Chocolate & Vanilla — The Tale of Two Churches — 1853-1917

Country Coon Prairie
Lutheran Church
burned on Easter Sunday 1909

Visitors to Westby are often curious about the fact that two large and handsome buildings of the same Lutheran tradition are located on Main Street, only two blocks from each other. They are known locally as the vanilla and chocolate churches. The existence of these two strong congregations is the result of broader historical forces which engulfed Norwegian Lutherans in the 19th century.

From the 1840s until WWI, immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany settled in the American Midwest in increasing numbers. About a quarter of them were concerned about their Lutheran religious heritage and, free from the restrictions of European state churches, formed their own religious organizations. Between 1840 and 1875 over sixty distinct Lutheran church bodies (often named synods) were formed. By the 1870s, the Norwegians had gelled into four separate church clusters, two of whom were represented in the Westby area, the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (usually called the Norwegian Synod) and the Norwegian-Danish Augustana Synod.

Interior,  Country Coon Prairie Lutheran Church

The first Norwegian settlers arrived in the vicinity of Westby in 1848 and in 1852 they formed Coon Prairie Lutheran Church in the northern section of the town of Viroqua. The congregation received its first pastor, H.A. Stub, in 1855 and dedicated its first wooden building in 1857. It was an anchor congregation of the new Norwegian Synod and the first president of the Synod, A.C. Preus, served Coon Prairie as its second pastor. Coon Prairie was a vigorous center for ministry and its pastors served as many as 11 daughter congregations throughout the region for many years. In 1875, during the pastorate of Halvor Halvorsen (1872-1921), the Coon Prairie congregation began building a fine stone building which was, according to the Vernon County History (1884), “without doubt the grandest church building in Vernon County,” measuring 100x50 feet with a 150 foot spire. 

Westby Coon Prairie Lutheran Church

Not all Norwegian Lutherans in the Westby area belonged to Coon Prairie and in 1857 some of them formed a small congregation, St. Petri. It was associated with the Scandinavian Augustana Synod which emphasized personal piety and encouraged lay preaching in a way that was not acceptable to the Norwegian Synod. The congregation built a small wooden church in 1878 at the site of the present Our Savior’s Cemetery, just north of Westby.    

In the 1860s, Norwegian Lutherans, like the rest of the country, were swept into the American drama of the Civil War and the slavery controversy. On this issue, the influence of the German Missouri Synod (formed in 1847 in the St. Louis area) and its able theologian, C.F.W. Walther, affected all Lutherans in the Midwest. In 1857 the Norwegian Synod had decided to have its pastors educated at the Missouri Synod seminary in St. Louis and they tended to adopt Walther’s views. While all Midwest Lutherans were concerned about maintaining a distinctive Lutheran identity based on the historic Lutheran Confessions, Walther insisted that agreement upon a formally recognized body of “pure doctrine” was the basis for all churchly unity or cooperation. In the course of maintaining his understanding of a pure doctrine uncontaminated by personal experience, Walther proclaimed that slavery was regrettable but not in itself a sin.

Interior, Westby Coon Prairie Lutheran Church  

The Missouri-trained clergy of the Norwegian Synod tended to agree with Walther, but ran into fierce opposition among other Norwegians Lutherans.  The other synods (including Augustana) were clearly against slavery and so were the majority of lay people within the Norwegian Synod itself—many volunteered to fight for the Union.

With the end of the Civil War, slavery ceased to be a theological issue, but the importance of pure doctrine refused to go away. In the 1880s it emerged again among Lutherans in the Midwest over the question of predestination with C.W.F. Walther once again a key figure. This controversy seems convoluted and even incomprehensible to our modern ears but it represents a variation on the theme of identity. How much can we change without compromising who we are? Walther maintained an understanding of pure doctrine which could not be modified by the lived experience of Christians—God  predestined human beings to have true faith, which Walther understood as a profession of true doctrine (as understood by the Missouri Synod). Other Lutherans, including many Norwegians, had a sense that faith was more than the adherence to pure doctrine and that opposition to slavery, for example, was rooted in God’s will.  This second position was not formulated with Walther’s theological precision and led to fears of the slippery slope—if we give in on predestination, we will give in on other important confessional issues and lose our identity.

The Norwegian Synod was wracked over this controversy and the bitterness of the dispute ended many longtime friendships. Pastor Halvorsen of Coon Prairie was firmly in the Missouri camp by virtue of his position as a respected leader in the Norwegian Synod. However, many of his lay members could not live with his strong position. They became a part of the anti-Missouri movement within the Norwegian Synod (which made up about one third of the Synod’s members). In 1888 about fifty families made the painful decision to leave Coon Prairie and to form Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. They made contact with members of St. Petri and the two groups joined in 1889. The newly-formed congregation became a part of the newly-formed United Norwegian Church in America in 1890, the largest of the three Norwegian Lutheran synods and one of the first of many American Lutheran mergers. Our Savior’s built a wooden church in the growing village of Westby and used the former St. Petri cemetery to the north of town as their own.

Our Savior's Lutheran Church

Coon Prairie continued to thrive under Pastor Halvorsen’s leadership, but was beset by tragedy in 1909. On Easter Sunday the beautiful building was burned to the ground. Congregational opinion was divided as to whether to rebuild on the historic site or to move to the thriving village of Westby which was now served by two railroads and many new businesses. They compromised by building two impressive brick edifices at $22,500 each, the present Westby Coon Prairie and Country Coon Prairie churches.

Meanwhile, sentiment for union was growing among most Lutheran Americans of Norwegian heritage. The older generation of theologians remained committed to the theological intricacies of the predestination controversy, but the majority of laity and many younger pastors felt that the advantages of unity among Norwegian heritage Lutherans outweighed these considerations. In 1912 a committee of parish pastors came to the conclusion that differences on predestination could be understood as two approaches to the issue that need not divide Lutheran Christians. The Westby churches demonstrated this new spirit as Our Savior’s Pastor Rondestvedt (1913-1933) began to conduct English-language services at Coon Prairie as well as in his own church.  

In 1917, the year of the Reformation’s 400th anniversary, the largest Norwegian synods joined together to establish the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America, comprising 92 percent of Norwegian Lutherans in the United States. One of the first actions of the new church was to take a strong leading role in ministering to troops serving in WWI. Coon Prairie and Our Savior’s were now part of the same national body. There were talks of a local merger, but two generations of members had already grown their separate ways with distinct identities and these discussions did not bear fruit. Our Savior’s went on to begin construction on its present brick edifice in 1921.

Interior, Our Savior's Lutheran Church — Lenore Stenslien at the Organ

Both Coon Prairie (the vanilla church) and Our Savior’s (the chocolate church) participated in the church mergers of the 20th century which reduced the number of major American Lutheran groups from sixty to three. Today the two congregations are joined together in congenial ministry through the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.