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Denominations - Protestant

Short profiles of selected Christian denominations in the U.S.

Church of the Lutheran Confession symbol

Church of the Lutheran Confession

Lutheran, Evangelical

  • Date Founded:  1960

  • Membership/Number of Clergy/Number of Churches:  8,390/90/87

  • Headquarters:  501 Grover Rd., Eau Claire, WI  54701

  • Schools & Seminaries:  Immanuel Lutheran High School, College, and Seminary

  • Publications:  Lutheran Spokesman, and Journal of Theology

  • Website:  http://clclutheran.org/

  • Core Beliefs:  “In our teaching and preaching we rely wholly upon the Bible, the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. We regard this Book of Books as the Word of God, verbally inspired and wholly without error as written by holy men of God. We consider our mission to be that of communicating the words and message of this Book to those who will hear them; and we know of no other divine source of true doctrine and instruction in the way of salvation and in God-pleasing living.”

  • “We therefore reject as sacrilegious and destructive every effort by which the intellect or science of man would modify or set aside a single inspired word. We deplore the wide-spread apostasy…which reduces the Bible to the status of a human document containing errors and myths.”

  • The CLC ordains only men.

For a detailed explanation of how the CLC views itself as differing from the other Lutheran denominations see https://clclutheran.org/ourhistory/.

Short History:  "The Church of the Lutheran Confession (CLC) considers itself to be the true spiritual descendant of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference, which was formed in 1872 and lasted until the early 1960s. As that association of formerly conservative Lutheran church bodies in North America was drawing its last breath, the CLC was just becoming a church body."

"The CLC emerged from three of the former member churches of the Synodical Conference: primarily from the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), but also from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS). The Synodical Conference had originally been formed on the basis of full agreement in doctrine and practice on the part of the member churches; it broke apart when that basis and the biblical doctrine of church fellowship on which it rested was no longer fully practiced by the member churches."

Local Churches:  None. There are no CLC churches within easy driving distance to Louisville.  Most are in MI, WI, MN, the Plains States, and CA. 

Church Locator: https://clclutheran.org/directory/