Collection › LCMS Convention Workbook (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1969 · 48th Convention › Page 3
LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 3

Scan: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

MISSIONS 3

ll. THE WORLD, THE CHURCH. AND THE WORD:
COMMUNICATIONS PROBLEMS

The warden in a recent popular prison movie, Cool
Hand Luke. kept on repeating this phrase: “What we
have here is a failure to communicate.” Within the
world, within the church, and between the two there
are obvious ‘failures to communicate.” The Gospel
Word doesn’t get through.

A. The World:
A Tower of Babel and Sounds of Silence

1. A Tower of Babel

Modern technology and electronic communication
have made our world “a global village.” Daily we view
what’s going on in that village from our living room.
What do we see? American men fighting a rice-paddy
war, endless peace talks, nation divided against nation,
youth unrest and demonstrations. Ours is still a post-
Babel world. Everywhere there is division and not unity;
confusion and not understanding. Individual men, orga-
nized groups, and whole nations, one upon another,
still rise up and say, ‘Let us build a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a
name.” But the fruits of pride and the judgment of God
are inherent in the building. Discordant voices rise
within, movements and countermovements oppose from
without. For every action there are reactions and some-
times “overreactions.” And man is confounded.

Because of man’s continual desire to build a monu-
ment to himself, there is the din of discord always jan-
gling in his ears. There is the confusion in his mind as
he tries to sort out all the discordant voices and move-
ments that seek his allegiance and loyalty — all demand-
ing “equal” or “prime” time.

Because of man’s desire to build a monument to
himself, there is really no “one world” but many separate
“worlds.” There are isolated nations and groups and
subcultures “scattered over the face of the earth” —and
within a single metropolitan area as well. Walls of mis-
understanding, of language and culture, of fear or
suspicion, of guilt and hostility keep the many separate
“worlds” lonely and apart.

2. Sounds of Silence

It is easy to focus on the loud, discordant, and often
contradictory noises of this “Tower of Babel” world in
which we live. But the description of our world would
not be complete if we stopped with surface sounds or
signs. In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, in the folk-
song “Sounds of Silence,” we hear a plea to look deeper:
People in the world talk without speaking, hear without
listening. And yet the signs and signals of their hurts
and burdens are written all around—in their noise and
in their silence, on subway walls and tenement halls.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear and then — really
speak.

B. The Church:
Speaking in Tongues and Speech Impediments

It is in and to this world that the church is called to
communicate the Good News—a living Word from God.
But the church too has often failed to communicate.
Here are some of the communications barriers we see
in the church.

1. “Speaking in Tongues”

For all practical purposes much of our communica-
tion is like “speaking in tongues”’ to the world. We use
theological jargon, or we talk endlessly to ourselves
about our own institutional concerns. For example, what
will the Denver convention communicate to the average
man? Will it say anything to him where he is hurting,
or will it all seem to him like “speaking in tongues”?
And what will it communicate overseas? Lutheran
Christians with whom we are in fellowship overseas
have seen that each bit of denominational splintering
and competition creates static in the clear communica-
tion of the Gospel to non-Christians and hinders Christ’s
mission. Inter-Lutheran cooperation and joint work
have become a “given” in sister churches overseas.
At a Missouri Synod conference 10 years ago in Oakland,
Calif., President B. H. Jackayya of the India Evangelical
Lutheran Church declared that in the face of a teeming
97 percent non-Christian India he saw other Indian
Christians primarily as fellow Christian allies and only
secondarily as persons with whom he was not in formal
fellowship. What does this say to us?

2. Other Speech Impediments

The church’s communication of the living Word is
hampered by other speech impediments too.

a. Perhaps the basic impediment is that many Chris-
tians still have a weak or faulty sense of mission. A num-
ber of independent research studies have revealed that
most American congregations have institutional “sur-
vival” goals rather than mission goals. Parishioners
view the pastor’s role as one of serving them—rather
than seeing that his primary task is to equip them for
service to others. In such a case, what we are (a self-
seeking congregation or institution that exists for itself)
speaks louder than what we say to non-Christians — and
we have communicated something radically different
than what we intended. Much equipping still needs to
be done, so that the church at all levels sees God’s mis-
sion as its main reason for being.

b. A second impediment in our speech is that we
often get caught up in a controversy about what the
mission is, about what’s involved in the communication
of the Gospel. We get so tied up in defining “evangelism”
(whether it refers only to “verbalizing the Gospel” or
whether it also means “serving the needs of our neigh-
bor’), for example, that sometimes little energy is left
for communicating the Good Word to people in the
world. A paper presented at a staff retreat in the fall
of 1968, “Toward a Position Paper on Evangelism,”
helped us arrive at some meaningful understandings: