LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2001, Page 32

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32 SYNODICAL REPORTS

Concordia Publishing House

Concordia Publishing House has a single mission—to serve you
and your congregation as you go about telling the Good News about
Jesus Christ. We seek to fulfill this mission by providing Christ-
centered, Bible-based. life-directed resources for your ministry
among God’s people. We are deeply thankful for your ongoing
partnership in the Gospel. Our official mission statement, vision
statement, and motto more clearly describe how we function as the
publishing arm of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. They are
taken from our recently revised (June 2000) core documents.

CPH Mission Statement

Concordia Publishing House is the publishing arm of The
Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. [t exists for the purposes of
strengthening and aiding member congregations in their proclama-
tion of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and working in partner-
ship with the agencies and congregations of the Synod to provide
publishing services. On their behalf, Concordia Publishing House
will develop. produce, market, and distribute products and services
that are faithful to the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions and
that will effectively serve such proclamation to people throughout
the world.

All to the Glory of God.

CPH Vision Statement

We resource churches and their schools with products and ser-
vices faithful to the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions.

CPH Motto

Verbum Dei manet in aeternum—“The Word of the Lord en-
dures forever.”

CPH Listens

The publishing house employs a number of diverse systems for
gathering an assessment of the effectiveness of its current products
as well as identifying the resource needs of our congregations and
schools. These include our regional CPH Listening Posts with
church professionals and laity; regular customer surveys; many dif-
ferent product surveys, focus groups, and consultations; our de-
ployed Christian Education Specialists; information gained by
those who “man” displays at events; the Internet; user response
cards; and the comments received by our own customer service
personnel. Every comment is received and handled with care and
attentiveness. We are grateful for your insights, challenges, and en-
couragement.

CPH Explores Partnerships

A very important part of business today is the use of partner-
ships that are beneficial to all parties concerned. CPH works on an
ongoing basis to nurture publishing opportunities with LCMS
World Missions (Planting Missions across Cultures), the Commis-
sion on Worship (the various support pieces for Hymnal Supple-
ment 98), Lutheran Hour Ministries (including Puzzle Club
support with a VBS tie-in), Congregational Services (the state-of-
the-art Web site for LCMS Family Ministry), the LWML (the 10th
anniversary relaunch of LifeLight), AAL (note the phenomenal suc-
cess of The Very First Easter and The Very First Christmas—hun-
dreds of thousands of copies distributed to Lutheran homes and the
first ever Gold Medallion Award to a Lutheran publisher), Lutheran
Brotherhood, our LCMS districts, the Lutheran Education Associ-
ation, and the Concordia University System (note the new elec-
tronic Lutheran theological library for the new online colloquy and

2001 Convention Workbook

other CUENet programs and Arch Books in Hmong for Concor-
dia, St. Paul, MN), among others.

We have further extended efforts toward publishing partner-
ships internationally with agreements in the last triennium to enti-
tics in Hong Kong, Brazil, South Africa, Scandinavia, Australia,
Russia, Kazakstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, Germany,
Guatemala, Jamaica, Korea, Indonesta, Japan, Burma, Cambodia,
Thailand, China, and the United Kingdom. Through all this, in ad-
dition to our regular distribution of Hispanic materials to the Amer-
icas and the distribution of our English resources throughout Africa
and Australia, CPH has a real presence through its publications
throughout the six inhabited continents.

CPH Provides Service

Concordia is always looking for new ways to effectively reach
and assist our churches, their members, and our LCMS schools.
We already distribute through 2,856 Christian bookstores. We pro-
vided for over 2,000 “Archy” bookfairs annually. We maintain
1,580 resource centers and 350 family book displays in LCMS con-
gregations and send hundreds of exhibits to LCMS events each
year. Our deployed Christian Education Specialists make personal
visits to several hundred congregations and schools each year and
do workshops that equip annually thousands of Sunday school
teachers, midweek instructors, VBS helpers, and the like.

On a larger scale CPH has taken over the management of the
campus bookstores at Concordia University, River Forest, IL, and
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. In the case of the seminary, this
meant nearly doubling the title offerings in the store.

At a cost of 3.5 million dollars CPH also recently renovated its
distribution center to a state-of-the-art “pick to light” system to in-
crease efficiencies in our service and prepare for future business
expansion.

In addition, through its mission arm, Concordia Gospel Outreach,
CPH has shipped in the last three years 1,180,000 pounds of free
Christian resources to 30 foreign countries and the United States.

Recent Product Development

The last three years have seen a wide variety of new resources.
Each falls within one of CPH’s four areas of excellence.

+ CPH as the “Christian Education Specialist” +

Our new science curriculum, DiscoveryWorks, was made pos-
sible by a partnership with textbook publisher Silver Burdett and
has been the answer to the prayers of many people in recent years
(and several convention overtures and resolutions). Two new mid-
week curricula were launched—CrossTown and Jesus Company.
Both are modular in design to fit the various program formats being
used by our congregations. A Martin Luther minicourse was de-
veloped and released. We came out with a new Bible product—the
Today's Light Bible—to build on the success of the popular two-
year, read-through-the-Bible journal. 2001 will sce the first levels
of the new faith curriculum for our Lutheran grade schools—Voy-
ages. In addition to these various curricular efforts, our line of con-
sumer (Christian living) books was expanded to include a new cat-
egory, “Spirituality and Culture,” with the release of Gene Edward
Veith’s Spirituality of the Cross, J. A. QO. Preus III’s Just Words,
and Thomas Peters’ Cherish the Word: Reflections on Luther's
Spirituality, as well as others. These make for important reading
for today’s reflective laity.

+ CPH as the “Premier Provider of Worship Resources and Church
Support/Services” +

Besides the support materials for Hymnal Supplement 98 men-
tioned above, Shepherd’s Staff 7.0 (32-byte) was released in the
fall of 2000. Over 5,000 congregations use our Shepherd’s Staff
management software. Our Music and Worship department contin-