# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1911_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

13th Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States, 1911. 37

We come into this closer union with your venerable body fully
and sincerely trusting you, as brethren, and you, we know, are coming
with us in the same trust. We are persuaded that our mutual confi-
dence shall never prove to have been in vain.

We come here to join ranks with you and march with you, hand
in hand, shoulder to shoulder, bearing farther and farther into the
world of lost sinners the one saving Gospel, whether it be by means
of the German language, or the English, or any tongue, just so it be
the old Gospel.

We have been one in faith. Now we are one in organization.
May we ever be one and inseparable! God bless this union! I close
with a word taken from Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the
temple. I know no more appropriate one. It is: "The Lord, our
God, be with us as He was with our fathers! Let Him not leave us,
nor forsake us!"

Thereupon P. F. Kügele, the first president of the English Missouri
Synod, addressed the following words to those present:

"Venerable fathers and brethren in the Lord! Thirty-two years
have passed since God led me out of the Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and
Other States. This came about when, without my desiring it, for
conscience's sake, I had to accept a call to an English congregation of
the Ohio Synod.

"Hard struggles have swept over our American Lutheran Zion in
these thirty-two years. The older brethren all know this very well,
especially those whose position placed them in the midst of the
conflict. But our Chief Shepherd, Jesus Christ, thwarted the evil
enemy's design to destroy our American Zion, and the true Lutheran
Church has emerged from the election controversy [Gnadenwahlslehrstreit]
strengthened, indeed one might say rejuvenated. When the waters had
somewhat calmed, about a dozen pastors — all of them, with the exception
of the newly founded English mission in Baltimore, standing outside
the Missouri Synod — came together in 1888, in accordance with the
advice of the 1887 Delegate Synod, at Bethlehem Church in St. Louis, and
founded the present English Synod of Missouri and Other States. This
took place with the advice and assistance of the then Commission for
English Missions. Few they were at the time. Of the original founders
only three remain in our body today: besides myself, Pastors W. Dallmann
and L. M. Wagner. But God's blessing visibly rested on this undertaking.
The time had come when God willed that the English work be taken up
and carried on by the Missouri Synod on a larger scale.

"Of the history thus far I need say nothing, and of what is
happening here today allow me to say only this one thing: it is simply
what the man whose memory we