LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2010, Page 59

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REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT
I believe our grandparents would encourage us to take some risks .
They and their forebears did . Men, women, and children, for the sake
of religious freedom, sailed across the ocean in wooden ships . That
was risky! Their risk became reality as one of the ships sank in the
Atlantic with everyone on board perishing .
Another risk had to do with words of the sainted Dr . C .F .W .
Walther, who once warned, “If we lose the German language in
our worship services, we will lose the Gospel .” Yet the time came
when our people said, “We’re Americans now, and Americans
speak English . We can’t keep replicating the past . The language of
our worship must be something our countrymen will understand .”
Making this change was a risk, an example of coming down from
the mountaintop, of leaving our comfort zone .
Coming down from the mountain does not mean descending into
the swamps of compromise, or diluting our doctrine, or editing God’s
Word to suit the whims of the day . We didn’t do this in the ’70s, and
we haven’t done it since . A case in point is my own candid speech
to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in response to their
sexuality decisions of last year, including these words:
“The decisions by this assembly to grant non-celibate homosexual
ministers the privilege of serving as rostered leaders in the ELCA and
the affirmation of same gender unions as pleasing to God … grieves my
heart and the hearts of all in the ELCA, the LCMS, and other Christian
church bodies throughout the world who do not see these decisions as
compatible with the Word of God, or in agreement with the consensus of
2,000 years of Christian theological affirmation regarding what Scripture
teaches about human sexuality . Simply stated, this matter is fundamentally related to significant differences in how we understand the authority
of Holy Scripture and the interpretation of God’s revealed and infallible Word .”

God’s holy Word is precious to all of us in the LCMS . In 1935, the
renowned Presbyterian theologian John Gresham Machen, professor
of New Testament at Princeton Seminary, traveled to St . Louis to
speak at Concordia Seminary . One line of his speech was especially
noteworthy . Essentially, he said, “If or when The Lutheran Church—
Missouri Synod falls to the modernists, mainline Christianity will
have folded .”
This shows how—75 years ago—the Missouri Synod was
considered a front-line defender of the purity of the Gospel . That
is true still today . The unique contribution of the Missouri Synod
to Christianity in the world is that we have always stood, steadfast
and without compromise, on the truths of God’s inspired, inerrant,
infallible Word .
This doesn’t mean that Christ’s church on this earth is static or
incapable of adapting to changing times and new opportunities and
challenges . The church is dynamic—preserving all it holds dear, yet
eager to find new ways of reaching the lost . It’s proclaiming the
changeless Christ to a changing world .
Today, congregations of The Lutheran Church—Missouri
Synod are comprised of and surrounded by a great diversity of
cultures, calling for an appropriate measure of resiliency in how
we communicate the Gospel . In most cases, the church of our
grandparents didn’t face such cultural diversity, at least not in this
country .
The setting back then was the farms and small towns and
burgeoning suburbs of largely Anglo America . The setting today
is that and much more . It’s the big city, the barrio, the Muslim in
Dearborn, the Somali in Iowa . It’s the immigrant from Croatia, China,
Ghana, Nigeria, Bolivia, Mexico, and many other lands . It’s the
youngster plugged into his iPod, the high school freshman sending
thousands of text messages every month on her iPhone, the college

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student on the secular campus, the young man displaced from the
auctioned-off family farm . It’s the unmarried couple living together,
the single mom or dad, the lapsed Christian family .
We can’t productively share the Gospel with such vastly differing
people unless we get to know them, develop relationships with them,
demonstrate Christian care and concern for them, and figure out ways
to communicate effectively with them . They’re not automatically
coming to the church . So we must go to them, becoming “all things
to all men so that by all possible means [we] might save some . [We]
do all this for the sake of the Gospel, that [we] may share in its
blessings” (1 Cor . 9:22b-23) .
We already have made a great start in this regard with exciting
congregational endeavors, including creative mission starts, many
of them multi-cultural, intentional ministry to Generations X and
Y, and an increased emphasis on mission-focused revitalization of
congregations . Prayer and Bible study are on the rise in churches,
homes, and even places of work . We also now have a variety of
initiatives at our seminaries and beyond, including the Specific
Ministry Pastor Program; the Ethnic Immigrant Institute of Theology;
the Center for Hispanic Studies; People of the Book Lutheran
Outreach, focusing on Muslims in America; and the Next Steps
Initiative, assisting congregations “vigorously to make known the
love of Christ” by utilizing the talents, skills, and gifts of retired
pastors and other church workers .
Beyond this, our seminaries are striving, through missiology
programs and curriculum enhancement, to train more pastors in the
art of church planting, and deaconesses to assist with ministry in
various ways . Part of our Ablaze! mission movement is to plant 2,000
new congregations by 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Reformation .
We have a great start, with over 600 already begun, leaving only
1,400 more to go in the next seven years . To do this we need skilled
pastors and other church leaders—specialized and well-versed not
only in theology but also in knowing something about people and
what makes them tick .
Our Synod is emerging as a national and global confessional
leader . I wish I had time to tell you about all the leaders of churches
around the world and even here in America, including groups from
the ELCA and the Episcopal Church, whose denominations have
deserted biblical truth . These groups are coming to us for theological
support, mission assistance, and conservative companionship .
Responding to these opportunities will require greater
collaboration among our congregations, districts, seminaries,
auxiliaries, and others . It will also require more money—increased
resources devoted to theological education and mission training as
well as support of the pastors of current and future partner church
bodies .
In America, some of our mission starts are going to be unusual
by our grandparents’ standards, calling for strategies that may differ
from our traditional approach . But maybe it’s all right for a pastor of
ours to allow a dance or a tambourine in a storefront mission reaching
out to new arrivals from Africa .
Not everything about the future, of course, will concern outreach
to immigrants and other specialized groups, as important as that work
will be . A great part of our future will center on our own children and
grandchildren and the church we leave for them .
So maybe it’s all right for a pastor, in casual clothing, to meet
in a coffee shop with young urban professionals or to conduct nontraditional worship some other place with folks who don’t feel
comfortable in a church . Maybe we need to allow our workers the
creativity they need, within reason, and clearly within our doctrine, to
2010 Convention Proceedings