Carl August Björk (27 July 1837 – 29 October 1916) was a Swedish missionary preacher in the Midwestern United States. He was the founder of the Mission Friends – some of which later developed into the

Evangelical Covenant Church The Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) is an evangelical denomination with Pietism, Pietist Lutheran roots. The Christian denomination, denomination has 129,015 members in 878 congregations and an average worship attendance of 219,000 people in th ...

, a Radical Pietistic Christian denomination with

Lutheran Lutheranism is a major branch of Protestantism that emerged under the work of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German friar and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practices of the Catholic Church launched ...

roots, which he played a key role in founding. Björk served as the first president of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant Synod.

Biography

Background and preaching

Carl August Björk was born in Lommaryd,

Jönköping County Jönköping County () is a county or '' län'' in southern Sweden. It borders the counties of Halland, Västra Götaland, Östergötland, Kalmar and Kronoberg. The total county population was 356,291 inhabitants in September 2017. The capita ...

, Sweden. He was originally a shoemaker by trade but later became a soldier. In 1862, however, he had begun reading

Carl Olof Rosenius Carl Olof Rosenius (3 February 1816 – 24 February 1868) was a Swedish lay preacher, author and editor of the monthly '' Pietisten'' (The Pietist) from 1842 to 1868.''Twice-Born Hymns'' by J. Irving Erickson, (Chicago: Covenant Press, 1976) ...

' publication '' Pietisten'', which led him to faith. He then left soldiering behind and emigrated to the United States in 1864. There he ended up in the Swedish colony of Swede Bend in Hamilton County, Iowa. He joined the local Augustana Lutheran congregation early on and preached with the encouragement of pastor Magnus Håkanson. He often read aloud from ''Pietisten'' but eventually began giving his own sermons, leading to somewhat of a revival. After Håkanson's retirement, C. J. Malmberg took over as pastor, and took a different view of Björk's revivalism, seeing it as "dangerous and schismatic". Björk, however, was dissatisfied with what he saw as the church's lack of religiosity. Soon he began holding his own prayer meetings at home. The pastor tried to brand Björk as an apostate, but this only increased his popularity and led to the creation of a mission society with Björk as its leader on 4 July 1868. His goal was reformation in the church, but it would soon lead to a new denomination. Similar movements also existed elsewhere in Swedish-American towns, and during the 1870s they came together to form what was to become the Mission Friends. They studied Luther and Rosenius to determine who had the authority to perform ordinations, and after Johan Magnus (J. M.) Sanngren had been ordained by Charles Anderson from the Lutheran Synod of Northern Illinois, Björk was ordained by Sanngren in 1870. In 1877, Björk became a pastor of the North Side Mission Church in Chicago, succeeding Sanngren and working there for seventeen years. His sermons, focusing on "salvation by unmerited

grace Grace may refer to: Places United States * Grace, Idaho, a city * Grace (CTA station), Chicago Transit Authority's Howard Line, Illinois * Little Goose Creek (Kentucky), location of Grace post office * Grace, Carroll County, Missouri, an uni ...

through Christ alone", were described by his friend and later Covenant president Erik Gustaf Hjerpe, as "gripping and lucid". He became the first president of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant Synod upon its founding in 1885. Björk served until 1910, taking on the position full-time in 1895. Björk died in Chicago in 1916. A monument was erected in his honor at the Swede Bend Covenant Church in 1937.

Family

Björk married Johanna Christina Boman in 1866; together they had four children: Ida, Selma, Albert, and Victor. After her death in 1876, he married Augusta Peterson, and together they had children August, Teresia, David, and Carl.

References

Notes

Sources