Finnish Missionary Society

The Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission (FELM, formerly The Finnish Missionary Society; Finnish: Suomen Lähetysseura ry; Swedish: Finska Missionssällskapet rf) is a Lutheran missionary society formed on January 19, 1859, in Helsinki, Finland. It is one of seven organisations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) that conduct missionary work. Its first deployments outside Finland were made to Ovamboland, an area that today is cut by the Angola-Namibian border.

The FMS was organized by K. J. G. Sirelius, who first worked as the society’s secretary and during 1864–1872 as its first mission director. The FMS mission school was also founded during his term.

The first missionaries from this society graduated in 1868 and were deployed to the Ovambo area in southern Africa that was later separated by colonial borders into southern Angola and northern South West Africa, today Namibia, in 1870. There they established the mission station at Omandongo, today in the Onayena Constituency of Oshikoto Region. The mission station was proclaimed a national monument in 2014.

At the request of the Rhenish Missionary Society, but also due to a contempt of the politics and ideas of the German missionaries, their activities started with the Ondonga tribe of the Ovambo people. They later spread to all of Ovamboland, southern parts of Angola, and to the area that today is the Kavango Region. The first Ovambo pastors were ordained in 1925.

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