Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LC-MS) is the second-largest Lutheran church body in the United States and, with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), one of the two most conservative large Lutheran bodies.
LC-MS members are referred to as “Old Lutherans.” This designation refers both to their cultural heritage in the German and Scandinavian immigrant communities of the Midwest and to their theological and historical connection to the nineteenth-century revival of sixteenth-century confessionalism. The most important features of this sentiment are allegiance to the verbal inerrancy of the Bible; the limitation of celebrations of fellowship, including prayer and worship— but especially the Eucharist—to individuals with the same correct understanding of its elements (“close communion”); and belief in justification by faith alone.The LC-MS is the only large Lutheran body in North America not formed from a merger, a consequence of its slogan “no unity without unity” and a condition that enhances its reputation as an ethnic enclave. In 2004 the LC-MS counted approximately 2.5 million baptized members in 6,142 congregations. Its most important media outlets are The Lutheran Witness, a monthly periodical, and KFUO, the oldest religious radio station in the United States. It operates archives at the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis, Missouri, and supports a publishing venture, Concordia Publishing House, which has historically required publications to pass doctrinal review. It finances and staffs the Concordia University System and seminaries at St. Louis and Fort Wayne, as well as 91 high schools and the largest chain (1,786) of denominational preschools and elementary schools in the United States. It funds approximately 250 missionaries in 40 countries. The LC-MS is closely affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Canada (LC-C), a group of three former districts that made an administrative separation in 1988, and the churches of the International Lutheran Council, a union of confessionally oriented Lutheran churches.
It is not affiliated with the Lutheran World Federation or the National or World Council of Churches.Tension in the immigrant experience between assimilation and exclusivity is highlighted in the group’s history. The synod stems from a Saxon group that immigrated in 1839 under the leadership of Martin Stephan, a Dresden pastor who studied at Leipzig and Halle and served after 1811 a Bohemian refugee congregation not subordinated to Saxon church administration. In 1817 Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia created a “union” church of Lutherans and Calvinists via a new liturgy (the Agende) intended to allow or force common celebration of communion (theologically taboo because of differing understandings of the nature of the presence of Christ in the sacrament). Stephan, like Klaus Harms an opponent of union decrees, saw pietism as a remedy to the sort of perceived overrationalism of late Lutheran orthodoxy that supported unionism and returned to Martin Luther for inspiration. In the 1830s Stephan heavily influenced a handful of Leipzig theology students who became the group’s first clerical corps. Although the students struggled to find positions in the Saxon state church, no evidence suggests that Stephanite theology was forbidden or persecuted. Still, the theme of enforced sacramental fellowship would recur throughout the group’s history.
Stephan’s popularity and his unconventional prayer meetings led to police observation and house arrest. In 1836 he founded an immigration society. Before the immigrants’ departure from Germany, a constitution for the new church legislated governance through a bishop. An emigration code established regulations for church discipline and financing through a credit fund of slightly over $80,000. Despite their theological conservatism, regulations mandated an eight-hour day for laborers and forbade women to wear corsets, both radical demands at the time. The group’s theological stance was one of firm commitment to orthodoxy, scriptural inerrancy, and allegiance to the Lutheran confessional statements (especially the 1580 Book of Concord) along with firm rejection of rationalism and unionism.
Stephan’s group apparently selected its destination from Gottfried Duden’s Bericht uber eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas (Report on a Journey to the Western States of America and a Stay of Several Years along the Missouri [During the Years 1824, 1825, 1826, and 1827], 1829). The migration fractured families, recalcitrant members were threatened with damnation, and a few children were kidnapped. Stephan left his wife and eight children behind. Six hundred sixty-five immigrants (with an average age of 25) in five ships sailed from Bremen for New Orleans in 1839; one foundered with the company’s goods. At sea, Stephan demanded installation as bishop; he required loyalty statements from group members as they traveled by riverboat. About 600 settlers arrived in St. Louis and settled in Perry County, Missouri, on a riverfront property of 4,475 acres, for which they paid $9,234.25. A theological school, which later moved to become Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, was established in 1839.
Quickly dissent over Stephan’s increasing demands for authority and extravagant expenditures came to the fore. When a delayed group of 108 settlers arrived, matters came to a head. A group of the clergy, including Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther (1811—1887), a participant in the Leipzig group, charged Stephan with sexual and financial misconduct and excommunicated him after he failed to cooperate with the investigation of the allegations.
