Arne Benjamin Sovik, age 96, of Minneapolis, passed away on Sept. 16, 2014. He was born at Kikungshan (now Jigongshan), China, to Norwegian-born American missionaries. Arne graduated from St. Olaf College in 1939 and from Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minn. in 1943, then was ordained and called to the China mission in Henan province. Displaced by Japanese action, he spent the last year of the war in Chongqing, working in the National Student Relief Committee, an ecumenical organization serving students who had fled to West China. He left China in 1947. After a year of teaching at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., and traveling in missions promotion, Sovik received a Ph. D. from Yale University in 1952 with a study on church and state relations in modern China. Since return to China was impossible, Sovik was sent to Taiwan, where for three years he chaired the Taiwan Lutheran Mission and helped to establish the indigenously led Taiwan Lutheran Church.

In 1955, he began work at the world mission program of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), Geneva, Switzerland, with 25 years of work there broken by four years heading the world mission offices of the Lutheran Church in America in New York. He participated in a 1963 conference on the Church and the Jews, which led to widespread work on the subject. Beginning in 1971, he headed a unit on Christian relationships with other faiths and ideologies, including the then-aggressive Maoist form of Marxism in an isolationist China. As a result of a World Council of Churches conference on Salvation Today in 1973, he wrote a book of the same name for use in North America churches. A linguist himself, he wrote articles that were translated and published in various languages.

Following retirement in 1984, he did some work for the evangelization of Chinese in France, lectured for short terms in a seminary in Indonesia, and edited a newsletter about China. After moving from Geneva to Minneapolis in 1992, he continued speaking on the church in China. During 2004-5, he taught English at a university in Chongqing.

Sovik was preceded in death by his parents, including father Edward Sovik ’11; daughter, Ann Sovik Brandenberg ’72; Ruth Johnson Sovik ’50, his wife of 50 years who died in 2000; and his twin brother, Edward Sovik ’39 and first wife Genevieve Hendrickson Sovik ’44. He is succeeded by his wife, Ellen, whom he married in 2003; his three other children with Ruth: Nord and wife Maureen, Liv, and Nathan Sovik ’75; sister, Gudrun “Margaret” Sovik Lindell ’39; sister-in-law, Anne Running Sovik ’68; and many nephews and nieces, including Rolf Sovik ’69 and Martin Sovik ’71.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Central Lutheran, Luther Seminary, St. Olaf College, or as may be preferred.