Move FM Global News

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota: Queen Sonja of Norway has praised the Mindekirken congregation for maintaining worship in the Norwegian language for the 100 years that the church has been in existence in Minneapolis.

“It’s extraordinary to realize that, one hundred years after, Mindekirken is still fulfilling that purpose” of building community and preserving culture and language, she told the nearly 500 congregants participating in the service.

The congregation was founded in 1922, at the tail end of a decades-long migration of hundreds of thousands of Norwegians to Minnesota, which made the Twin Cities the “unofficial capital” of the Norwegian diaspora, said Amy Boxrud, the director of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.

At that time, Den Norske Lutherske Mindekirke the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church committed to continue conducting religious services in Norwegian, even as many other European churches were moving to English, after hostility to speaking foreign-languages spread across the United States in the World War I era.

“The group said, ‘We’ll talk American English every day, but we need our hearts’ language when we praise God,” said the Rev. Gunnar Christians, the current pastor, to a gathering of about 200 families.

Within a few years, Mindekirken was the only one of five dozen Norwegian Lutheran churches in Minnesota still worshipping in Norwegian, he added.

And to have that continuity of culture and worship celebrated today by Queen Sonja and the presiding bishop of the Church of Norway, the Most Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, brought tears to the eyes of Mindekirken council president Jeannette Henrikssen, whose parents migrated in the late 1960s.

“It’s very moving that we still hold services in Norwegian,” she said. “It’s a testament to the determination and sheer stubbornness of those Norwegians, and the love and connection they wanted to uphold,” as quoted by the Associated Press.