Collection › LCMS Convention Workbook (St. Louis, Missouri) › 1969 · 48th Convention › Page 391
LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 391

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

SOCIAL ACTION AND WELFARE 391

millions of Americans are undernourished, and some
starve. But this tragedy is small compared with the
problem of world hunger that exists today and is certain
to reach disastrous proportions within the next several
decades. Already 7 persons die of starvation every
minute, and a United Nations report projects a world
population of 7 billion people, or double the present
number, by the year 2000. Thus a question of Jesus
acquires a new desperation: “Where can we buy enough
food to feed all these people?”

Through research and modern technology — such
as improved use of land and sea, development of new
food products, birth control — the means of eliminating
mass starvation and even the possibility of wiping out
hunger are within reach. Only the lack of will im-
mobilizes us. Dr. C. P. Snow said that before many
years we will watch television as millions starve to
death before our eyes — and we will quietly turn away.
That the billions of impoverished people who make up
most of the wor!d’s population will not passively ac-
cept starvation as a way of life while the rich nations
become richer should be warning enough to those of
us who have no higher motivation than survival. How-
ever, Christians have been shown “a more excellent
way.”

II

The more excellent way is the way of love. It is
not possible for us to keep faith with our baptismal
covenant or maintain integrity as followers of Jesus
Christ if we pass by on the other side while increasing
millions perish for lack of bread. The verbal portrait
Jesus made of the Last Judgment remains to haunt
us. “I was hungry, and you fed Me,” He said. That is
the requirement. From the law of Moses, which pro-
vided for the poor who had to gather food from the
harvest, and the prophets, who proclaimed social justice
as a necessary ingredient of faithfulness, to the Son of
God, who had compassion on the crowds whom He fed,
the Biblical imperative could not be more clear. In
terms of the rich man and Lazarus, surely we are in
the position of the rich man, feasting sumptuously,
while much of the world would welcome the scraps
that we discard from our tables. According to a bro-
chure from our Board of World Relief, what we give to
feed the hungry is a drop in the bucket — even com-
pared with the amount we spend on church kitchens.

There is no valid retreat into a kind of theological
quietism that stops after exhorting us to individual acts
of charity. Such an ethic shows an incapacity to apply
the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Rich Man
and Lazarus to the modern world and tends to reduce
the proclamation of the Gospel to irrelevance. If the
church is Christ’s mission to the whole man and to
the whole society of man, then we are obliged to use
a wide range of resources and levers of decision that
God has made available to us in combating the anguish
of world starvation.

Therefore we request The Lutheran Church — Mis-
souri Synod to do the following as a minimal necessary
response:

II

A. Upgrade drastically the efforts we are now mak-
ing through Lutheran World Relief, as well as through
other agencies.

B. Develop and implement a strategy that takes into
account our sister congregations in underdeveloped
countries, so that we can work together on the problem
of hunger as part of our ministry to the whole man
and to the whole society of man. Among other things
this strategy should mean initiating projects such as
agricultural development, land reform, and _ birth
control.

C. Begin an intensive program of preparing the
youth of the church for vocations that can help to
combat world hunger. Our church can capitalize on
the work of the Walther League during this past year.
Just as we make appeals to interest young people in
various church vocations, such as the preaching and
teaching ministries, we can likewise channel our young
people to Christian service in careers such as food
research and agricultural development in lands of
poverty.

D. Declare a moratorium on all capital expenditure
for new building construction until the next synodical
convention, so that we can begin to realign our own
stewardship as a church body. We should do this be-
cause the problem is so urgent and because our own
priorities are far from consistent with that urgency.

E. Begin, as a church body and as Christian citizens,
to arouse the national conscience on world hunger
through the machinery of public opinion and through
our elected and appointed government officials by urging
that our nation —

1) eradicate hunger in the United States without
further postponement;

2) reassess its national values — placing the specter
of starvation in the light of an annual military
expenditure of $50 billion and our willingness to
spend vast sums annually to place a man on the
moon;

3) seek solutions aimed at better distribution of
food in the world rather than restricting produc-
tion of food on American farms;

4) realign our foreign aid and trade programs so
that they reflect a more serious coming-to-terms
with the disparity between our wealth and the
poverty of other nations:

5) render assistance to underdeveloped countries
whenever possible through international agencies
in order to bypass the problem of attaching politi-
cal considerations to such assistance:

6) assist also underdeveloped communist countries
on the food problem. While the view may pre-
vail that it is not in our own best interest to
use food as a political weapon, Christians will
also remember the word of Jesus, “If your enemy
is hungry, feed him.”