The resulting chaos over governance threatened the group’s identity. Lay members charged that the group had committed corporate sin and should return to Germany. Walther filled the leadership gap, uniting settlers behind eight theses on the church and ministry at an 1841 debate in Altenburg, Missouri. Walther reaffirmed the legitimacy of the group’s call and its identification with the visible church. The group was reconstituted with a modified congregational policy strikingly different from Stephan’s plan. Walther accepted a call to the pastorate of the group’s St.
Louis church (Trinity) and assumed a decisive mantle of leadership, later serving as synod and seminary president. After 1844 he published Der Lutheraner (The Lutheran), an important source for the group’s history. It spread his unabashed confessionalism and hence was seen critically by churches of the General Synod, an organization of earlier Lutheran immigrations to the United States., many of which used English in worship. In 1843 Trinity’s constitution had mandated exclusive use of German in preaching.The Missouri Synod’s development was also influenced by the Neuendettelsau missionaries sent to the United States by Wilhelm Lohe in the 1840s. The “Lohe men” sought to serve German immigrants in the United States, but also conducted missions to the Chippewa in Michigan. They were organized by Friedrich Konrad Dietrich Wyneken (1810-1876) and founded a seminary at Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 1847 these groups joined in a synod as Die Deutsche Evangelisch- Lutherische Synode von Missouri, Ohio und anderen Staaten (The German Evangelical- Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other states). A similar group, which had immigrated to Buffalo, New York, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, under the leadership of Johannes Grabau (a Prussian pastor jailed in Germany for his rejection of the Prussian Union), maintained its distance after an 1843 dispute over the office of the ministry and constituted itself as the Buffalo Synod. When it split in 1866, however, its largest faction joined the Missouri Synod. In addition to emphasis on the congregational polity, these groups insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible and Book of Concord. These groups also insisted on German as the primary language for theology, preaching, and religious instruction. The Missouri Synod’s constitution required its exclusive use at synodical conventions. Still, the synod began English missions to former slaves in 1877.
The Missouri Synod, rather than uniting with the General Synod, joined the Synodical Conference, a body organizing the conservative synods of the later nineteenth century including the Joint Synod of Ohio (also primarily composed of Germans) and the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Norwegian synods.
These groups united around limited fellowship and opposition to membership in secret societies. Disagreement occasionally flamed among them, as when the Ohio Synod accused Walther of embracing predestination. Ultimately such disagreements led to the separation of most churches that used English as their primary language. A number of Old Lutheran congregations holding English services petitioned for union repeatedly after 1887, but were only admitted as the “English District” in 1911, when the synod assumed control of their periodical, The Lutheran Witness. After 1911, use of English was permitted at conventions.After Walther’s death, theological continuity contrasted with the apparent need for a move to English. Membership had reached 500,000 by 1897. Insistence on German led to a shortage of adequate English religious literature, so that pastors and laity were influenced by debates in the Reformed tradition, such as the social gospel and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. The Missouri Synod avoided these matters for fear of fellowship with church bodies not in full doctrinal agreement. (Missouri’s position would not have been clear; it supported the inerrancy of scripture, for instance, but rejected millenarian- ism as well as the free-will doctrines of many fundamentalist denominations.) When World War I broke out, the synod initially cultivated neutrality. After the U.S. declaration of war, the group dropped “German” from its name, and 75 percent of synod congregations held English- language services by 1920. By 1927 its parochial schools taught mostly in English.
The acceptance of English, however, opened the group to social changes. Women’s work in teaching after the midnineteenth century sparked persistent questions about female roles in the church. By 1926 the synod allowed women to be educated in a few of its colleges. The turn of the twentieth century also saw a growth in lay involvement, perceived at first as a challenge to the pastorate.
