It’s a shame even Lutherans don’t know about Sister Elizabeth Fedde (1850-1921), a Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess who established the Norwegian Relief Society to serve the Norwegian-American immigrant community.

The Lutheran Deaconess movement started in Germany in 1836. By 1884, there were 56 deaconess communities in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Scandinavia with a total of 5,653 deaconesses. They ministered with vagrants, epileptics, those in prison, those recently released from prison, the sick, orphans, and anyone in need.

Elizabeth Fedde  trained as a deaconess at the Lovisenberg Deaconess House in Christiania, Norway. In 1883 she came to the United States. In quick order she established a house to train deaconess and then a hospital that became Lutheran Medical Center (today called New York University Langone Hospital – Brooklyn). That would have been enough by itself, but next she was off to Pittsburgh to run the Pittsburgh Infirmary (today UPMC Passavant), then to Minneapolis to start the Lutheran Deaconess Home. She was also consulted in the planning of Lutheran Deaconess Hospital in Chicago (today Advocate Lutheran General in Parkridge) and yet another hospital in Grand Forks Nebraska.

In 1895, worn out by her labors, she returned to Norway. She resigned from the diaconate in 1898 order to marry Ole A. P. Slettebø, her childhood sweetheart, who had waited for her throughout her twenty-seven years in the diaconate.

There are around 70 deaconess today in the ELCA and also a community in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. They serve in a variety of rolls including teachers, counselors, administrators, health professionals, and  youth workers. God bless them.

Read Romans 16:1 and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne