Logout
Ingrid Arneson Rasmussen, a pastor of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, was handcuffed and arrested in January for kneeling in the middle of a road at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Along with about 100 other clergy members, she was protesting at a site used by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to dispatch immigrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers around the country during Operation Metro Surge, a three-month escalation in ICE enforcement in the area.
Lori Wise participated in a No Kings rally in York, Pa., in March. Drawn to the rally with other members of Zion Lutheran Church in York, she was protesting for personal reasons. She had watched her adopted son, an immigrant, struggle while growing up in the United States. She uses her voice now because she believes civic leaders have emboldened cruelty toward immigrants.
At 93, retired ELCA pastor Joseph Ellwanger is still recovering from a stroke, but he rallied with others in Milwaukee on the Sunday after Easter to protest the detention of a Muslim man who’d lived and worked in the United States legally for more than 30 years. The man had been targeted for detention, protesters argued, because he had been vocal in his support of Palestinian rights. Ellwanger is no stranger to civic activism: the first church he served, from 1958 to 1967, was in Alabama, the center of the civil rights struggle.
All three have been called to action by faith. They carry on a long tradition of Lutheran activism rooted in Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors.
During Operation Metro Surge, residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area—including many Lutherans—made news around the world for establishing a rapid-response network to monitor ICE arrests and protect potential detainees. But the network was only a natural extension of the ways ELCA congregations had been caring for their communities for years.
Rooted in the Protestant Reformation, the Lutheran faith has been expressed through civic activism throughout its history. Protests against slavery in the United States were organized in the 1830s by the Frankean Synod and Daniel Alexander Payne, the first African American admitted to a Lutheran seminary. A resolution at the 1862 General Synod denounced slavery.
In the following decades, Lutherans supported and welcomed waves of immigrants as they arrived in the United States. They were also part of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
“As long as there is injustice, we have to stand up against it,” Ellwanger said. “Love of neighbor requires that we stand up for fair and just treatment of our neighbor, and everyone is our neighbor. And especially everyone in need. … This is part of living the gospel.”
All hands on deck
In the aftermath of Operation Metro Surge, Rasmussen believes it will take years, if not decades, for portions of the city to recover.
“What we are living in right now is the economic crisis that follows what I would describe as an experience of wartime, in at least our area of Minneapolis,” she said. “Many people in our community were necessarily sheltering in place, not leaving their homes and not working. The byproduct of that is fewer people were doing things like buying groceries or eating out. What we find ourselves in at this moment is a serious rent crisis, utility crisis, small business crisis.”
At the height of ICE activity there, Holy Trinity members responded in myriad ways.
“We had a lot of congregants involved, whether they were on street corners [checking] license plates or on school watch at dropoff and pickup times, doing legal observing down at the federal building, food distribution to thousands of families who were receiving groceries at their doorstep, medication distribution,” Rasmussen said. “Congregants who are less able to leave home because of age or ability were finding ways to participate in the public outcry by calling senators or representatives, saying this is not the way the world has to be and that we can imagine more for our communities.
“It was ‘all hands on deck’ in a thousand different ways for this community. This congregation is deeply connected to the wider neighborhood.”
Rasmussen said Holy Trinity spent its entire pastoral discretionary fund in the first 14 days of the year, responding to individual and communal crises among residents.
One of the ways the congregation responded financially was by hiring lawyers. “The legal aid that is required by people who were touched by the occupation is like nothing I’ve seen before,” she said.
Local congregations helped those who had been wrongfully detained to file habeas petitions, which are used to challenge unlawful detention or imprisonment. “In all of our cases that we were able to have an attorney work on a habeas, the judge deemed the arrest unlawful and released the person from detention,” Rasmussen said.
The legal case against Rasmussen ended in April when she and many of those arrested with her pleaded guilty to a petty misdemeanor and paid a fine.
She didn’t imagine her life as a pastor looking this way.
“I’m a farm kid who grew up in a small town, and now I have the great joy of serving in the center of the city. I never imagined this for my own vocation or for my life or my family’s life,” she said. “I think living in this time as a Lutheran leader or any public leader requires courage. I don’t think any of us are born with that. We learn it in the context of community. To my great delight, I have been placed in a congregation and in a neighborhood and in a city that is passionate about acting collectively for the common good. That’s the Spirit’s call to us in this particular time.”
Proclaiming and living the gospel
In 1958, nearly 70 years before he rallied with other Milwaukeeans in April, Ellwanger, who is white, was called as pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church, an African American congregation in Birmingham, Ala. He remembers the call as a blessing: “It was the right place at the right time for me to learn and grow into what it means to really proclaim the gospel and live it.”
Stepping into activism wasn’t immediate for Ellwanger. “The first time that I really went public and walked with the civil rights workers in Birmingham was in November of 1963, which was after the civil rights demonstrations of that spring,” he said.
After those demonstrations, five Birmingham department stores had committed to each hire one African American clerk. When they didn’t follow through, Ellwanger joined picket lines outside the stores. “They didn’t live up to their promise,” he said. “So we picketed to remind them and the public of their promise.”
St. Paul was deeply affected that September when a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four schoolgirls. One of them, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair, had attended the Baptist church with her mother, but her father was a member of St. Paul. Ellwanger participated in the funeral for McNair and two of the other girls.
“That was a very important part of my life and my experiences,” he said. “It was becoming more real. Obviously it was a very emotional moment in the life of our congregation and in my work as the pastor.”
“As long as there is injustice, we have to stand up against it.”
