preserve traditional, Protestant America from the rising tide of southern and eastern European newcomers. {61}

In spite of their teacher’s indifference to millenarianism, however, the Norwegian and Danish immigrants whom he educated remained eschatologically oriented. Meeting at Wesley, Iowa, in 1894, the Western Evangelical Free Church Association discussed vigorously the question “How shall we understand the doctrine of Christ’s Second Coming and the thousand-year reign?” Hans Josephsen, a Norwegian who had cooperated in gathering the Norwegian Lutheran Free Church of Milwaukee in 1887 and had graduated from Chicago Theological Seminary a few months before the 1894 convention, moderated the discussion. He stressed three points which, he believed, were matters of consensus among Scandinavian free-church immigrants and therefore should be discussed by the Association. First, among apostolic Christians “the hope of the Lord’s rapid return ignited their love and enthusiasm for the Lord and the advancement of His Kingdom.” Second, “the Lord’s return has become a very popular matter in our time and because of this ought to be considered.” Finally, “the doctrine of Christ’s return and the thousand-year reign has been falsely presented and thus perverted, so that, to many, such a teaching suggests a pie tire of terror, while to others it seems to be nothing more than fanaticism.”

The other ministers who participated in the discussion shared these observations and added some of their own. One theme that ran consistently through their comments was joy over the anticipated return of Christ These ministers were apocalypticists, but their millenarianism precipitated neither fatalism nor despair. Charles J. Jensen (1873-1940), an immigrant carpenter who conducted a lay ministry in northern Wisconsin, addressed himself to a common misperception about their eschatology. “Many believe that when Christ comes, the whole world will collapse,” he observed. To Jensen this was an unchristian fear, because with the Second Advent “a glorious time will begin for Cod’s people, while the ungodly will meet their judgment.”

Charles Nelson, a young Evangelical Free Church clergyman who later served Lutheran free congregations in Wisconsin and Illinois, agreed wholeheartedly, remarking that “talk of the Lord’s return is the finest music to my ears.” Nelson concurred with Josephsen that the Bible should be the only source of millenarian doctrines, as did Niels Julius Bing, an equally young immigrant. This Dane, who served briefly as minister of the Scandinavian Congregational Church of Britt, Iowa, before joining the ministerium of the United Danish Lutheran Church, combined millenarianism and Lutheran eucharistic theology. For a reason that he did not explain, belief in “the blessing and greatness that the Lord himself will come” reminded Bing “of the Lord’s presence in communion.”

Some of the clergymen who attended this conference agreed with Josephsen that recent interest in millenarianism meant the recovery of a long-ignored Christian teaching. K. Knudsen observed, perhaps a bit anachronistically, that “it is seldom that such a topic is taken up for discussion.” Bing echoed this belief, blaming the rigidity of the Old-World churches for neglecting the doctrine of the Second Coming. “I am glad the brethren here expect the Lord soon,” he told his colleagues, “and that the old dogmas of the state church no longer blind the people.” {62}

Kenneth Bjork has noted that the few studies of the assimilation of Norwegian immigrant churches that have been undertaken have been too narrow in scope. “Discussions of the subject of ‘Americanization’ have focused on language,” he wrote, “but the congregation of today was already largely formed while Norwegian was still the language of the pulpit.” {63} This brief look at the origins of the Dano-Norwegian antecedent of the Evangelical Free Church confirms Bjork’s observation. At least two decades before English became the predominant language of these immigrants, the lineaments of the present denomination’s faith had clearly been drawn. These included Anglo-American revivalism of the Moody tradition, resistance to liberal Biblical scholarship, belief in the imminent Second Advent of Christ as interpreted by John Nelson Darby, and a denigration of various adiaphora which have divided Protestants since the Reformation.

But this study also suggests that the process of Americanization was not simply a matter of immigrants adapting to the religious atmosphere of the United States, either before or after they began to preach and worship in English. Men like Ludvig Ellingsen and Severin Didriksen displayed the characteristics which became normative in the Evangelical Free Church before they left Norway, as did their nonemigrating countrymen in the Norwegian Mission Covenant and Danes in the Danish Mission Covenant. Rather than thinking in terms of the Americanization of Nordic immigrant churches, historians would do well to place such communions as the Evangelical Free, whose theological and religious roots lay chiefly in the United States and Great Britain, into the context of transatlantic Protestantism. Both before and after Scandinavian-American Christians adopted English, many participated in this international community, in which ideas and practices shuttled from shore to shore with surprising rapidity.

NOTES

<1> Odd s. Lovoll and Kenneth O. Bjork, The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1925-1975, 66 (Northfield, 1975).

<2> Theodore C. Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition (Northfield, 1940).

<3> George Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration, 287-291 (Minneapolis, 1932).

<4> H. Wilbert Norton et al., The Diamond Jubilee Story (Minneapolis, 1959). See also Hugo W. Norton, “The Contribution of the Evangelical Free Church of America to Foreign Missions,” an unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1955.

<5> No dispassionate account of Franson’s life and evangelistic activities exists. He deserves better treatment from historians than his laudatory followers and vilifying enemies - particularly the Lutheran clergy in Scandinavia - afforded him during his lifetime and after his death. The best account is Josephine Princell’s eulogistic Fransons lif och verksamhet (Chicago, 1909). For Franson’s revivals in Norway, see John Christensen, Verdensmisjonæren Fredrik Franson (Oslo, 1927).

