Evangelical Free Church of America
| Evangelical Free Church of America | |
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EFCA – Multiplying Transformational Churches Among All People
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| Classification | Protestant |
| Orientation | Evangelical |
| Polity | Congregationalist |
| Associations | National Association of Evangelicals, Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability |
| Region | United States |
| Headquarters | Bloomington, Minnesota |
| Origin | June 1950 Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Merger of | Swedish Evangelical Free Church and Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association |
| Congregations | 1,500 |
| Members | 371,191 (weekly attendance) |
The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) is an evangelical Christian denomination. The EFCA was formed in 1950 from the merger of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church and the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association.
The Swedish Evangelical Free Church formed as the Swedish Evangelical Free Mission in Boone, Iowa, in October 1884. Several churches that had been members of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Ansgar Synod and the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Mission Synod, along with some independent congregations, were instrumental in organizing this voluntary fellowship. In the same year, two Norwegian-Danish groups in Boston, Massachusetts, and Tacoma, Washington, began to fellowship together. By 1912, they had formed the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association. The Swedish and Norwegian-Danish bodies united in June 1950 at a merger conference held at the Medicine Lake Conference Grounds near Minneapolis, Minnesota. The two bodies represented 275 local congregations at the time of the merger.
The EFCA shares some early ties with those who formed the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church. It has been a member of the National Association of Evangelicals since 1943, the year after that organization was formed.
In its Statement of Faith, the Evangelical Free Church of America affirms the authority and inerrancy of the Bible; the Trinity; atonement through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; original sin; Christ as head of the church and the local church's right to self government; the personal, premillennial, imminent return of Christ; the bodily resurrection of the dead; and the two ordinances of water baptism and the Lord's Supper.
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