Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America

It was dissolved in 1967 and the other remaining member, the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, merged into the LCMS in 1971.

During the previous 20 years a number of new synods had emerged, the result of immigration from the Lutheran regions of Europe.

Meetings in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1866 and Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1867 led to the formation of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America.

[1] Despite its professed confessional stance, the General Council allowed divergent teaching regarding millennialism, altar fellowship, sharing of pulpits with non-Lutheran pastors, and lodge membership in an attempt to include the largest number of synods as possible.

[6] The Missouri Synod needed to build a new seminary due to overcrowding at its campus in St. Louis.

[16] The CLC maintained that both the WELS and ELS had misapplied the principles of Christian fellowship themselves by not breaking away from the Synodical Conference and the LCMS when doctrinal differences had first been perceived.

Its 1877 convention appointed a committee of three pastors to decide whether the Synodical Conference should devote attention to "heathen mission among the Negroes or Indians".

[19][20] The conference elected three members to oversee the mission work, and on October 16 of that same year, John Frederick Doescher was commissioned as a missionary to African-Americans.

[21][22] From October to April, Doescher toured the states of Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida to organize local mission committees to serve those who became interested in his work until a missionary pastor or teacher could be sent.

[23] The first congregation resulting from these efforts was organized in 1878 in Little Rock, Arkansas, as St. Paul's Colored Lutheran Church.

[26] In 1879, Doescher left the employ of the Mission Board under controversy over his willingness to preach in non-Lutheran churches, and Friederick Berg was called as his replacement.

Berg was frustrated in his effort when he found that three-fifths of the African Americans to whom he was sent already belonged to Protestant churches.

The population in the rural areas in which the Eastern Field was focused shrank as more people moved to cities.

The quality of public education for African-American students also rose, so Lutheran day schools became less popular.

In 1944, a report to the Synodical Conference stated that the Eastern Field had declined to 23 churches and preaching stations ranging from New York to South Carolina.

She wrote to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute, and he suggested she contact the Synodical Conference.

Upon receiving her letter dated October 27, 1915, the Mission Board sent missionary Bakke to Rosebud in January 1916 to investigate.

[37] The number of congregations peaked in the 1930s, and the Great Migration led to the decline of rural communities generally and Lutheran churches in particular.

[38] In the 1960s, as the Synodical Conference was breaking up, the African-American congregations and schools were absorbed by the respective geographical districts of the LCMS.

[39] The Synodical Conference opened Immanuel Lutheran College in Concord, North Carolina, in 1903 to train African-American teachers and pastors for the schools and churches that had been established.

[41] Nevertheless, Immanuel struggled to maintain its enrollment, and multiple resolutions to close it were made at Synodical Conference conventions in the 1940s and 1950s.

The campus was sold to the state of North Carolina, and the library was transferred to the Alabama Lutheran Academy in Selma.

The entire college was closed in 1925, in part because the lack of the seminary department prevented the school from meeting its primary purpose, but also because the conference decided the funds needed to erect new buildings would be better spent supporting Immanuel and the new college in Alabama.

[43] In 1919, the African-American congregations in Alabama petitioned the Synodical Conference for funds to open a high school and college to train church workers.

[44] The college was forced to close during the Great Depression and the remaining high school was renamed the Alabama Lutheran Academy.

[13] LCUSA itself ceased operations in 1988 upon the merger of the LCA and ALC that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).