# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1950_S1315
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS 843

Emergency Planning Council Report
1947-1950
(Memorial 1010)

Our Church Today

Christ expects the Church to be always at its best. Life in
this atomic and hydrogen-bomb era is, to say the least, foreboding.
The standards of living, despite illusory predictions, are dropping
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instances been replaced by humanistic and pagan ideologies.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 is merely sporadic. Add to this the hard struggle of
rehabilitation, through which many nations of Europe are going,
and there stands before the Church of today a world sick and
maimed, discouraged and disillusioned.

Out of the vortex of this maelstrom of immorality and irre-
ligion, chaos and frustration, there arises a hand beckoning for
help. God in His wrath has visited. His creation with these holo-
causts, these evil times. But He is also a God of mercy. 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 benevolence to the peoples
of Europe and Asia.

The cries for help have not gone unanswered by our Church.
Through an unprecedented physical and spiritual relief program
that reaches into nineteen countries, distributes thousands of tons
of food and clothing, allocates millions of dollars, brings His Word
to tens of thousands of unbelievers, 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
despairing peoples and changed hate to love, fear’ to confidence,
despair to courage, apathy to faith.

Relief Expenditures $4,155,030.35

During the past triennium there were allocated for the purpose
of relief, reconstruction, rehabilitation, and mission expansion
a total of $4,155,030.35.

The above amount comprises expenditures out of Relief funds
for Europe and Asia of $2,492,,979.05, and out of the Peace Thank-
offering, $1,662,051.30. It represents actual cash transactions super-
vised and approved by the synodical Board of Directors.

It is impossible to give an exact figure of the over-all totals
expended by individual congregations, organizations within con-
gregations, and individual members of our churches who made