# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1959_S212
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

212 RESOLUTIONS — COMMITTEE 4

Parents, youth leaders, pastors, Christian teachers, and elders
need to exercise Christian concern regarding “dating as a search
for a mate” and supply the necessary positive and negative in-
struction early enough “so that the mind directs the search before
the emotions are involved.” Children and young people must be
insistently warned against “falling in love” with a Roman Catholic
or with any other person with whom it would be impossible or very
difficult to achieve spiritual unity. Where pastor, Christian teachers,
elders, and youth leaders raise no voice in warning, offer little by
way of instruction, and give inadequate personal counsel in the
time of courtship, the congregation itself must share the blame for
unhappy interfaith marriages.

6. Where an Interfaith Marriage Exists

In dealing with members of the Lutheran Church who have
entered into an interfaith or mixed marriage, the church should
exercise sympathetic understanding and sincerely endeavor to save
and build the marriage with its counseling ministry. The following
principles of action should apply:

a. Where marriage has taken place, it should be saved, not
destroyed. The words of Jesus apply, “What therefore God hath
joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6). St. Paul
tells the Christian to remain even with an unconverted spouse.
(1 Cor. 7:12, 13)

b. The Lutheran party should be strengthened in his faith and
in his fellowship with his congregation. No marriage should be
the cause of severing one’s relation with Jesus Christ as personal
Savior and with the church of which He alone is the Head.

c. The Lutheran party should be brought to the conviction that
his Christian liberty and a clear, untrammeled conscience are to
be safeguarded. The Lutheran party should be encouraged stead-
fastly to witness to the truth. Those being counseled should be
warned against relinquishing and denying the freedom which
Christ died to earn for them. When the Lutheran party who has
signed the Roman Catholic premarriage agreement is convinced in
his or her own conscience that this agreement is to be repu-
diated, such action should be undertaken after due discussion with
the spouse. In such discussion, patient witness and Biblical in-
struction should be brought to bear in the spirit of Christian love.
In all situations the Lutheran spouse should not act arbitrarily or
spitefully but endeavor so to witness within his family that both
spouse and the children are led closer to their Savior and to
Christian doctrine as revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures.

d. In every case of an interfaith or mixed marriage, the pastor

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