LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1992, Page 70

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70 REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

The Board of Directors, as you know, has responded to
that cry by recognizing, in conjunction with the Board for
Mission Services, an Eastern European Outreach Goal.
We're trying to do more and-more all the time. If you hear
me speaking with considerable personal emotion about
Eastern Europe, it’s because the need and the opportunity
is so great ... and the need is now!

In this convention, we're going to hear, we believe, if
technology serves us well, from another exciting field. we
hope to talk to our chief mission person in China, Mis-
sionary Henry Rowold, and to do it live by satellite during
this convention. China has almost one-fourth of the world’s
population. You all know what went on in Tiananmen
Square years ago, and what a perilous situation remains
for Christians in China, But our church body is there, too,
working together with the Lutheran Laymen’s League, as-
sisted by the wonderful women of the Lutheran Women’s
Missionary League, and by many others who are trying to
present the Gospel on tape through libraries, teaching En-
glish as a second language, and any other meana to help
and support the church in China and to be strong in the
proclamation of the Good News in Jesus Christ.

People in this great church are responding wonderfully
to God’s Macedonian call to many parts of our world. But
we need to ask harder questions if we really want to be a
mission church. And, dear brothers and sisters, that’s the
chief challenge of this convention.

How are we doing’as a Synod, you might well ask? The
way you answer that question depends on your perspec-
tive, I suppose. The Presidents of our Districts and the
faculties of our two seminaries had a retreat several
months ago. We listened to one of America’s distinguished
theologians talk about “perspective.” He used as an illus-
tration he called “the hurricane model.” When you look at
a hurricane from a satellite, as we sometimes do on the
evening newscasts, it looks almost beautiful, because you
see it as a whole. If you look at a hurricane from a weather
plane, you're just a little bit closer, and it isn’t all that
beautiful. If you look at it from a weather station, you’re
still closer, and if you have to look at it from a hut, God
help us!

That’s an interesting analogy for the way in which we
see this big family of God that we call The Lutheran
Church—Missouri Synod. How are we doing? The answer
depends, I suppose, on whether at any one time you happen
to be in a hut or a weather station or a weather plane or
a satellite. We need to recognize and accommodate each
other’s different perspectives. Things often look different
when your contexts are not the same.

The optimist and the pessimist in each of us also tends
to see things a little bit differently. Is the glass half full
or is it half empty? Is that a doughnut that I am about to
eat, or must I pity the hole that’s there with no food value?
If you're shoveling out a barn, as I once heard a preacher
remind us, are you going to complain about the smell and
uncleanness, or are you going to conclude that there must
be a horse somewhere that you could ride as soon as you
got finished.

When you describe the Synod, do you focus on pluses
or minuses? Both of them are there. The Synod, in any
sound and fair evaluation of the 60-some corporations that

comprise us, the 35 Districts, the colleges, the seminaries,
the universities, the 35 mission fields, and the 6,000 con-
gregations who, as we know are autonomous, independent
congregations, has many, many pluses. I believe one of the
great pluses of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
continues to be our concern for and practice of pure doc- ©
trine. We seek to be faithful to the Word of God and to the
Lutheran Confessions in everything we do. How important
that is today at a time when many others around the Chris-
tian church are So preoccupied with the various “isms” and
ideologies of this strange world. I’m proud of the pastors
and teachers and laity of this church who, almost without
exception, it seems to us who supervise them, are clear
and strong and consistent in their proclamation of the Gos-
pel of Jesus Christ on the basis of His holy and inspired
Word, and who do it so faithfully. We don’t need to, and
we don’t want to, and we must not allow change in that
beloved doctrine! As Dr. Sohns reminded us this morning,
it’s part of the boldness of our Christian confession, to say
with the Augsburg Confessors on the basis of Psalm 119,
“I will speak Thy testimonies before kings and will not be
put to shame.”

There aré' many other positive things we can talk about
in the Synod. For example, approximately 250,000 young
people are students in our parochial school system—the
largest in the nation’s Protestant church family. We have
also been able to maintain a plateau in church member-
ship—a slight gain last year after a decline the previous
year. To be sure, these are not figures to brag about, but
by a lot of hard work and good evangelism effort, I believe
there are many examples among us of outstanding witness
and outreach, Sunday school and Bible class enrollment
continues to climb, although it’s still too low. We still have
only 40 percent of our people or a little bit less in church
on Sunday; if you’re comparing yourself with another
church that has only 31 or 32 percent, you can say that’s
good, but when you compare ourselves to the Word of God,
which tells us to not forsake the assembling of ourselves
together, we cannot be happy with that. Or with the fact
that approximately 25 percent of the communicant mem-
bers of our congregations do not even commune once in
any given year. There is much work to do to provide the
spiritual care for the people of our church. But God be
praised that so much is going on!

Some mistaken information gets out once in a while,
implying that we are declining in mission outreach. I don’t
know whether a tot of people understand that during the.
last 10-15 years there's been a dramatic change in mission
strategy in The, Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, and
in many other churches of the world as well. We no longer
count the activity of mission outreach in terms of mission-
aries sent out each year, because the philosophy has been
that the missionary goes in order to train missionaries who
are natives in the church in which they work. Today, we
have many evangelists, catechists, and pastors and lay.
leaders in churches that were once served as mission fields
of the Synod. Such workers today number over 4,000 mis-
sionary personnel, compared with about 2,000 in the year
1980, and 2,600 in the year 1970, and 1,000 in the year
1950. It is true that the number of U.S. missionaries is
lower than it once was. But when one looks at the number