LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1989, Page 89

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90 OTHER PRESENTATIONS

3. Greetings of the President
of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

I greet you—all of you—in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ from your brothers and sisters in the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America:

On the one hand, it could be said of us that we are a
very old church. 1988 was the year when many in our
church recalled the 350th anniversary of the coming of
some of the earliest Lutherans to America’s shores. As
stream after stream of immigrants came to this land, they
brought with them their Bibles and catechisms and hymn
books.

In the course of time many of those streams came to-
gether. In 1988 three of them flowed into our Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America. In that sense, we are a very
young church.

I need not tell you that the past two years since the
constituting convention have been a time of enormous ad-
justment for us. It is no small task to bring together a
church of over 5 million members, with 11,000 congrega-
tions, more than 16,000 pastors, and several thousand full-
time lay workers. But after almost nonstop travel over the
past two and one-half months to visit synod assemblies in
every corner of the country, I can assure you that the spirit
is positive, that our postnatal difficulties are surmounta-
ble, and that the long-range picture for our church is very
good.

During these times of transition we have valued un-
derstanding friends. And I want to acknowledge in your
presence the kindness and pastoral support of Dr. Ralph
Bohlmann, your president. He was one of the first visitors
to my office after I moved to Chicago. Since then we have
been together on many occasions, both formal and infor-
mal. Out of these encounters has developed a relationship
of respect and trust. We do not gloss over our differences.
We find that we can be forthright and candid with one
another.

But neither do we ignore our common heritage in the
Scriptures and the Confessions of the Lutheran Church.
No, that does not mean that we will always share an iden-
tical understanding of those resources. But our very alle-
giance to them obligates us to speak with one another and
to search for increasing understanding. This is the mood
that prevails in the meetings of our Committee for Lu-
theran Cooperation (CLC), the successor to the LCUSA.
Those sessions have been characterized by the same spirit
that has pervaded the meetings between your president
and me.

I share with President Bohlmann the conviction that it
is important to witness boldly, not only to those outside
the church, but also to one another within the body of
Christ. In so doing, we remind our respective churches of
what is at the heart of the Gospel.

It is in that spirit that I come today with a witness from
our Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As our three
predecessor churches began merger discussions in the
early part of this decade it was assumed by many that
there would be substantial theological differences that
would hinder or even scuttle our quest for unity. What we

Bishop Herbert W. Chilstrom

discovered, however, was that there already existed a re-
markable theological consensus between us. Out of that
consensus came the most important section of our consti-
tution—the part called “Confession of Faith.”

The Confession begins with a clear, unapologetic wit-
ness to our belief in the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. It then moves very directly to this proclamation:
“This church confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior
and the Gospel as the power of God for the salvation of all
who believe.” When the Confession of Faith speaks about
the Word of God, it begins where such discussion must
always begin, namely, with Jesus Christ as the Word of
God incarnate. His life, death, and resurrection are pro-
claimed as the source of all of life and as the only basis for
our hope.

The Confession also reminds us that God’s message is
always heard as both Law and Gospel, beginning with cre-
ation and finding its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

The canons of the Old and New Testaments are also
acknowledged as the Word of God. We say that these are
inspired by God’s Spirit speaking through the authors, and
that these are the authoritative source and norm for the
church’s proclamation, faith, and life.

Our Confession names the three historic creeds as true
declarations of the faith and the Unaltered Augsburg
Confession as a true witness to the Gospel. The other
confessional writings are also accepted in our constitution
as further valid interpretations of the faith of the church.

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