Pastor for the Federation

Despite their quarrels over justification, the delegates at Helsinki had no trouble in picking a successor to Dr. Franklin Clark Fry as president of the Lutheran World Federation for the next six years. He is shy, solemn Dr. Fredrik Axel Schiotz, 62, president of the 2,300,000-member American Lutheran Church, which has its greatest strength among Midwesterners of Scandinavian and German origins.

Schiotz is a self-effacing pastor, and thus is one of the least-known important Lutherans in the country. Nevertheless, he has been a key man in much of the behind-the-scenes conciliation that makes ecumenicism work. In 1956 he led the old Evangelical Lutheran Church into the World Council of Churches. Next he played a major role in the negotiations that brought the Evangelical Lutherans into the A.L.C. The target now: intercommunion with Fry's Lutheran Church in America.

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