# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1956_S318
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

318 PARISH EDUCATION

counseling, and home-church co-operation. Professional leaders
called in to appraise the program found it “one of the best,” seek-
ing to develop not merely the “good” but the “Christian” family,
They pointed out, however, that it was still largely a “paper pro-
gram” that needs to be transmitted to pastors and people.

b. The threats to the Christian home are greater than ever on
account of the mobility of people, moral laxity, and the invasion
of non-Christian influences, such as divorce, mixed marriages,
parental and juvenile delinquency, and family disharmony pre-
sented by movies, magazines, radio, and television. The families
themselves must be strengthened to withstand these thrusts, and
pastors, teachers, and other church workers need to be equipped
to give remedial help. Pastors are dealing with more family prob-
lems than ever before. The church’s program needs to be both
preventive and remedial.

c. To help parishes minister more specifically to family needs
the Board’s Family Life Committee carried forward many projects.

(1) To help more families establish and improve family wor-
ship, the film Faith of Our Families was developed with Concordia
Publishing House; the tract Why Families Worship and the book-
let Building Family Altars in Your Parish were produced for the
year-long Family Worship Project of 1954.

(2) To give help to the couples’ groups (almost 1,000 in Synod),
a new book, Working with Young Adults, is to appear in 1956.

(3) To help Christian parents, three books in the Parent Guid-
ance Series have appeared: Happiness Is Homemade (1954), Teen-
Agers Need Parents (1955), Guiding the Young Child (1956).

(4) To promote home-church co-operation, the Family Life
Committee has worked closely with the newly formed (1954)
National Lutheran Parent-Teacher League, in setting up policies
and developing its newsletter “Nurture” and its annual packet of
materials. The League has 400 affiliated groups.

(5) To help pastors with marriage counseling, fast becoming
a necessity to safeguard marriage and the Christian home, the
committee is producing its first book on Premarital Counseling.
It has studied the problem of mixed marriages. A separate state-

ment on marriage with Roman Catholics is included later in
this report.

(6) To meet the new needs and new opportunities of serving
the rapidly increasing number of older adults and aging families
in our churches, the committee produced a tract, Golden Days
of Useful Living, and is working with the Lutheran Laymen’s

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