Evangelical Free Church of America
evangelical Christian denomination
The Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) is an evangelical Christian denomination in the Radical Pietistic tradition. The EFCA was formed in 1950 from the merger of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church and the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association. It is affiliated with the International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches.
History
The Swedish Evangelical Free Church formed from a number of Free Mission Friends as the Swedish Evangelical Free Mission in Boone, Iowa, in October 1884. Several churches that had been members of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Ansgar Synod and the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Mission Synod, along with some independent congregations, were instrumental in organizing this voluntary fellowship. In the same year, two Norwegian-Danish groups in Boston, Massachusetts, and Tacoma, Washington, began to fellowship together. By 1912, they had formed the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Free Church Association. The Swedish and Norwegian-Danish bodies united in June 1950 at a merger conference held at the Medicine Lake Conference Grounds near Minneapolis, Minnesota. The two bodies represented 275 local congregations at the time of the merger.
The EFCA shares some early ties with those who formed the Swedish Evangelical Covenant Church as they both came from Mission Friends groups.
The public source identifies “Evangelical Free Church of America” as evangelical Christian denomination. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Evangelical, Free and Church.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5415680. VIAF identifies the subject as 153623817. The Library of Congress control number is n82031694. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1884 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Evangelical Free Church of America” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.