While a student at St. Olaf College in 1922, Fredrik Schiotz, a Chicago native who grew up in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, was elected the first president of the Lutheran Student Association of America. After graduation, he taught elementary and high school for two years in his home town before entering Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. Seminary studies were interrupted during the year Schiotz served as traveling secretary to the Student Volunteer Movement. 

After ordination and two Minnesota pastorates, he became executive secretary of the Student Service Commission of the American Lutheran Conference (1936-45). He then became pastor of Trinity Church, Brooklyn, New York, (1945-48) before being called by the National Lutheran Council to serve from 1948-54 as executive secretary of the Commission on Younger Churches and Orphaned Missions (New York and Geneva, Switzerland), dedicated to reuniting European churches and world missions after World War II. Simultaneously, he served for two of those years (1952-54) as director of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Department of World Missions.

In 1954, Schiotz was elected president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. A leading advocate for greater Lutheran unity, six years later he was elected the first president of the merged American Lutheran Church (ALC). During his as ALC president tenure he served seven years as president of the LWF (1963-70). He was a member of the LWF executive committee for the next 16 years. He helped bring the ALC into the worldwide ecumenical movement and was a member of the World Council of Churches Central Committee. Dr. Schiotz was instrumental in creating the Lutheran Council in the USA in 1966, and in the ALC-Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) fellowship agreements, later broken by LCMS. He died in 1989 at age 88.

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