# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_2013_S88
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

88

SYNOD REPORTS
• Judaism
• Kabbalah
• Latter Day Saints
• The Lodge
• Membership in Certain Fraternal Organizations: A Pastoral Approach
• Moose International
• New Age Movement
• The Occult
• Rastafarians
• Reiki
• Restorationism
• Salvation Army
• Satanism
• Seventh-day Adventism
• Theophostic Prayer Ministry
• Transhumanism
• Unification Church
• Unitarian-Universalist Association (UUA)
• United Pentecostal Church International
• Unity School of Christianity
• Vineyard Ministries
• Wicca
• Word-Faith Movement
• Yoga

The Commission through its staff continues to respond to a large
number of inquiries, making use of resources accumulated in its
library and files and information available on the Internet.
Lawrence Rast, Chairman
Joel D. Lehenbauer, Executive Director
Notes
1. C. F. W. Walther, Church and Ministry: Witnesses of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church on the Question of the Church and the Ministry, J. T.
Mueller, trans. (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1987), 19, 22, 220.
2. Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XVIII, 13 (Kolb/Wengert).
3. Commission on Theology and Church Relations, Church Discipline
in the Christian Congregation (1985), 10.
4. David Harbaugh, A History of the Evangelical Lutheran
Congregation of Hopeful Church, Boone County, Kentucky. Being a
Discourse Delivered at Its Forty-Eighth Anniversary, on the 6th Day of
January, 1854 (Cincinnati: S. V. Crossman, Printer, 1854), 5-6.
5. “Pledge of Subjection to Stephan,” in Walter Forster, Zion on the
Mississippi: The Settlement of the Saxon Lutherans in Missouri 1839–
1841 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1953), 294.
6. For the text of Walther’s “Altenburg Theses,” see Forster, Zion on
the Mississippi, 523–25.
7. 1847-01, “Rejection of L. F. E. Krause’s Teaching,” Erste Synodal
Bericht, pp. 11b–13a.
8. Walther, Church and Ministry, 321–22.
9. CTCR, Church Discipline in the Christian Congregation, 25: “Is it
proper for a congregation to delegate to the elders, to the church council,
and/or to the pastor the authority to excommunicate? The question is probably prompted by the desire to give as little publicity to the sin or error as
possible (see question 10 on legal considerations). It should be noted that
a kind of delegation has already taken place when the voters’ assembly,
as is generally the case, is authorized to act in the name of ‘the church.’
It is no doubt within the power of the congregation to ask the Board of
Elders and/or pastor [to] act in its behalf. Whether it is wise to delegate
authority in such a serious matter may well depend on the circumstances,
but in general this is a questionable practice.” The CTCR, however, does
recognize that pastors have the responsibility in certain cases to suspend

2013 Convention Workbook

individuals from communion: May a pastor suspend a person from communion? Although a pastor may not himself excommunicate without the
congregation, he may, in the interest of a person’s spiritual welfare, refuse
to commune one whose presence at the altar would be a source of offense
to other members of the congregation, or one living in unrepentant sin who
is still being dealt with on a personal basis by himself or others. If, for
example, a member has embezzled church funds and the matter is known
but the problem has not been resolved (there has been neither absolution
on the one hand nor excommunication on the other), the pastor may insist
that the party involved absent himself from the table of the Lord. This
suspension must always be temporary, however, until the matter has been
resolved in one way or the other. Any appeal from such suspension must
be acted on properly by the congregation, with the party involved, by virtue of the appeal thereby forfeiting any privacy that may have previously
been his” (CTCR, Church Discipline in the Christian Congregation, 21).
10. CTCR, Church Discipline in the Christian Congregation, 10.
11. It is clear from background information in the District President’s
correspondence that this request does not pertain to questions about the
service of “licensed lay deacons,” but about lay men “commissioned” by
the congregation to carry out certain functions of pastoral ministry, such
as public preaching and regular sacramental administration.
12. The Ministry: Offices, Procedures, and Nomenclature, p. 35.
Available online at www.lcms.org/ctcr (p. 31 in online version).
13. Various other terms are also used, such as pastoral office, pastoral
ministry, public ministry, office of the public ministry, preaching office.
As for scriptural terminology, see The Ministry: Offices, Procedures and
Nomenclature, p. 13–14 (p. 6 in online version).
14. See The Ministry in Its Relation to the Christian Church (1973);
The Ministry: Offices, Procedures and Nomenclature (1981); Theology
and Practice of “the Divine Call” (2003). All are available online at: http://
www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=509.
15. Pages 11–12. Available online at http://www.lcms.org/graphics/
assets/media/CTCR/divinecall.pdf.
16. Divine Call, 13–14.
17. Ibid.
18. This was illustrated recently by 2007 Res. 5-01B, which sought
to address both a pressing need for pastors and the Synod’s “doctrine of
the ministry and our commitment to high standards of pastoral education and formation.”
19. The Ministry: Offices, Procedures, and Nomenclature (1981),
available on CTCR Web site, p. 25.

R4-02

Commission on Doctrinal Review
Along with the undersigned, the Commission on Doctrinal Review
consists of four additional members: Dr. Gerhard Bode (Concordia
Seminary, St. Louis), Dr. Walter A. Maier III (Concordia Theological
Seminary, Fort Wayne), Dr. Naomichi Masaki (Concordia Theological
Seminary, Fort Wayne), and Dr. Steven Mueller (Concordia
University—Irvine). During the 2010–2013 triennium, the commission rendered two decisions regarding material already in print and
four decisions in response to appeals from the authors or publisher.
In keeping with the Bylaws of the Synod which govern the doctrinal review process, the commission seeks to ensure that all books,
tracts, devotional materials, worship resources and articles published
by the Synod through its official organs or its publisher, Concordia
Publishing House, are clearly in agreement with the Holy Scriptures
and the Lutheran Confessions.
Prof. John T. Pless, Chairman