# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1911.  19

business of the church. Since the task has now fallen to me of opening our proceedings with a few words, allow me, reverend fathers, to briefly prove and explain this important truth — that the preaching of the gospel is the church's real business — by the following three reasons: 1. The preaching of the gospel is our Lord Jesus's last, summary command to his church. 2. The church can fulfill its calling on earth only through the preaching of the gospel. 3. The church alone is able to preach the gospel.

Before our dear Savior, through suffering and death, took leave of his disciples, he gave them the promise that he would see them again after his resurrection and would then tell them exactly what they were to do. As the Lord had promised, so it happened. For forty days the Risen One showed himself to his own, now in Jerusalem, now by the Sea of Galilee, now in Galilee, now to a few, now to the Eleven, now to more than 500 brothers at once. At his final appearance on the mount of the ascension, the Lord then gathered up everything he had spoken with his own during the forty days into the brief instruction: "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature!" From this we see that our Lord Jesus assigned the church of every land and every age only one business, and this business is the preaching of the gospel, the glad tidings of the grace of God in Christ Jesus. That was the great theme that the Risen One dealt with in the circle of his disciples, and of speaking of which he never grew weary. And so the Lord also steps invisibly into our midst today, as we are about to begin our synodical work, and reminds all of us together that our real business is the preaching of the gospel.

We therefore have a clear and simple rule for our synodical work: everything that does not serve the course of the gospel — indeed, that actually hinders it — does not belong within the scope of our deliberations. Conversely, everything that advances the course of the gospel is worth being discussed and deliberated by us. And the more and the better a subject advances the preaching of the gospel, the more important and necessary it should appear to us. Now since our Savior intends to provide for the preaching of the gospel in such a way that he gives his church shepherds and teachers, we will in these days have to direct our chief attention to our schools of the prophets and to our missions.

The blessed Dr. Walther, whose hundredth birthday we are celebrating this year, expressed himself on this point in his Synodical Address of 1874 as follows: "We must ... never forget of what importance, incomparable with that of any other church institution, our higher educational institutions for the training and formation of teachers in church and school are, namely that on the condition of these institutions depends the future of our church in this country, its welfare