When the ELCA was formed in 1987 there was a great deal of discussion about conferences. The Northwestern Minnesota Synod decided to have ten conferences that generally follow county lines. The three counties that comprise our conference are lightly populated which resulted in our conference being one of the smallest in congregation members and clergy. There was concern about this in the beginning, but our conference has turned out to be one of the more cohesive and better organized conferences in the synod. Perhaps our remote location and light population have led us to pull together more.
Our “claim to fame” is that our conference includes the northernmost land in the lower 48 states of the United States. That’s the northwest angle of Minnesota, a little bit of land that is not Canadian because the land had not been explored or surveyed by the Americans or the British at the end of the Revolutionary War when the boundary between the U.S. and Canada was negotiated. They simply made a mistake which gives the map of Minnesota a little smokestack on the top. The 2010 census lists only 119 permanent residents of Angle Township of Roseau County. Of course there are many more in the summer when people come to camp and fish or visit Oak Island. Unfortunately there are no Lutheran congregations in the angle, but we can still argue that we have the northernmost ELCA congregation in the lower 48 at Pine Creek in Roseau County. That tiny congregation is nestled right against the border. But then again, there may be others like it out in North Dakota and Montana. I’m not spending any time researching that bit of trivia.
We are called Conference One because the synod decided to number conferences from north to south in the same way Minnesota numbers legislative districts from northwest to southeast. I enjoy telling people “we’re number one” when referring to our conference or our state senate district. For the Minnesota House district it is even better: “1A.” Sounds like a winner, eh?
Back in 1987 each conference was given the option of choosing another name for itself which resulted in a hodgepodge of names, many of which do not distinctively identify the conference. This replaced the sensible old system in the American Lutheran Church which named conferences for the largest city in the conference. Thus we used to have the Thief River Falls Conference and the Crookston Conference. We knew just where they were. It is not so with the Pine to Prairie Conference or the Agassiz Conference today. If memory serves me, our name was proposed by our own Jim Sollund of Karlstad following the local tradition of combining county names. Do you remember “Mar-Kit” and KaMaR”? “LaRoKi” is composed of the first two letters of each county going from east to west.
After the congregation, the conference is the level of church organization closest to us. It includes our nearest neighbors, people who not only share our faith but share our community or county. Sometimes people think of the Church (with a capital “C”) or the ELCA (all capital letters!) as a big organization far from us with little understanding of us. But the Church is the people just down the road who are also part of the Body of Christ, and the ELCA is those people down the road who also subscribe to the Augsburg Confession..
Twenty five years ago I had many questions about the direction the brand new ELCA was going to take. I have to admit that I did not always trust those liberal big city Lutherans or those East Coast Lutherans with a 300 year old tradition. But I came to appreciate the 1987 merger when I focused on our union with a congregation in the next township over or on the other side of the county seat. They were the ones with whom we were merging, and they are the ones I appreciate to this day. When I was tempted to complain about the merger I thought about them.
When I was considering the call to First and Eidsvold in the spring of 1990, Art Rimmereid, who was assistant to the bishop back then, said to me, “one thing you will like up there is the conference.” It was true then. It is true today.
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