ABOUT US

 
Our Mission: The Mission of St. Olaf Lutheran Church is to Know Christ and Make Christ Known...through Reaching, Welcoming, Growing, and Caring.

St. Olaf Lutheran Church was organized by the Norwegian settlers of Austin, Minnesota in 1867. Austin was just eleven years old at the time and the President of the United States was Andrew Johnson. The pioneering leader of the church was Reverend C.L. Clausen, who was originally from the island of Aeroe, Denmark and had served as the founding pastor of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America, located in Muskego, Racine County, Wisconsin. In 1853 Rev. Clausen became a colonizer and led a caravan of seventy-five settlers in thirty covered wagons to Northern Iowa. They chose for their settlement site a juncture of Cedar River and a creek which Rev. Clausen named Deer Creek. He named the site St. Ansgar, which means "God's spear." They built a church of stone which was later named the First Lutheran Church of St. Ansgar, Iowa. From there he traveled doing missionary work in the area. Rev. Clausen preached and administered the Sacraments in the Austin and Blooming Prairie area. On October 28, 1867, he organized St. Olaf Lutheran Church.

Not many Norwegian families were in Austin in 1867, but the ones that were here longed for a place to worship where the Sacraments would be given them in the language they understood. Austin was divided into neighborhoods where people of the same background settled. "Der Norske Byen" or "The Norwegian Town" consisted of 4th Street NW, 8th Place NW to 3rd Ave NW. Meetings would be held wherever they could find room, sometimes in homes or in the small lobby of the American Hotel, but most often in the court room or the courthouse (which was then located at the corner of Main Street and 2nd Ave. NW). Through personal sacrifice of those early Norwegian settlers, they purchased a small wooden church building from the Methodist Church for $1,500 and moved it to the spot the church still stands on.

The minutes from that first meeting on October 28, 1867 were written in Norwegian. They are translated to read:

"At seven O'clock on Monday evening the 28th of October 1867, a group of Norwegians met at the home of Nils Johnson for the purpose of organizing a Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran congregation.

As its chairman the Rev. C.L. Clausen addressed the group, after which the following rules and regulations were unanimously adopted.

In the Name of Our Lord

We, the undersigned members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church who are at the present time living in, or in the vicinity of Austin, Mower County, have agreed to unite in organizing a Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Congregation based on the following fundamental principles.

We accept God's Holy Word as recorded in the Old and in the New Testament as the only true foundation upon which to establish our church. For the interpretation of the Holy Scripture we will use the Nicene Creed, the Augsburg Confession and Luther's Catechism."