Mission History
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea
The first Lutheran missionaries came to the island of New Guinea in 1886, sent by German mission societies. There were major disruptions in the German work during both World War I and World War II. In 1976, shortly after the independence of Papua New Guinea, the church became fully autonomous and its name was changed to the current ELC-PNG.
In 1921, the former Iowa Synod (a predecessor of the American Lutheran Church, now part of the ELCA) responded to a call for American missionaries in PNG, and since that time hundreds of Americans have worked alongside Australian and German missionaries as well as Papua New Guinean companions. One major program involved sending teams of builders after World War II to rebuild churches and other structures which had been destroyed during the war.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Papua New Guinea (ELC-PNG) emerged out of predecessor mission boards and societies first organized in 1956 as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of New Guinea (ELCONG). In the late 1960s, as the country began to look toward independence from Australia, the indigenous church also began to take over many of the responsibilities from the overseas mission-controlled Lutheran Mission New Guinea (LMNG).