# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S890
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

890 MISSIONS

your Board has appealed to the Board of Directors for the grant
of this sum from the Peace Thankoffering.

The publication of Lutheran literature in the Flemish language
is also a necessity for mission work in Belgium, and your Board
is ready to make an appeal for a special grant for this purpose.
Here, as well as in France, future workers in the churches’ min-
istry cannot be trained in their native country, and your Board
will seek young men who are willing to study in America at our
colleges and seminaries for the purpose of preparing themselves
for the ministry in their native land. This work will also require
our financial support.

D. Denmark
THe Stare CuurcH or DenmMARK

The State Church of Denmark has been Lutheran since the a
time of the Reformation and has shared in all the changes of ‘
theological orientation that have swept through the German
Church. It is a picture of what a Church can become if the
desire for mere outward union outweighs the desire for real unity
in spirit and doctrine. Although the Danish State Church officially a
subscribes to the Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Small Cate- a
chism and demands that all ministers upon their ordination promise
to teach and preach only according to the Canonical Scriptures and
the Confessions of the Church, yet no serious effort is made to
discipline the flagrant departures from that standard. In fact, our :
representative was assured by more than one pastor of the State a
Church that there was only a single pastor in the whole Church a
who could honestly subscribe to the above confession, and at the
present time he is being disciplined by the church authorities on
account of his “prejudice in favor of true doctrine” and has been
requested to consider “if he could not be persuaded to change his
position, namely, his self-assurance of having the truth.” Because
of this laxness you will find within the Danish “Lutheran” State
Church every variety of doctrine from Anglo-Catholicism to some
of the more lurid types of Pentecostal doctrine.

THe Ortcrn or THE DANIsH LUTHERAN Free CHuRCH

The Danish Evangelical Lutheran Free Church began about
1850 with the protest of a Danish pastor, Grunnet, against the
rationalism rampant in the Danish Church of his time. So power-
ful were his sermons and so energetic his labors that in a few
years he had gathered together a group which numbered almost
2,000 souls. In order to assist him in his work, he trained a group
of lay preachers. Subsequent disaffection of these lay preachers
against Grunnet and eventually his son for assuming a superior
position in the church led to a schism in the church about the
year 1890.