LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2001, Page 58

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58

REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

be encouraged to keep giving this need a high priority as
they provide not merely a “get by” salary for our pastors
and church workers, but a truly livable wage, one that reflects the typical salary of the members of the congregation. We cannot expect to recruit and retain competent
pastors and church workers, particularly teachers in our
schools, and then ask them to survive on substandard and
even, in some sad cases, woefully inadequate salaries. I
would here simply like to encourage our congregations to
keep this matter before them and do whatever they can to
address and improve the salaries of our church workers.
Moving Together into a New Millennium … Giving All
Thanks and Praise to God!

Finally, then, as we move together into a new millennium, we do so giving all thanks and praise to our good
and gracious God! We think back on the many blessings
He has so abundantly poured out on our church. We think
back to the early years of struggle as the founders of our
church struggled simply to survive in this new land. We
think of the formative early years of the Synod when Dr.
Walther led us forward, and then the years of growing
awareness and understanding of what it means to be
Lutherans in America, when we moved from being a German church to a church that has worked hard at reaching
out to all peoples and various cultures. We think of those
challenging years during the Depression and into the
years of WWII and then those “boom” years of the 1950s
when we, with most churches, grew by leaps and bounds,
and then the challenge of careful teaching and education
required by so many new converts to Lutheranism. We
think back to those years of controversy and turmoil during the days of Seminex and ELIM when we had to resist
the inroads of liberal theology in our circles. We look at
the years since then, when our Synod has had to face a
rapidly changing society and culture. Through it all, because of it all, and, yes, at times in spite of it all, we have
sung and spoken the praises of our good and gracious God.
The psalmist says it best in Psalm 106:
Praise the LORD! Oh, give thanks to the LORD, for He is
good! For His mercy endures forever. Who can utter the
mighty acts of the LORD? Who can declare all His praise?
As we now move together into a new millennium, we
do so committed to remaining united in the one true faith,
strengthening congregations and members for the sake of
bold witness, recruiting and training church workers, providing opportunity for Christian love, and supervising and
protecting our church workers and congregations. But finally, we do all this with a great sense of gratitude to the
Lord God Almighty for all His blessings, chief among them
that great salvation that is ours in Christ our Lord. For
all His wonderful blessings upon our Synod we offer our
heartfelt thanks and praise to God.
As we move forward together we remain united and
committed to that five-fold vision statement that we
adopted in 1995 and which continues to provide a very
good and unifying theme for our walk together. We are
committed to being a church body that is strongly in the
Word, Christ-centered and people-sensitive, reaching out
boldly with the Gospel, faithful to Scripture and the
200l Convention Proceedings

Lutheran Confessions, and committed to peace and harmony.
Now let us turn our attention to the second half of our
theme, Telling the Goods News about Jesus.
II. Telling the Good News about Jesus
God be gracious to us and bless us, and cause His face
to shine upon us. That Your way may be known on the
earth, Your salvation among all nations. Let the peoples
praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You. Let the
nations be glad and sing for joy; for You will judge the peoples with uprightness and guide the nations on the earth.
Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise
You. The earth has yielded its produce; God, our God,
blesses us. God blesses us, that all the ends of the earth
may fear Him (Psalm 67).
Psalm 67 is all about the great mission task that our
Lord Jesus Christ has entrusted to His church on earth.
Ours is the joyful privilege, the great honor, and the
solemn duty and responsibility to tell the Good News
about Jesus. It is because of this fact that in 1995 our
Synod adopted the “Tell the Good News about Jesus” emphasis, in which we together agreed that we would all the
more increase our efforts to tell the Good News about
Jesus, spending three years preparing for an unprecedented ten-year period of time from 2001–2010 for outreach with the Gospel.
Committed to the Mission of the Church

There can be no better way for us to move together into
the new millennium than by committing ourselves—individually, congregationally, as Districts, and as a Synod—
to moving ahead boldly with the task of telling the Good
News about Jesus.
To accomplish this unprecedented ten-year period of extensive outreach with the Gospel, we must first each internalize the great call our Lord has given to each and every
baptized child of God: to tell the Good News of His Son, the
Savior, that is, to be witnesses to Christ and to proclaim
the salvation that is ours in Him. Indeed, what better gift
could there possibly be for our sin-weary and sin-filled
world at such an important time as now? What better way
for our Synod to move together into the new millennium
than by committing ourselves to this great effort?
We exist for this very purpose: to be beacons of light
shining brightly in the darkness that fills our fallen world.
We Christians can sit around at times wringing our hands
and despairing of the future. We can very much “go negative” when it comes to our hopes and dreams for the future. We can indulge ourselves in grumbling about and
criticizing fellow believers or our Synod, our Districts, our
congregations, but to what end? For what purpose? Such
efforts result in nothing. Our Synod deserves better, and
most importantly, our Lord deserves better.
Our Lord is calling us to higher things and a higher
purpose. He has put us in this place, at this time, for this
reason: to tell the Good News about Jesus. The first president of our Synod, Dr. C. F. W. Walther, put things well
once in a sermon he preached on the church’s great mission task. Let me here quote a portion of his remarks: