The North American 400th Anniversary

For anyone connected with Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition, 2017 was the kind of year that comes around only once every five hundred years. But this is just the beginning of the celebrations that we can observe in the coming years, such as Luther at the Imperial Diet at Worms in 2021, or similarly the Augsburg Confession in 2030, along with all the important dates in between. Yet we should not miss another important anniversary coming up in 2019, namely, the four-hundredth anniversary of Lutherans in North America.

1619 was the first verifiable presence of Lutherans in the New World, specifically, a party of Danish explorers seeking the fabled "Northwest Passage" to Asia. There are sketchy references earlier to "Lutheranos" in Spanish America, but in all likelihood these were mistaken identifications, based on the fact that the Spanish called all Protestants "Lutherans" even though these particular ones were actually French Huguenots. In the early seventeenth century many of the territories in Europe were sending out explorers and colonizers not only to settle the western hemisphere, but also to find and develop trade routes and trading stations in Asia. Not to be left behind, King Christian IV of Denmark ordered an expedition of two ships under the command of Jens Munk (or Munck) to sail westward in order to find a passage to Asia by going northwest between Greenland and Canada. This expedition of sixty-four men left Copenhagen on May 9, 1619, and among their number was a Lutheran pastor, the Reverend Rasmus Jensen. Probing around the islands and bays of Arctic Canada, the expedition was harassed by bad weather conditions and sea ice, until they finally found refuge in Hudson's Bay near the site of present-day Churchill, Manitoba. Here the short arctic summer quickly evaporated, and the expedition was trapped in ice for the long winter of 1619–20.

Things quickly took a disastrous turn, as malnutrition, scurvy, dysentery, and other misfortunes took a heavy toll. Pastor Jensen attempted to maintain regular religious life among them, and conducted funerals for the many who died (although the services had to be abbreviated due to the cold weather). To keep up their spirits, Captain Munk and Pastor Jensen provided the crew with a special Christmas Eve celebration. But the weather worsened and the health of the crew deteriorated after the New Year, with Pastor Jensen himself dying on February 20, 1620. The rapidly-dwindling crew continued to maintain a semblance of religious life by singing hymns and reading Luther's sermons among themselves through Lent and Easter. With just a handful of the crew left alive, Captain Munk was able to sail out of the bay in July, 1620, and he arrived in Norway in September, with only two other crew members left alive. Rasmus Jensen, the first Lutheran pastor to lead worship in North America, was also the first Lutheran pastor to die there. The Danes themselves later went on to found colonies in North America, namely, in the Virgin Islands in the 1670s and on Greenland in 1721, establishing Lutheran congregations in both places.

The Munk expedition to North America was not a particularly auspicious start to the Lutheran presence on this continent. But a century later there were thriving Lutheran populations in the British colonies in North America, and even some scattered settlements in the Caribbean. It is impressive that these Lutheran immigrants to North America were able, in the intervening centuries, to establish a thriving Lutheran community in this area, and almost all of it without the support of Lutheran states and state churches in Europe. The few state-supported Lutheran colonies in North America were hardly a success, and the Lutheran immigrants were generally on their own, especially beyond the colonial period. But more than this, Lutherans in North America had to develop a very new kind of Lutheranism, one that was adapted to a new and different culture. These Lutherans had to build their religious tradition without any state support from the colonies, and with precious little from back home. They had to figure out how and why...