LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1981, Page 73

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PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS 73

States and Canada, from every District, and from
almost every state, who were gathered together, singing
the praises of their Savior and rejoicing in the fellow-
ship of their fellow Missouri Synod Lutherans. It was a
great experience, and now with the steady progress of
the Lutheran Youth Fellowship, which has chapters in
nearly half of our congregations (more than the Walther
League had), we can expect that youth work is going to
gain in importance at every level of our church, and that
the interest of the church in its young people is not going
to be something that is merely academic or preached
about, but something that is being demonstrated in
every level in our church body.

Another area which has struggled along for many
years has been evangelism. And when in 1980 we had
the first Great Commission Convocation here in St.
Louis, which drew over 10,000 people, I know that the
hearts of Dr. Kolb and Pastor Biesenthal and their
excellent board must have warmed with joy and happi-
ness at this mark of God’s blessings and the power of
His Holy Spirit. I look upon this event, too, as one of the
most joyous of the past 12 years. It is significant that
1980 marked the turnabout in the decline of our baptized
and confirmed membership. We are on the way up
again, with a small net growth for the first time in
several years.

It is also a great pleasure to inform you that the new
synodical headquarters building in the St. Louis suburb
of Kirkwood is now well under way. In April we broke
ground, and I hopemany of you will have opportunity to
see the site and the beginnings of the building. This is
the first time in history that the Missouri Synod will
have built its own headquarters building, tailored to our
needs and our mission, and we are grateful to those who
have given so generously and those who will give to get
this important project started and completed. We are
moving Forward in Remembrance.

At this convention, which is emphasizing steward-
ship, an area in which we always seem to have many
problems, we are also celebrating the completion of
what has been the most successful fundraising effort
ever conducted in the history of The Lutheran Church—
Missouri Synod. At this point it is also the most
successful effort ever conducted in any American
judicatory, or ever conducted by our friends from
Community Counselling Service, who gave us such
great help. Thanks go, first of all, to our heavenly
Father, then to Dr. Hyatt, Pastor Uhrinak, the wonder-
ful staff of the Community Counselling Service and to
those thousands of workers in all of the Districts and
Circuits of the Synod who in turn moved the hearts of
thousands of our congregations and thousands of our
people to make an outpouring, an extraordinary gift, for
the work of missions and higher edication. Over 80
percent of the congregations of the Synod participated
in this endeavor. At the time that Forward in Remem-
brance was first discussed in the Board of Directors and
the Council of Presidents, there were those who won-
dered if we were ready, if we could succeed, who dreaded
what might be a failure, and who voiced all kinds of

concerns that we should either delay or not do it at all.
Thanks be to God, there was courage and faith in the
hearts of the Board of Directors and the 1979 conven-
tion, so that we can report a marvelous success by God’s
grace. This is one of the finest experiences of God’s
goodness that our church has ever had. We are moving
Forward in Remembrance.

Certainly no one can look back in history to the era of
the Vietnam War, Watergate, the rebelliousness of the
1960s and early 1970s, without asking the question,
“How did this affect the church?” Historians will be
busy writing articles and books on this subject for
generations, and those of us in the Missouri Synod who
lived through that era and who were active in the
church at that time can well remember the tensions that
were created.

In most ways, the Synod weathered this era remark-
ably well. There were, however, some aspects of it which
did affect our church. There was a falling away of young
people from our membership rolls. For a host of reasons,
our mobile population became even more mobile and the
result was that we lost thousands of members, some-
times in one year the equivalent of the membership of
entire Districts, because of the fact that the church, by
reason of financial strictures and the cumbersomeness
of our structure, was simply not able to keep up with this
kind of shift in population.

Worst of all, this era was characterized as one of
extreme individualism, of anti-institutionalism. Change
for its own sake was a good thing, and the breaking of
tradition was almost a sacred duty. A confessional
church, such as ours, made up largely of conservative
middle class people living in middle America, could not
escape the impact of this age. It showed up in member-
ship losses, in financial difficulties, in disenchantment
in many quarters, and of course in doctrinal conflict and
confusion.

While I dislike very much talking about our doctrinal
conflict of the first six years of the 1970s, it is an
acknowledged fact that our church, during those years,
was wracked by what will probably go down in history
as the greatest conflict of our synodical existence. It
resulted in a split in which about 200 congregations out
of 6,200 left our fellowship and about 500 pastors of the
nearly 8,000 also left us. Concordia Seminary, St. Louis,
was brought to the brink of disaster, and literally
millions of dollars in potential income were lost for
reasons too numerous to mention.

I know that there are still pockets of discontent and
disenchantment, there are still those who say the whole
conflict was unnecessary and an evil thing, and there
are others who say that the controversy came toa close
too quickly and that the administration should have
taken a stance which would have resulted in further
losses and defections. These now are matters of history
and can be debated in pastoral conferences and semi-
nary classrooms for as long as any survivor of this era
still lives.

As your President during those years and as the one
who in many ways took the leadership in the conflict, I