# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S647
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 647

Report of the National Advisory Emergency
Planning Council -
(Memorial 1006)
THE CHURCH AT WORK IN WORLD RELIEF
The World — the Church
‘< When the world is at its worst, the Church must be at its best.
‘Life in this atomic era is, to say the least, dark and foreboding.
The standard of living, despite postwar illusory predictions, is being
pushed lower and lower. Christian moral codes have in all too
many instances been replaced by humanistic and pagan ideologies.
The road back to God, which many prophesied would be teeming
with penitent humanity, has only occasional travelers. The influx
into churches which was to have been so tremendous has been
nerely sporadic; the revival so assuredly looked for has been quite
perfunctory. Add to this the deluge of destruction which has swept
“over many lands, particularly Central Europe, and there stands be-
fore the Church of today a world sick and maimed, discouraged and
disillusioned.
Out of the vortex of this maelstrom of immorality and irreligion,
‘chaos and destruction, there arises a hand beckoning for help.
d in His wrath has visited His creation with these holocausts,
se atomic threats, these evil times. But He is also a God of
rey! Today He sends us, the bearers of His compassion and love
for over a century, to proclaim, undaunted, the Gospel of Jesus
Christ to all the world, and to administer the balm of Christian
evolence to the peoples of Europe and Asia. :
_ The cries for help have not gone unanswered by our Church.’
Through an unprecedented relief program that reaches into nine-
en countries, distributes thousands of tons of food and clothing,
atlocates millions of dollars, the Missouri Synod has opened its
arms unto suffering, bleeding, dying humanity. Through its relief
“work our Church has answered the call of distraught and despair-
ing peoples and changed hate to love, fear to confidence, despair to
ourage, apathy to faith.
The origin of such a relief program dips back a number of
ears.
Soon after Pearl Harbor it became evident that many situations
"confronting the life and work of the Church, incident to the war,
“were everybody’s concern in general, but nobody’s business in
‘particular. To meet this emergency, the President of Synod ap-
=pointed in 1942 the NationaL Apvisory EmerceNcy PLANNING