{"id":4172,"date":"2025-03-10T07:43:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-10T14:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christlutheranchilliwack.com\/?p=4172"},"modified":"2026-05-20T19:48:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T02:48:30","slug":"about-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/10\/about-us\/","title":{"rendered":"About Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

We gather on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the St\u00f3:l\u014d Coast Salish peoples, who for eons have been stewards of this land on which we are privileged to live, worship, work, learn and play.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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We are an open and welcoming congregation that strives to \u201cdo justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God\u201d (Micah 6:8). We strive to be a vibrant, inclusive, caring, loving, praying, worshiping community that lives out God\u2019s Gospel in deed and in word. Please come and be a part of our faith community.<\/p>\n

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Christ Lutheran Chilliwack 1947-71<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Christ Lutheran was established on January 18, 1940. \u00a0The original building was completed in 1947, and was located at Victor and Cleveland Streets. \u00a0The current building on Charles Street was dedicated on May 16, 1971. For many years worship services were in both the German and English language, but since 2000 services have been in English only.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The congregation has been served by 10 pastors.  <\/p>\n

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Christ Lutheran Church, Chilliwack, is a congregation of the BC Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n

LUTHERANS IN CANADA<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Although we are part of one of the largest Christian groups in the world, we Lutherans aren’t very well known in Canada. Part of the reason for this, is that there aren’t very many of us. <\/p>\n

The ELCIC, of which Christ Lutheran Chilliwack is a member, is quite a young denomination. We began in 1986, through the merger of two Lutheran groups which in turn were the result of other mergers before that. In 2020 our ELCIC had 519 congregations and claims loyalty from about 95,000 baptized members. You will find us in many of the country’s major cities, in southwestern Ontario, across the Prairies and in pockets in the rest of the country such as British Columbia and Nova Scotia’s South Shore.<\/p>\n

We call ourselves evangelical because it is a word deeply rooted in our history. Evangelical is the name that has been used to describe us as far back as the 1520s, long before it took on other connotations in North America. It describes the church that organized around the teachings of Martin Luther with the gospel as the center of those teachings.<\/p>\n

We call ourselves Lutherans because we base our teachings on the Bible and the Book of Concord, which remains the basic definition of what it means to be a \u2018Lutheran.\u2019 Martin Luther, an Augustinian priest who lived in the sixteenth century wasn’t trying to start a denomination; he was trying to reform the Church. <\/p>\n

The first Lutheran services in Canada were conducted in Churchill, Manitoba, in the fall of 1619, by the Rev. Rasmus Jensen, a chaplain who accompanied an ill-fated Danish expedition searching for the Northwest Passage.<\/p>\n

For much of our history in Canada, we have been a church of immigrants. When we met together, we often used the language we brought with us because it was more comfortable for us to worship God that way. Hearing about God’s love in words we understood made us feel more at home in a strange land.<\/p>\n

Today English is the primary language used in the ELCIC.  However, some of our congregations still use the languages we brought with us, from Danish, Norwegian, and German to Chinese, Vietnamese and Eritrean.  No matter what language we speak, however, we hope to provide you with a gracious welcome, and that you will experience the love of God among us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We gather on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the St\u00f3:l\u014d Coast Salish peoples, who for eons have been stewards of this land on which we are privileged to live, worship, work, learn and play. We are an open and welcoming congregation that strives to \u201cdo justice, and to love kindness, and to walk…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4172"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7375,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4172\/revisions\/7375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christchurchchilliwack.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}