A National Church Governed From No Single Place

The Apostolic Lutheran Church of America governs itself without a central headquarters. Authority rests with an elected Central Board, which meets regularly at locations across the United States and Canada rather than from a fixed denominational seat, a structure that distinguishes it from the seminary trained, synodically organized Suomi Synod that once stood beside it as the largest Finnish Lutheran body in America. What holds its scattered congregations together is a shared doctrine rather than a shared address. Laestadian teaching gives the church its most visible mark: the audible declaration of forgiveness of sins, spoken aloud between believers rather than pronounced only from the pulpit, paired with an emphasis on repentance as a felt experience of one's own sinfulness. The church accepts the historic creeds of the Evangelical Lutheran church and grounds much of its teaching in Luther's Small Catechism, so its distinctiveness lies in practice and emphasis rather than in a break from confessional Lutheran doctrine. As of 2009 it reported roughly six thousand baptized members, with sizable congregations in Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and New Hampshire and further congregations in Canada and Finland, a reach that outlasted the geographically concentrated, single headquartered Suomi Synod and the National Evangelical Lutheran Church, the two other Finnish American Lutheran bodies it is most often named alongside.