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How fascinating that you've even heard of WELS over there! I respect WELS. If it had more presence in my area, I might have ended up going there.
It is crazy how every flavor of Protestantism now has a mainline vs. confessional or evangelical division here. PCA/PCUSA, ELCA/LCMS (and WELS), UMC/GMC (which goes far beyond America); hours of Wikipedia article reading are available to the interested.
Lutherans talk casually about how in America, the big split was ultimately between "German Lutherans" who went to the LCMS, and "Scandi Lutherans" who eventually formed the ELCA; and about how each group's cultural personality informed the direction of their theology. Of course it's much more complicated than that, but there's an element of truth in it.
Ah, interesting. When I was writing my post about the meaning of the term "Evangelical" in Lutheran circles, I actually hypothesized that the split between the ELCA and the confessional churches had something to do with the German vs Scandinavian split, but it's interesting that I was actually on to something.
My great-great grandmother had a copy of Walther's hymnal, in the German of course, which is now in my possession. My mother often tells me the family story about her praying in German. The other family story about her German ancestry consists of her fastidiously sweeping the floor while her husband, a full-blood Scots-Irish good old boy, spat tobacco on the porch. But Lutheranism in my family was wiped out a few generations ago in favor of generic American evangelicalism, or Holiness Pentecostalism.
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