Its first lay group was the Walther League (1893), a youth organization; it was followed by the Lutheran Laymen’s League (LLL), a fundraising organizations; and the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League (LWML, 1942). After 1930 the LLL produced an influential radio program, The Lutheran Hour. Despite its accommodation of these social changes, the synod resisted union with other church bodies in 1917 and 1929 (and has continued to resist the twentieth-century trend toward unionism in American Lutheranism). In 1932 its convention endorsed the “Brief Statement,” which delineated its differences from the other Lutheran church bodies, especially the American Lutheran Church (ALC), a church body stemming from earlier German immigration. The “Brief Statement” was reendorsed in 1938, 1947, and 1956 as the doctrinal basis for future fellowship with other Lutherans. As the LC-MS pursued fellowship with the ALC after 1940, a conservative faction in the synod agitated against union in a periodical, The Confessional Lutheran. The synod’s strict confessionalism attracted some smaller immigrant churches to the LC-MS, like the Finnish-American National Evangelical Lutheran Church, a splinter group from the Suomi Synod (1964) and the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church (1971).In 1947 the group adopted its current name. Conflict between exclusivism and assimilation continued over other questions: the purchase of life insurance with other Lutherans (German immigrants of all theological colors joined Aid Association for Lutherans [AAL], a mutual aid society founded in 1902); women’s congregational suffrage; or participation in the military’s chaplain corps or secular youth organizations (Boy Scouts). The LC-MS embraced a less exclusivist position than the WELS, which condemned participation in the chaplain corps as syncretistic and founded its own youth organizations. The relatively ecumenical turn of the LC-MS in the later 1950s was dealt a sharp blow, however, by the 1961 WELS decision to sever fellowship. The break drew into sharp relief the influence of the ecumenical reform spirit of the age and the education of LC-MS seminary faculty outside of the synod. The 1969 LC-MS convention reflected the tensions: while a conservative president, JAO Preus, was elected (who had come from the more conservative, Norwegian-influenced Evangelical Lutheran Synod), the synod entered fellowship with the ALC and extended congregational suffrage to women. In response to complaints in the conservative Lutheran press, Preus investigated the faculty at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis for doctrinal error. By 1972 this investigation focused on the exclusion of the “historical-critical” method of Bible interpretation, which emphasizes the importance of linguistic and contextual features for understanding the Bible. Under pressure to eschew this method, in 1974, the faculty and about 400 students left to constitute a seminary in exile (Seminex) and in 1976 a synod, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), both of which joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a merger of liberal Lutheran church bodies, in 1988.
Although its membership is now less “German” or even immigrant American than merely “white,” the LC-MS’s associa- tional life continues to be affected by the assimilation/exclusivism dynamic. This issue is nowhere more apparent than in hymnal controversies. For much of its history the group used Walther’s 1847 German hymnal, itself a book “cleansed” of all but Reformation and pietist hymnody. Though some English hymnals were used, the first uniform revision was The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941 (known initially as the “blue hymnal” and by the 1970s as the “red hymnal” because of its binding), the common hymnal of the Synodical Conference. It added Scandinavian, Slovakian, and English elements that reflected the exposure of these groups to other liturgical traditions. In 1965 a hymnal commission was formed among the North American Lutheran churches, which resulted in the Lutheran Book ofWorship (the “green hymnal”) in 1978. The LC-MS’s withdrawal from ecumenism spawned publication of its own revision, Lutheran Worship (the “blue hymnal”) in 1982. The controversy shattered the LC-MS’s uniform liturgical tradition as its congregations chose between “red,” “green,” and “blue,” with many abandoning hymnals altogether in favor of a patchwork liturgical solution. The synod’s hope to restore its historical liturgical allegiances with the planned introduction of a new hymnal for 2005, The Lutheran Service Book, is probably illusory, given the cultural assimilation of its membership and widespread lay interest in more modern, diverse church music.
Susan R. Boettcher
See also Duden, Gottfried; Lohe, Johannes Konrad Wilhelm; Pietism; Walther, Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm
References and Further Reading
Burgdorf, Paul H. “Pastor Martin Stephan’s Published Sermons on the Christian Faith.” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 63 (1990): 91—96.
Forster, W O. Zion on the Mississippi. The Settlement of the Saxon Lutherans in Missouri 1839-1841. St. Louis: Concordia, 1953.
Meyer, Carl S., ed. Moving Frontiers: Readings in the History of Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod. St. Louis: Concordia, 1964.
Olson, Oliver K. “The Landing of the Saxons 1839—1989.” Lutheran Quarterly 3 (1989): 357-411.
Todd, Mary. Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
------. “The Curious Case of the Missouri Synod.” Lutherans Today: American Lutheran Identity in the 21st Century. Ed. Richard Cimino. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003, pp. 26-44.