Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod

The Evangelical Lutheran Tennessee Synod (1820–1920) was a Lutheran Church body known for its staunch adherence to the Augsburg Confession and commitment to confessional Lutheranism. The Synod began with 6 ministers in 1820 and had 40 by 1919, plus 10 students and candidates for ministry. Most of the congregations were in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee until 1860 when the congregations in Tennessee, under the leadership of Abel J. Brown, formed the Evangelical Lutheran Holston Synod. However the Tennessee Synod kept its name, and so after 1860, it had congregations in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Alabama, but none in Tennessee. In 1886 the Tennessee Synod (along with the Holston Synod and other southern synods) joined the United Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the South, paving the way for the Tennessee Synod's merger into the United Synod of North Carolina in 1920, which ended the Tennessee Synod's history as a separate body.

The Tennessee Synod is probably best known for producing the first English translation of the Book of Concord (the confessions of the Lutheran church), published in 1851 by the Henkel Press of New Market, Virginia. In addition, though not widely known, the Tennessee Synod helped found Lenoir–Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina, a private, four-year liberal arts college. The first president of the university, Robert Anderson Yoder, was the Tennessee Synod's first student beneficiary of scholarship funds.

The Tennessee Synod's defining characteristic was certainly its confessionalism. The Synod's ministers were labeled "Henkelites" and lambasted by their opponents. "Henkelites" is a reference to the fact that Paul Henkel and his sons were synod leaders and printer of all synod materials, so the Henkel name was well known. They had a strict standard of Lutheran orthodoxy which kept them from joining with other Lutherans in surrounding states for several generations, but the number of churches in Virginia and North and South Carolina grew in later decades as the body developed into more general Lutheranism. The churches were chiefly rural and small, with many just being established and built in this period. They were especially opposed to the General Synod (see Bente below).

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