Evangelist Hans Romsdalen Goes to Oppdal, Norway

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I recently learned something fascinating about my father’s relatives: The reason they immigrated to America from Norway was because they were fleeing religious persecution.

Oppdal, Norway, located about two hundred miles north of Oslo, is a small, thriving country town complete with its own mall, community theater…and ski resort.

Oppdal is also the birthplace of my paternal grandparents, Sivert and Mary Reese. Sivert immigrated to the U.S. in 1880 with his parents and siblings when he was 5 years old. They were part of a group of 60 residents who left Oppdal en mass and homesteaded in sod huts and dugouts near Irene, South Dakota. (For a vivid description of Norwegian immigrant life in the Dakotas in the late 1800’s, read the classic, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, by O. E. Rolvaag.)

My grandmother immigrated from Oppdal at the age of 26, arriving in Irene, South Dakota, in 1902. She and my grandfather married on his farm near Irene in 1904, moved to Canby, Oregon, gave birth to my dad, Ben Reese, in 1905, and helped start an Evangelical Free Church there, now called Bethany Evangelical Free Church.

Up until a few months ago, no one in my family ever talked about the reason Dad’s family came to America. But recently my sister Dorothy called and said she had been going through some of Dad’s papers and discovered a book by his uncle about their family history. The title is, “Some Pioneers and Pilgrims on the Prairies of Dakota: From the Ox Cart to the Aeroplane,” by Rev. John B. Reese, published in 1920 (Available on Amazon here).

I asked my sister to send me the book and while reading it I discovered the reasons why that group of 60 people left Oppdal, Norway, the primary one being religious persecution.

It turns out that, prior to 1880, an evangelist by the name of Hans Romsdalen had come through Oppdal, holding revival meetings in local homes since the state church in town refused to let him use their building.

“He denounced the dead forms of religion current in the Lutheran State Church as of no avail, and worse than nothing, in that they caused people to rest their salvation on a false foundation. He testified by reference to the Bible, and to personal experience, that the only basis of salvation for man was a personal, vital relation to Jesus Christ, entered into by faith; and that in Him alone could man find forgiveness of sin, peace with God and a good conscience.”

Among those responding to Hans Romsdalen’s message was my great-grandfather, Berhaug Reese, who became a lay preacher in the new home church movement in Oppdal. Unfortunately, he and his fellow lay church preachers also became targets for persecution.

“It was a foregone conclusion that these lay preachers, especially the above mentioned leaders, would soon find themselves marked for persecution by the representatives of the established church and also by petty government officials who of course stood back of that church organization. Then, too, while looking upon the State Church not only as dead religiously but also as a positive menace to true religion, in that it led people astray, and persecuted those who were trying to lead the way back to the teachings of the lowly Nazarene, yet they were compelled to give a tithe of their principal farm produce toward the upkeep of this institution.”

As the years progressed and the persecution increased, the option of immigrating to the new world became more and more appealing. “This religious situation and persecution became a strong motive for seeking a freer atmosphere.”

“Freer” here is the operative word. The revival experience of this group of believers in a small farm village in the middle of Norway was being duplicated at the same time in villages and towns all across the country and in Sweden as well. It would eventually coalesce into what we now know as the Evangelical Free Church, (“Free” referring to freedom from government control.)

Then, when the group of sixty immigrants – the leader of which, according to the book, was my great-grandfather – decided to immigrate to the U.S., Berhaug Reese sold his farm and from the proceeds paid, not only the price of passage for his own family, but also the price of passage for many in the group!

And the rest is history.

So, thank you, Evangelist Hans Romsdalen – now in heaven looking down on us – for fulfilling your calling by God to tell my ancestors about the necessity of having “a personal, vital relationship” with Jesus Christ through faith in him. I am a Christian, a Reese, and an American because of you.

And if there are any other evangelists reading this, thank you as well. You are changing for the better, not only the lives of every soul you save, but the lives of their descendants too.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry

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