# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S881
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

. MISSIONS 381

Deutschland, each province has its own church organization. These
vary both in confessional and theological position. Although these
provincial churches (Landeskirchen) were state-supported until
1921, they are today independent of the State, even though their

organization still shows signs of their former character.

Provincia, CHurcHEes (LANDESKIRCHEN)

Our representative was able to obtain a very complete picture
of the conditions in the Landeskirchen of the American and British
zones by personal contact with leaders and prominent personalities.

The strength of the provincial church lies in its organization.
Almost everybody in these territories is automatically declared to
be officially affiliated with the Church and is taxed for its main-
tenance, and that gives the Church a financial income from large
masses of people and consequent financial strength. Owing to
this method of procedure, it is almost entirely a Church of pastors,
since the laity takes very little interest in the organizational activity
of their Church. This tends to develop within the Church certain
strong men, who are great leaders with a deep theological insight
and organizational capacity. The leading personalities of the various
churches are all acquainted with one another and in practically
all instances present a solid front against any viewpoints with which
they are not in agreement. Because there has been so little emphasis
on lay activity in their churches, most of the church work is done
by the clergy and other professional workers. That is true of
almost all fields of churchly endeavor, in mission work, in youth
work, in the educational program of the Church, in the charitable
endeavors of the Church. Among these professional workers one
must reckon the deaconesses, who are a powerful working force in
almost every provincial Church. As a result the type of work
which is done is of a high caliber. The only difficulty is that the
number of these professional workers is too small to cope with
the great mass of people with whom they must deal.

The weaknesses of the Landeskirchen grow out of their char-
acter as mass churches. What strikes an observer most forcibly
is the small size of its actually interested and active membership.
Parishes which number from six to ten thousand souls are not
exceptional, and yet those same parishes will have a church building
seating from 600 to 1,000 persons. What is more saddening is that
usually only one service is conducted on Sundays and that even
that service is often not sufficiently well attended to fill the church.
Where there is such a poor church attendance, one can expect a
poor Communion record. Even in the best of the provincial
churches, let us say in the Franconian districts of Bavaria, the
average Communion attendance per year is less than once per
communicant member, while in a normal provincial church the