History
The church developed out of the work of the Finnish Missionary Society that began in 1870 among the Ovambo and Kavango people in the northern area of what became German South-West Africa. In 1954, an independent church known as the Evangelical Lutheran Ovambo-Kavango Church (ELOC) was established with Birger Eriksson as its first president.
The first Namibian bishop of ELOC, Leonard Auala, played a notable role in the struggle for Namibia's independence. 1971 an open letter was jointly written with Moderator Paulus Gowaseb of the Rhenish Mission's United Evangelical Lutheran Church in South-West Africa (later known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia) to the Prime Minister of South Africa, B.J. Vorster declared their church's opposition to the continued rule of South Africa and the acceptance of the recommendation by the International Court of Justice for the withdrawal of South Africa's mandate and a transition period towards independence.
In 1984, ELOC's name was officially changed to its current name, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia.
Auala's successor, Kleopas Dumeni, also played an important role in highlighting the plight of Namibians under South African rule. Bishop Dumeni suffered personal losses in the struggle including the death of his 18 year old daughter in a bomb blast in 1988.
In 2007, ELCIN together with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Republic of Namibia and the German speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK) formed the United Church Council: Namibia Evangelical Lutheran Churches, with the ultimate aim of becoming one national Lutheran church.
Read more about this topic: Evangelical Lutheran Church In Namibia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.”
—John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)