Franklin Clark Fry - Forming The Lutheran Church in America

Forming The Lutheran Church in America

In the early 1960s, the nation's many independent Lutheran church bodies moved progressively toward greater unity. A number of such bodies merged in 1960, for example, to form the American Lutheran Church. From his position as head of the United Lutheran Church in America, Fry engineered a similar move in 1962, organizing the merger of his own church with three other independent bodies –- the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the American Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church –- to form the Lutheran Church in America (LCA).

Fry was elected as the head of the Lutheran World Federation in 1957 making him the most powerful figure among U.S. Lutherans, and one of the most influential leaders of world Protestantism. The new LCA cut across traditional ethnic distinctions among Finnish, Danish, German, and Swedish Lutherans, and with 3.3 million members was the largest Lutheran church body in the United States. Theologically, the LCA was most often considered the most liberal and ecumenical branch in American Lutheranism. In church governance, the LCA was clerical and centralistic, in contrast to the congregationalist or "low church" strain in American Christianity.

His accumulation of jobs was very impressive, serving as chairman of the policy making Central and Executive Committees of the World Council of Churches, and as a member of the Policy and Strategy Committee of the National Council of Churches. At the same time, he was president (since 1944) of the United Lutheran Church in America, a member of the Executive Committee of the National Lutheran Council, and the first American ever elected president of the 50-million-member Lutheran World Federation. Fry lived in New Rochelle in Westchester, New York, commuting to his offices in Manhattan in the former J.P. Morgan mansion on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.

In January 1968, Fry issued a stirring appeal to fellow church members to "unstop your ears" to the need for a "massive improvement in the lot of Negro ghettos," warning of the prospects for "spiraling and spreading violence" if racial justice were not achieved swiftly.

Fry, as the Los Angeles Times put it several years after his death, was "known everywhere for his brilliant parliamentarian tactics, his shortcutting of time-consuming wrangles, the pungency with which he cut through intricate debate snarls, and for his wit and incisive dominance of any situation." He was also known as a rabid fan of the New York Yankees baseball club.