Background
He was born in Delsbo, Holsingland, Sweden, the son of Esbjorn and Karin (Lindstr"m) Paulson
He was born in Delsbo, Holsingland, Sweden, the son of Esbjorn and Karin (Lindstr"m) Paulson
Orphaned at the age of seven, he was taught to read by his foster-mother, who encouraged him to enter a school at Hudiksvall. Here and in the gymnasium at Govle he eked out a meager living by singing in the homes of farmers, who rewarded him with gifts of money, candles, grain, food, and clothing.
On June 11, 1832, he was ordained to the ministry of the Church of Sweden. His work as curate at 626terv la and chaplain on an estate at Oslottfors was marked by a strong strain of pietism and interest in the cause of temperance, which brought him into intimate relations with Sweden's great apostles of temperance and pietism--George Scott, an English Wesleyan missionary stationed at Stockholm, and Peter Wieselgren, a pastor in the State Church--a circumstance that blocked his promotion and gained him enemies who even threatened his life.
The spontaneity of Scott's "free church" activity magnified by contrast the formalism and spiritual deadness of the Established Church and caused Esbjorn to long for a field of labor among his countrymen in a land where all creeds had equal opportunity.
This longing was finally realized on June 29, 1849, when the Cobden put out to sea from Govle with a party of emigrants, of which Esbjorn was the leader.
Although he left Sweden "on leave" from the Established Church in order to minister to its sons and daughters in the Western Republic, he became the founder of an ecclesiastical organization that bore little resemblance to it except in doctrine.
At New York he met Olof Gustaf Hedstr"m, a Swedish Methodist pastor, who urged him to affiliate with his denomination. Esbjorn might have accepted this invitation but for his wife's loyalty to Lutheranism and his own aversion to a church that admitted slaveholders to membership.
It was not long after the inception of his work as pastor at Andover, Ill. , however, that his experience with Eric-Jansonist, Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal proselyters hardened him into an uncompromising adherent to the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church.
The Swedish pastor's application for financial assistance from the American Home Missionary Society was granted on condition that the congregations he might organize should affiliate with some American church body.
This condition was satisfied when he applied for membership in the Lutheran Synod of Northern Illinois at its first meeting in September 1851, notwithstanding the doctrinal laxity of this organization, which caused him to safeguard his own doctrinal position by a reservation.
His untiring missionary zeal, efforts to solicit money, and interest in educating pastors caused his election to the Scandinavian professorship at Illinois State University at Springfield, an institution supported by his synod, in September 1858.
Dissatisfaction with the administration of the institution and the doctrinal laxity of the "American" element in the synod led to his "sudden and utterly unlooked for resignation" on March 31, 1860, an act that occasioned the secession of the Scandinavians from the synod and the organization of the independent Augustana Synod at Jefferson Prairie, Wisconsin, on June 5, 1860.
His pioneer labor, personal influence, and important positions won for him the distinction of being the founder of the Swedish Lutheran Church in the United States.
His work as curate at 626terv la and chaplain on an estate at Oslottfors was marked by a strong strain of pietism and interest in the cause of temperance, which brought him into intimate relations with Sweden's great apostles of temperance and pietism--George Scott, an English Wesleyan missionary stationed at Stockholm, and Peter Wieselgren, a pastor in the State Church--a circumstance that blocked his promotion and gained him enemies who even threatened his life.
Of a kindly disposition, warm-hearted, generous to a fault, and without ostentation and conceit, Esbjorn was impulsive, given to rash statements, and lacking in sagacity and diplomacy.
He was thrice married: to Amalia Maria Lovisa Planting-Gyllenb ga, who died in 1852; to Helena Magnusson, who died in 1853; and to Gustafva Magnusson, who survived him.