I’ve been thinking about Family Conflict as a way for me to understand the dynamics at work in a church family.  

It’s family reunion time, and all of the members of the extended family are getting together for a celebration.  Everyone who is coming is somehow related to the original patriarch and matriarch of the family, Ole and Lena Olafson.  Their marriage was a scandal to both families, for it was a dreaded mixed marriage!  Ole was Norwegian and Lena was a Swede!  To make matters worse, Ole came from the Pietist tradition, and Lena came from the orthodox state church in Sweden.  It is not clear whether their families disowned them, or Ole and Lena beat them to the punch by immigrating to America in 1883.

They ended up joining the Uniting Lutheran Church, for neither the Norwegian Lutherans nor the Augustana Lutherans would take this sinful mixed couple.  Ole and Lena also became rock solid members of the Bull Moose party, partly because Lena had a crush on Teddy Roosevelt, and partly because Ole liked anyone who’d take on those he disagreed with on both the left and the right!  Through the years, things would get awfully tense in the Olafson household, for their son, Sven, had the gall and nerve to marry a German girl named Helga.  Ole threw Sven out of the house saying, “I won’t have any mixed marriages in my family!  I disown you!”  But one year later Sven and Helga were back because Lena couldn’t bear not seeing her first grandchild.  And when they named the boy little Ole, well, big Ole kind of melted.

But Ole’s heart was hardened again when second son, Ivar, both became a Democrat and married a Dane named Pia.  To make matters worse, their daughter Ingrid married a Swede, Peder, who was an Augustana Lutheran.  Some say Ole died of a broken heart.  Lena just said he ate too many meatballs and sausages. 

The Olafson clan now had four different kinds of Lutherans in the family, and a number of mixed marriages, which everyone tried so hard not to talk about at family gatherings, especially when Lena was around.  ”You are all my precious children and I love you all,” is how she would scold them when they got into any arguments over which Lutheran church was the True Lutheran church, and thereby who were the real Lutherans, and who were the dirty heretics.  Once Lena died, the families kind of drifted apart.

Sven and Helga moved to South Dakota.  Ivar and Pia stayed near the homestead in Minnesota.  Peder and Ingrid moved out to Oregon.

Only after the depression hit did the family start coming back together again.  Sven and Helga lost the farm and moved back to Minnesota.  Peder and Ingrid went bankrupt when the Herring market collapsed, and they too moved back to Minnesota with dreams of starting a lutefisk factory.  Some people just never stop dreaming.  All of Ole and Lena’s grandchildren started attending the same schools and got to know each other in the years that followed.  Added to this were the mergers starting to happen between the different Lutheran churches, though the old Norwegians and the Missouri Synod Lutherans still wouldn’t talk to anyone outside their faith.  Christmases would become fraught with crying children when the uncles started yelling at each other calling the other, “Spawn of Satan” and “Hellbound Heretics!”  Needless to say there were a few Christmases when Peder and Ingrid would not come to Christmas with their kids and everyone missed their lutefisk with cream sauce and delicious lefse.  It seems Helga couldn’t get the hang of either dish, but everyone felt bad for her because she couldn’t help it, she was German after all.