C.V. Bowman Records

Carl Victor Bowman, author and third president of the Evangelical Covenant Church, was born on January 13, 1868 in Marbäck Parish, Småland. His parents were August and Johanna Skott, and he was the oldest of four children. When he was seven years old, his father, a tailor, fell ill with pneumonia and was incapacitated for several years. Thus impoverished, his parents sent him in 1879 to live with an aunt and uncle in Chicago, from whom he took his adult surname. For the next several years he worked in factories, suffering a brief period of unemployment in 1883. In late 1889 he returned briefly to Sweden, finding his father's health improved and subsequently bringing his two sisters back with him to the United States.

Bowman's religious career began in 1885, when he was converted at the Mission Covenant Tabernacle in Chicago. In 1888 he joined the North Side Mission Covenant Church, where C. A. Björk was pastor, and there became a deacon and youth leader. Encouraged by some Covenant pastors, he decided to become a minister and entered the Covenant seminary in Minneapolis in 1892. As a student he served churches in Blue Island, Illinois and Escanaba, Michigan, and in 1896 he graduated from the seminary, which had since moved to North Park.

For the next twenty-four years Bowman served churches in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. In the fall of 1896 he became pastor of the Tabernacle in Chicago. There he met and married Julia Nelson (March 10, 1897), with whom he eventually had five children: Raymond, Carl, Malcolm, Alpha, and Earl. In 1900 he moved to Salem Covenant Church in Minneapolis. While there he also served as secretary of the Northwest Mission Association, the precursor to the Covenant's Northwest Conference (1901-1907) and later as its first superintendent (1907-1910). In 1910 he moved to the Swedish Congregational Church in Boston, where he served for seven years. He then returned to Chicago to serve Edgewater Covenant Church (1917-1920).

Bowman's literary career began at about the same time as his pastoral service. He began to write poetry in 1886 and continued to do so for most of his life, though only a small portion of his work was published. In 1906 he published two books, the first of which was Väckelsen i Wales (The Revival in Wales). The second book, Missionsvännerna i Amerika (The Mission Friends in America), was the first comprehensive history of the Covenant. He also contributed frequently to a number of periodicals, including Veckobladet and later Förbundets Veckotidning.

In 1920 Bowman left ministerial work to become the Covenant's Secretary of Missions. As missions secretary he initially traveled throughout the United States and Canada, reporting on conditions of the denomination's domestic mission fields. Among the chief problems he encountered were generational conflicts over the denomination's language transition (from Swedish to English) and related difficulties of placement for a large number of pastors. With these concerns in mind, he called repeatedly upon Covenanters to improve their domestic missions, particularly in regard to youth. Following the denomination's constitutional revision in 1923, he devoted more of his attention to the mission programs in Alaska, which he visited in 1925, and China, which then was beset by financial problems and societal unrest.

In addition to his secretarial duties, Bowman continued his literary work during this period, translating and updating his Covenant history in 1925 and publishing an autobiography, Allmogesonen (Son of the People) in 1926. He also helped to promote a denominational annuity fund and led a campaign to establish an endowment fund for North Park College.

Bowman was elected president of the Covenant in 1927, replacing the retiring E. G. Hjerpe. Unfortunately, he assumed office in failing health and at the beginning of one of the most difficult periods in the denomination's history. In 1927 a theological struggle began between a number of fundamentalist pastors and leaders, including Gustaf F. Johnson and Axel B. Ost, and North Park Seminary. A similar controversy arose in 1929 over the issue of motion pictures, centering on assistant Sunday School secretary Olga Lindborg's advocacy of their use in ministry. As these conflicts raged, the Great Depression brought great financial hardship to the denomination, replacing the financial surpluses that Bowman initially accumulated with massive deficits within virtually all of its institutions. Though Bowman probably deserves praise simply for maintaining the denomination's existence during this period, his health prevented him from achieving more. An increasingly severe case of arthritis, possibly induced by an ankle injury in 1927, gradually incapacitated him and forced him to resign the presidency in 1932.

Bowman spent his remaining years in Chicago. Though his health continued to deteriorate, he managed to complete his last published work, a biography of C. A. Björk, in 1934. He died on August 4, 1937, and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery.