The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is a mainline Protestant Lutheran church headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The ELCA was officially formed on January 1, 1988, by the merging of three Lutheran church bodies. As of 2021, it has approximately 3.04 million baptized members in 8,724 congregations.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada is Canada's largest Lutheran denomination, with 95,000 baptized members in 519 congregations, with the second largest, the Lutheran Church–Canada, having 53,165 baptized members. Together with the LCC and the Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations, it is one of only three all-Canadian Lutheran denominations. It is a member of the Lutheran World Federation, the Canadian Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and the Anglican-Lutheran North American grouping Churches Beyond Borders. According to the 2011 Canadian census, a larger number of 478,185 adherents identify as Lutheran.
Mark S. Hanson is an American bishop who served as the third Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Before being elected presiding bishop, he served as bishop of the Saint Paul Area Synod as well as pastor of three Minnesota congregations: Prince of Glory Lutheran Church, Minneapolis; Edina Community Lutheran Church; and University Lutheran Church of Hope in Minneapolis. In addition to serving as Presiding Bishop, Hanson was the 11th President of the Lutheran World Federation.
1517 Media, formerly Augsburg Fortress Press, is the official publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). It also publishes for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada as Augsburg Fortress Canada. Headquartered on South Fifth Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the former headquarters of the American Lutheran Church, Augsburg Fortress publishes Living Lutheran, the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), the Lutheran Study Bible, and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), as well as a range of academic, reference, and educational books. Tim Blevins has served as the CEO of 1517 Media since August, 2018. Beth Lewis served as the CEO of Augsburg Fortress since September 3, 2002.
The Lutheran Church in America (LCA) was an American and Canadian Lutheran church body that existed from 1962 to 1987. It was headquartered in New York City and its publishing house was Fortress Press.
The Lutheran Confessional Synod (LCS) was a Confessional Lutheran church, characterized by a strict interpretation of the Lutheran Confessions and a historical liturgy. Organized in 1994, when Christ Lutheran Church in Decatur, Illinois, broke away from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, it initially declared doctrinal agreement with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, but broke fellowship with those two synods on June 14, 1997, because of differences in the doctrine of the ministry and the Lord's Supper. The LCS organized the Johann Gerhard Institute and St. Anselm Theological Seminary in 1996.
The Slovak Zion Synod is a group of 20 Lutheran congregations and one of the 65 synods that make up the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It is the only non-geographic synod in the ELCA, the only ELCA synod to have a congregation in Canada, and the only synod defined by its mission and outreach, instead of geography. The synod was founded by Slovak immigrants in 1919 as the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Zion Synod and joined with the United Lutheran Church in America, remaining as a separate synod in that denomination. The policy continued when the ULCA merged into the Lutheran Church in America (1962) and later the ELCA (1988).
First Lutheran Church is a Lutheran congregation in Albany, New York. Founded in 1649 as Ebenezer Lutheran Church, First Lutheran is the oldest congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the only congregation in the ELCA to be founded while New York was under control of the Dutch, and the oldest Lutheran congregation in the United States. When the congregation was founded, it was a part of the Dutch settlement of New Netherland; it later adopted German and then English in 1808 for use during worship. The congregation began to use the name First Lutheran Church in 1871.
First United Lutheran Church is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), located in San Francisco, California. Formed in 1886, it was the first Lutheran congregation in California to use English as its primary language for worship. In 1990, First United was suspended, and later expelled from the ELCA for ordaining an openly gay pastor, against the wishes of the denomination. The ELCA Churchwide Assembly voted to approve openly gay clergy in 2009, and in 2012, First United rejoined the denomination. Presently a "church without walls," First United meets in St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, located at 2097 Turk Street, near the main campus of the University of San Francisco.
Kountze Memorial Lutheran Church is located at 2650 Farnam Street in Midtown Omaha, Nebraska. Organized on December 5, 1858, as Emanuel's Evangelical Lutheran Church, the church is thought to be the first Lutheran congregation organized west of the Missouri River. In the 1920s the church was credited with being the largest Lutheran congregation in the United States.
Religion in Atlanta, while historically centered on Protestant Christianity, now involves many faiths as a result of the city and metro area's increasingly international population. While Protestant Christianity still maintains a strong presence in the city, in recent decades Catholic Christians have gained a strong foothold due to migration patterns. Atlanta also has a considerable number of ethnic Christian congregations, such as Korean Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian Churches, the Tamil Church Atlanta, Telugu Church, Hindi Church, Malayalam Church, Ethiopian, Chinese, and many more traditional ethnic religious groups. Large non-Christian faiths are present in the form of Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Overall, there are over 1,000 places of worship within Atlanta.
The 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly was the eleventh biennial Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It convened in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, from August 17–23, 2009. The Churchwide Assembly is the 'highest legislative authority' of the ELCA.
Leonard H. Bolick is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and served as the bishop of the North Carolina Evangelical Lutheran Synod from 1997 to 2015. Bolick is known for seeking ecumenical reconciliation and improving relations with the Roman Catholic Church in North Carolina while he has been bishop. Prior to serving as Bishop of North Carolina, Bolick served as a pastor at Calvary Evangelical Lutheran Church in Concord, North Carolina and St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He later joined the Bishop of North Carolina's personal staff and served in youth ministry and evangelism, and was a member of the Synod's transition team. He was consecrated as Bishop of the North Carolina Synod on February 2, 1997. He was succeeded in this position by Timothy Smith, who was officially installed as bishop of the North Carolina Synod on September 12, 2015.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, also known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and the Other States (ELCROS), is a Lutheran denomination that itself comprises seven regional Lutheran denominations in Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan as well as individual congregations in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Established in its current form in 1999, ELCROS currently has about 24,050 members in more than 400 congregations within its jurisdiction.
R. Guy Erwin (Osage) is an American Lutheran bishop. He was elected in 2013 to a six-year term as bishop of the Southwest California Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Since August 2020, he has served as president of the United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia.
St. John's Lutheran Church is a Lutheran church in Atlanta, Georgia. First organized in 1869, the church moved to its current location in 1959.
April Ulring Larson is an American retired Lutheran bishop. In 1992, she became the first woman to be elected to serve as a bishop by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
Christ Lutheran Church on Capitol Hill is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in the Thomas-Dale neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States.
St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran Church (SSLC) is a historic Lutheran Church at 119 N Church Street in Lexington, South Carolina. The Church is affiliated with the ELCA as a member of the South Carolina Synod. The church holds worship on Sundays at 8:30 AM and 11 AM as well as on Wednesdays at Noon and livestreams each of these services on the church's YouTube Channel. Current pastors are Jason Antley and Ralph Hill. As of the SC Synod's 2020 annual report, St. Stephen's has 1,716 baptized members and 1,100 active participants, which is the most of any ELCA Congregation in South Carolina. The same report also lists the church as having the third highest average online attendance (600) and the fifth highest average in person attendance (209) of churches within the synod, making it one of the largest Lutheran Churches in the state.