<6> The best study of Moody is James F. Findlay, Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837-1899 (Chicago, 1969). Findlay, however, does not mention Moody’s association with Franson.

<7> Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago, 1970) is an excellent study of the various types of Christian apocalypticism which developed during the nineteenth century.

<8> Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, Chapter 3.

<9> Findlay, Dwight L. Moody, 251.

<10> Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, 174-176.

<11> No satisfactory study of the controversial Princell exists. The most revealing source is his memoirs, which his wife edited shortly after his death. See Josephine Princell, ed., J. G. Princells levnadsminnen (Chicago, 1916).

<12> The proceedings of this millenarian convention were published serially in 1881 in Chicago-Bladet, a newspaper which later served as the unofficial organ of Princell’s Swedish Evangelical Free Church. An edited version was subsequently published as a book in Sweden; see Fredrik Franson, ed., Utforligt referat öfwer forhandhingarna wid den forde profetiska ämnenas studier afsedda konferensen i Chicago (Kristinehamn, 1882).

<13> The best historical treatment of the Norwegian Mission Covenant is Ingulf Diesen, Det norske misjonsforbunds historie (Oslo, 1973). See also Diesen’s Fem foredrag om det norske misjonsforbnnd (Oslo, 1975).

<14> Morgenrøden, April 15, 1884.

<15> Leif Eeg-Olofsson, Oile i kroken: Olof Olofsson, forkuonare och frikyrkooriginal, 30 (Stockholm, 1957).

<16> Luthersk Kirketidende, May 23, 1885. Moody’s revivals were also severely criticized in other countries, particularly in Great Britain, by more traditional churchmen who disliked his “indifference to forms”; see Findlay, Dwight L. Moody, 145, 157.

<17> Luthersk Kirketidende, March 22, 1884.

<18> Emil Larsen, Historiske studier over kirkelige ogfrikirkelige brydninger, 86 (Copenhagen, 1965).

<19> Emil Larsen, “Det danske missionsforbunds forhistorie,” in Helge Rasmussen, ed., En dansk vækkelsesbevægelse, 22 (Copenhagen, 1963).

<20> Vilhelm Beck commented at length on his campaign against ecclesiastical pluralism in Denmark in his Memoirs (Philadelphia, 1965).

<21> Den indre Missions Tidende, March 8, 1885.

<22> Den indre Missions Tidende, March 14, 1885.

<23> Larsen, Historiske studier, 130.

<24> Morgenrøden, April 15, 1883.

<25> Morgenrøden, April 15, 1883.

<26> Morgenrøden, April 15, 1884.

<27> Morgenstjernen, August 1, 1889.

<28> Morgenstjernen, July 1, 1893.

<29> Morgenstjernen, April 1, 1893.

<30> Morgenstjernen, April 1, 1884.

<31> For a more detailed analysis of the impact of these eschatological cosmologies in northern Europe, see Frederick Hale, Trans-Atlantic Conservative Protestantism in the Evangelical Free and Mission Covenant Traditions (New York, 1979).

<32> Morgenrøden, May 1, 1884.

<33> Morgenrøden, May 15, 1884.

<34> Morgenstjernen, October 1, 1889.

<35> Morgenstjernen, October 15, 1889.

<36> Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, 111.

<37> F. Franson, Bibelns lära om antikrist, 2-4 (Hedemora, Sweden, 1886).

<38> See, for example, Morgenrøden, February 1, 1884.

<39> Morgenstjernen, September 1, 1890. See also Morgenstjernen, February 15, 1889, April 1, 1890; Morgenrøden, june 1, 15, 1883.

<40> Findlay, Dwight L. Moody, 246.

<41> Morgenrøden, November 15, 1883.

<42> The Swedish Mission Covenant, constituted in 1878, was an outgrowth of pietistic revivalism among Lutherans in Sweden. Despite the similarity of their names, the Mission covenants of Norway and Denmark had little in common with the Swedish body. For an excellent study of the Swedish Mission Covenant and its American counterpart, the Evangelical Covenant Church, see Karl A. Olsson, By One Spirit (Chicago, 1962).

<43> Morgenrøden, February 1, 1884.

<44> Morgenrøden, August 15, 1884.

<45> Morgenstjernen, January 1, 1889.

<46> Viggo Ramsvold, “Det første halve sekel,” in Rasmussen, En dansk vækkelses-bevægelse, 43.

<47> Morgenstjernen, January 1, 1889.

<48> Ramsvold, “Det første halve sekel,” 44.

<49> Missionæren, July 6, 1890.

<50> Morgenstjernen, April 1, 1890.

<51> Morgenrøden, October 15, 1884.

<52> Morgenstjernen, March 1, 15, 1890; Missionæren, July 6, 1890.

<53> M. W. Montgomery, The Work among the Scandinavians, 19 (New York, 1888).

<54> R. Arlo Odegaard, With Singleness of Heart, 101-102 (Minneapolis, nd.).

<55> Montgomery, Work among tile Scandinavians, 16-17.

<56> Evangelisten, February 1, 1890.

<57> Morgenstjernen, March 15, 1890.

<58> Morgenstjernen, August 1, 1894.

<59> Odegaard, With Singleness of Heart, 560; Evangelisten, February 1, 1890.

<60> Odegaard, With Singleness of Heart, 565.

<61> Reinert Jernberg, A Nation in tile Loom: The Scandinavian Fibre in Our Social Fabric (Chicago, 1895).

<62> Evangehisten, September 15, 1894.

<63> Lovoll and Bjork, Norwegian-American Historical Association, 66.