Ellwanger said these events were part of a natural progression that drew him to activism and advocacy as part of his ministry. He not only joined the Greater Birmingham Council on Human Relations but was elected president. Through that role, he led more than 70 white protesters in a voting rights march on March 6, 1965—the day before “Bloody Sunday,” when Black protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery were attacked by state troopers on horseback as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Though no violence occurred on March 6, both days were a critical turning point in the civil rights movement, directly leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When Ellwanger moved to Milwaukee for a new call in 1967, he supported forming a coalition of urban congregations to work for justice and establishing school breakfast programs in public schools.
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the collapse of legal segregation, Ellwanger felt significant progress had been made. He is dismayed by the opposition from elected leaders that he sees again today.
“It’s a reminder that injustice does not die easily, and it is important for people of faith to be awake and aware to how people are being treated,” he said. “That’s why we need to stand up for justice and truth. As long as there is injustice, we have to stand up against it.”
“We’re going to protect people”
When Wise and other ELCA members participated in the No Kings rally on March 28, they took part in one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history. Eight to nine million people gathered at 3,300 coordinated events in all 50 states to protest immigration enforcement, the Iran war and the erosion of democratic norms.
“My faith is about working with the vulnerable and needy in our society,” said Wise, a medical administration professional. “I worked in substance abuse and mental health as a clinician for many years. I feel very strongly about the mission of helping people.”
Wise said she witnessed the pain of stricter immigration enforcement when medical colleagues working legally in the United States left the country to vacation or visit family and were denied reentry. “We had doctors who couldn’t get back into the country,” she said.
Being the mother of an adopted immigrant son “triggered me to go out and do this,” she said. “So I don’t feel alone in this, and I’m with like-minded people.”
Davidson participated in the rally as an exercise in both patriotism and faithfulness.
Bruce Davidson, a retired pastor and member of Christ Ascension Lutheran Church in Philadelphia, participated in a No Kings rally there as an exercise in both patriotism and faithfulness. He attended with other members who participate in advocacy campaigns, sign petitions and write letters to elected leaders.
The congregation isn’t large, Davidson said, but it has a history of activism, especially regarding poverty, hunger and immigration. When he served in Philadelphia during the AIDS epidemic, Christ Ascension helped to reverse neighborhood resistance to a treatment facility in the area. “That was pretty gutsy back in the ’90s,” he said.
When ICE became active in the city, the congregation drafted a plan for how to respond should agents try to enter the preschool housed at the church. “We mapped out ‘Here is the law, and we will follow the law,'” he said.
Christ Ascension committed to not allowing federal agents into its private spaces without an arrest warrant. “A significant number of people in the congregation needed to make it clear where we stand,” Davidson said, “and we’re going to protect people here.”
Advocacy: The toolbox we use
Today the ELCA continues the tradition of Lutheran civic activism, in part by connecting faith with public life through its Witness in Society office.
As senior director of Witness in Society, Amy Reumann leads the church’s public advocacy and witness in the world. “You almost have a toolbox of resources for how we respond to human suffering, to crisis, to caring for creation,” she said. Advocacy, mobilization and community-based organizing are among those tools. So is prayer.
Public prayer was particularly important during the resistance to ICE in Minnesota this year, Reumann said, adding, “Holding vigils, doing it publicly, talking about where people are feeling pain has been important. And the church is doing it publicly and visibly.”
Reumann acknowledges that the work of advocacy can feel overwhelming, given the number of global public crises Lutherans attempt to engage with today. But she believes that the ELCA’s social policies ground members in God’s call to seek justice for all people.
Development of the most recent ELCA social statement, “Faith and Civic Life: Seeking the Wellbeing of All,” was requested at the 2019 Churchwide Assembly to clarify “the role of government, the nature of civic engagement, and the relationship of church and state.” The social statement—a primary teaching document of the ELCA—was adopted by the 2025 assembly.
Reumann refers to the work of advocacy as “farming redwoods”—planting, cultivating and tending.
“Faith and Civic Life,” Reumann said, can guide church members in even small steps to make change. “We can preserve and care for what is immediately in our vicinity,” she added. “There are simple things you can do in your community, through support for election officials, volunteering to be a poll worker. We find what our small part is, and those small parts make a difference.”
Reumann refers to the work of advocacy as “farming redwoods”—planting, cultivating and tending.
“What we do in advocacy, we’re not going to see all the fruit of it,” she said. “Public policy takes time to forge and implement. It needs to be corrected and funded. You really need a long view for what we’re doing.”
In other words, faith expressed through civic activism is what the ELCA has been doing, is doing now and will be doing tomorrow.
Reumann points to another ELCA social statement, “The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective,” which includes the following passage: “With Martin Luther, this church understands that ‘to rebuke’ those in authority ‘through God’s Word spoken publicly, boldly and honestly’ is … ‘a praiseworthy, noble, and … particularly great service to God'” (page 4).
“These [statements] really inform us that we have a grounding in our theology,” she said. “There can be a lot of reticence to protest injustice, and here we have it directly from Luther, saying this is one way that God’s word works. It needs to be proclaimed loudly and boldly.”
For more information
- Read the “Faith and Civic Life: Seeking the Well-being of All,” “The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective” and other social statements at elca.org/socialstatements. Social messages, which focus attention and action on timely, pressing matters of social concern to the church and society, can also be found at the above link.
- Learn more about the advocacy work of ELCA Witness in Society, find resources and sign up to join its network at elca.org/advocacy.
Study guide
Download a free, five-page study guide for this story.
