[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Charles Henrickson (Lutheran pastor, LCMS) might disagree with you. In the US the two main Lutheran demominations are LCMS (Missouri Synod), mainly German tradition and conservative and ELCA, more Scandinavian, and quite liberal. This bunch is ELCA. (There's a funny episode of Cheers wherein Woody gets married, but his marriage is shortly torn apart by religous contraversy. He's LCMS, she's ELCA.

Charles is a former ECLA, so maybe he can fill you in on the difference.

A big problem for the European Church is that churchs have long been supported by the state. The Nazis were careful to subsidize Protestant churchs, which made them subordinate to it. Bonhoeffer, and others, led unauthorized "confessing" churchs that opposed the Nazis, but came into conflict with it. The Roman Church lived in an uneasy relationship with the Nazis. Many Roman clerics were sent to Dachau, and Hitler intended to settle scores with the Catholics after the War.

[Charles Henrickson]

Charles Henrickson (Lutheran pastor, LCMS) might disagree with you. In the US the two main Lutheran demominations are LCMS (Missouri Synod), mainly German tradition and conservative and ELCA, more Scandinavian, and quite liberal. This bunch is ELCA. . . . Charles is a former ELCA. . . .

Former ELCA predecessor body. My grandparents emigrated from Sweden, so I started out in the old Augustana Synod. But when I was a kid, a lot of the Swedes were moving out to the suburbs of Chicago, we stayed in the city, and our little Augustana congregation disbanded. The closest Lutheran church was LCMS. That's how a Swede ended up in the Missouri Synod with all those Germans.