Queen lauds Minnesota church’s century of Norwegian worship

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Before attending the packed Sunday morning service, Queen Sonja of Norway praised Mindekirken congregation for having maintained worship in Norwegian for all 100 years that the church has existed in Minneapolis.

“It’s extraordinary to realize that, one hundred years after, Mindekirken is still fulfilling that purpose” of constructing group and preserving tradition and language, she mentioned to the practically 500 individuals in attendance. They had lined up for greater than an hour on this modest neighborhood in brisk fall climate within the 40s — single digits in Celsius, simply as in Oslo — to take part within the service.

Queen Sonja obtained a particular greeting from Eline Gro Knatterud, 4, who offered the queen with a bouquet of purple roses practically as huge as herself. Queen Sonja acquired right down to eye stage with the awestruck lady and advised her, in English, that she had an similar purple conventional bunad gown at residence, earlier than strolling into the massive stone church.

The congregation was based in 1922, on the tail finish of a decades-long migration of lots of of hundreds of Norwegians to Minnesota that made the Twin Cities the “unofficial capital” of the Norwegian diaspora, mentioned Amy Boxrud, the director of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.

Lutheran church buildings had been central to those immigrants’ lives, although some stayed with the Church of Norway and others established totally different Lutheran synods.

Den Norske Lutherske Mindekirke – the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church – dedicated to maintain celebrating companies in Norwegian at the same time as many different European church buildings had been shifting to English, as a result of assaults on foreign-language audio system unfold throughout the United States within the World War I period.

“The group said, ‘We’ll talk American English every day, but we need our hearts’ language when we praise God,” mentioned the Rev. Gunnar Kristiansen, the present pastor to a flock of about 200 households.

Within a number of years, Mindekirken was the one one of 5 dozen church buildings in Minnesota nonetheless worshipping in Norwegian, he added.

That made all of the distinction to Kirsti Grodahl, who was 11 when she emigrated to Minneapolis in 1962 from the fjord-side village of Frei in Norway together with her mother and father and siblings. She began going to church at Mindekirken every week later, generally on foot.

“It was just so comfortable,” she mentioned. She made her first buddy there, who had arrived two years earlier, and she or he raised her two youngsters to talk Norwegian, too.

Grodahl nonetheless repeatedly attends Sunday companies at Mindekirken, and significantly enjoys the espresso hour that follows the 2 companies, one in English and one in Norwegian.

“Dad baked a lot of bløtkake for this church,” she recalled, referring to the normal tender cake that her father had perfected as a baker in Norway. “It’s a place you always feel it’s your home.”

Standing in line Sunday morning together with her two daughters and dozens of different congregants earlier than service began, Karen Liv Mjlølhus Cardwell mentioned her father began worshipping right here in 1929, when he emigrated to Minnesota.

“It’s like coming home to family,” Mjlølhus Cardwell mentioned.

And to have that continuity of tradition and worship celebrated in the present day by Queen Sonja and the presiding bishop of the Church of Norway, the Most Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, introduced tears to the eyes of Mindekirken council president Jeannette Henrikssen, whose mother and father migrated within the late Sixties.

“It’s very moving that we still hold service in Norwegian,” she mentioned. “It’s a testament to the determination and sheer stubbornness of those Norwegians, and the love and connection they wanted to uphold.”

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