Elling Eielsen was a Norwegian-American minister and Lutheran Church leader.
Background
Elling Eielsen was born on the farm Sunve, at Vossestranden, in the district of Voss, Western Norway. His parents were Eiel Ingebrigtsen and Anna Ellingsen Sunve. His father, a farmer and schoolmaster, was for a time influenced by the pietistic movement known as Haugeanism (from Hans Nielsen Iiauge, 1771-1824), and it is not unlikely that the boy Elling imbibed something of the devout religious spirit of the Haugeans.
Career
He continued to live in Voss until he was twenty-five, then in 1829, went to Bergen, learned there the carpenter’s trade, and secured a position.
He remained in Bergen until 1831.
There had developed at this time in his mental make-up a strong anti-clerical feeling.
The ordained clergy of the State Church were, in his opinion, worldly-minded and negligent of their duty as ministers.
Feeling that in his own case he had received no help from the clergy, he came to look upon them as an official class serving the State, an aristocracy, who held themselves aloof from the masses, and made no effort to instruct their humbler charges in morality and right living.
The theologically trained clergy were “High Church, ” and antipathy to everything for which this term stood was a dominant principle with him throughout most of his later life.
In Bergen he was permitted to preach to the soldiers and his sermons found so much favor that the captain of the company urged him to enter upon preaching as his life-work.
During a long illness at this time he had an experience that he interpreted as a divine call to go out and preach.
Accordingly, in1831 he set put, going to the northern provinces, Trondhjem, Nordland, Tromso, Finmarken, traveling as an itinerant missionary here and among the Lapps of the extreme North, walking on foot in summer and in the cold of winter, often suffering untold hardships.
Thus began a career that lasted for nearly fifty years.
During the first eight years he visited all parts of Norway, as well as Sweden and Denmark, usually walking, and preaching two or three times a day, but in 1839 he emigrated to America.
At Chicago, in October of that year, he preached in a log cabin the first Norwegian sermon delivered on American soil.
The Fox River Settlement, La Salle County, became his home.
Here he at once built himself a house, the second story of which was fitted out as a “meeting-house, ” where for years he preached regularly, except when he was visiting and preaching in the new settlements that were springing up in Illinois, Wisconsin, and other parts of the northern Middle West.
In 1859 he visited settlements recently formed in Texas, and did missionary work among the Pot- awatomi Indians of Missouri.
Yielding to the wishes of his people at Fox River he was ordained, October 3, 1843; less than three years later, April 13-14, 1846, he organized the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the largest organization of Norwegian Lutherans in the New World.
Achievements
Religion
Evangelical Lutheran
Views
He showed a religious bent from the age of eight, but then apparently changed and in the years of his youth lived a somewhat wild and uncontrolled life in his home community. In his twenty-second year he experienced a religious awakening; there followed three years of religious depression that once almost drove him to suicide. He looked upon his life as one of sin and degradation, though there appears to be no evidence from those years that he had committed excesses of any kind.
Membership
founder of the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church of North America (also called The Ellingian brotherhood, Elling Eielsen’s Synod, or simply The Ellingians)
Apr. 13-14, 1846, he organized the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the largest organization of Norwegian Lutherans in the New World.
Personality
As a child he was sociable but of a headstrong nature, and later was subject to moods of melancholy.
During the church controversies of the next two decades he sometimes alienated co-religionists by his dictatorial methods and intolerance of opposition; ground that had been gained for his church he sometimes lost again, for he did not have the capacity for cooperation and the talent for organization required of the true leader.
Interests
carpenter’s trade
blacksmithing
Connections
He had married Sigrid Nilson Tuftc, in Muskego, Wisconsin, on July 31, 1843.