A College Founded to Keep a Language and Train a Ministry

Suomi College and Theological Seminary opened its doors on 8 September 1896, in Hancock, Michigan, founded by the Reverend Juho Kustaa Nikander, president of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Suomi Synod. Its first enrollment numbered only twenty seven students. The institution answered a problem Nikander had watched grow as a mission pastor among Finnish and Swedish immigrants: congregations of copper and iron miners had no way to train ministers who spoke their own language, and no reliable means of teaching their American born children English while keeping the Finnish language and culture the immigrant generation had carried across the Atlantic. Suomi College and its attached theological seminary answered both needs under one roof, training pastors for the synod's congregations while functioning as a school for the wider immigrant community. Through the 1920s it grew beyond a preparatory and ministerial school into a liberal arts college, all the while continuing to house the seminary that trained the Suomi Synod's clergy. That dual mission held for six decades, until 1958, when the seminary separated from the college as an independent institution, four years before the Suomi Synod itself merged into a larger American Lutheran body and ceased to exist as a separate church.