LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1965, Page 21

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PLANNING FOR THE CHURCH’S MISSION

Presentation by Dr. Walter F. Wolbrecht, Executive Director

Note: The numbers in parentheses indicate the ap-
proximate points at which slides were projected during
the presentation. The projected materials, identified by
number, are reproduced on the pages following this
address. Some slides originally projected have been
omitted.

As The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod in dele-
gate convention meets in Detroit for the first time in
45 years, we must focus on the next period of years.
Our planning period can be the quarter century to
A. D. 1990, with a backward look to see whence we have
come by the grace and power of God.

Let us remember this point: in the next 10 years
the population of the U.S. will grow faster than it did
in the previous 10 years, and this in turn, short of
major annihilation, will prove cumulative throughout
this planning period of a quarter century.

Most of our attention properly is fixed on the Synod
within the U.S.A., because the bulk of our Synod’s
share in the church’s mission begins precisely where
our congregations and their members are in our world
and time, even though it dare never end there.

I. Our World and Our Time

Some have tried to minimize the population growth-
trend projections on the grounds that the birth rate
just now is lower than in the 20 years just past. It is
the lowest now since 1945, the very end of World
War II. However, this temporary slowing down was
forecast years ago. The rate will rise again in the very
near future (20 births per year per 1,000).

We meet in 1965. Ten years from now, on June 16,
1975, there will be 25% more babies born than are
being born today. This means that instead of 4 million
babies born in the U.S. this year, 5 million are likely
to be born in 1975. Incidentally, the delayed-action
population bomb with fuse already lit in the U.S.
means that we have reached population totals one-half
century earlier than they were expected. What does
this mean for new marriages and new families of our
members? What does this mean for infant baptisms and
child evangelism in our congregations and parishes?

At the end of the earthly span of life, our pastors
are burying more people than their predecessors did,
yet the typical person lives to be almost one-third
again as old as his father or mother did. This differ-
ence in age is expected to increase with each succeeding
decade. .

We all have been hearing or reading about the
mobility of the people of the United States. One out
of five (or 20%) of our people, we hear, moves each
year. The migration of many people from the heart-
land of America to the ocean coasts and to the Gulf
area, and the relocation of those classified as economic-
ally underprivileged is continuing. For a church body
which had its humble origins in communities such
as Perry County, Missouri, the Saginaw Valley in

21

Michigan, in Lee County, Texas, and among the home-
steads of the Northern Plains, even though it met to
organize in downtown Chicago in 1847, it is of tre-
mendous importance to realize that where once the
bulk of America’s production was farm production
with farm labor being the largest category of all
workers, by now only 1% million farmers turn out
87% of all of America’s agricultural production. A re-
maining 2 million farmers account for the other 13%.
The homesteads are gone and the family farms are
disappearing. What of the rural church and of the
church geared to meet the needs of a rapidly changing,
ever shifting, increasingly urbanized membership?

When The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod last
met in Detroit, 45 years ago, most delegates came by
train. The automobile was in its infancy, and nobody is
known to have come by airplane. Furloughing mis-
sionaries from overseas were few, and weeks away
from their stations by ship instead of hours away by
jets. A few crystal sets were coming into use, but no
radio networks existed, and the idea that delegates and
conventioneers could broadcast or be seen on some-
thing called television was not a lively thought in any
delegate’s mind.

The challenge of the population change to the Chris-
tian church has a twofold aspect. Church planning
must take into account a faster rate of growth in many
areas, and each congregation needs to be mindful of
how the population change is affecting it. A larger
proportion of its membership will be in that age group
which in turn is likely to increase the population in
the next cycle. That part of the population ranging
from birth and baptism to junior confirmation age and
adolescence is up 28 million over the decade just past
and will in turn be up by 35 million in the next decade.
All these children are already born! And most of these
young people will live, move, work, and have their be-
ing in increasingly industrialized, urbanized concentra-
tions called by new names because the ancient name of
city no longer fits. The major production output coupled
with a major share of the economic burden will fall on
the middle group in age, who are the salary and wage
earners, the productive and reproductive portion of the
population, and they will have more aged persons and
more children to support.

This makes a technical economic term such as Gross
National Product of more than passing interest, even
for a church body as it plans ahead for its mission.
The Gross National Product for any country is the
dollar value attached to the annual total output of
goods and services of both the private and the public
sectors of the economy. Even Nigeria and Ghana have
a Gross National Product. Do you remember when it
was considered to be worse than radical dreaming to
maintain that the Gross National Product of the U.S. A.
could ever reach $400 billion a year? Already 10 years
ago that mark was reached, and the Gross National