LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2007, Page 109

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3. GREETINGS FROM THE PRESIDING PASTOR OF THE
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF LUTHERAN CHURCHES
President Kieschnick, delegates to the 63rd Regular
Synodical Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri
Synod, and your guests, brothers and sisters, on behalf of
your brothers and sisters in The American Association of
Lutheran Churches, and on behalf of Presiding Pastor-elect
Franklin Hays, I greet you in the name of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ, who brings us grace and peace! I cannot tell you sufficiently with what joy and honor it is for me
to do so.
So may I greet you also with these words of the apostle
Paul, from his Epistle to the Colossians, chapter 1, verses 3–6:
“We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in
Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; because of the
hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard
before in the word of the truth of the gospel, which has come to
you, as it has also in all the world, and is bringing forth fruit,
as it is also among you since the day you heard and knew the
grace of God in truth.”
Faith—love—hope—the word of the truth of the Gospel—
and the fruit that endures: that is the apostolic summary of
the Christian life. Brothers and sisters, by the action you
have just taken, and by that taken by the AALC in convention last month, we have just declared fellowship with one another in those sacred gifts given by our Lord Himself to us,
which He bestows upon us through His Holy Word and Sacrament. This is truly a joyful and an awesome thing—that the
unity we have in Christ has now been so expressed because of
mutually recognized concord in faith and life.
The American Association of Lutheran Churches has
found a true friend and brother in The Lutheran Church—
Missouri Synod! On a personal note, the fellowship we
have just declared is the fulfillment of a hope cherished for
over 20 years.
I was ordained into holy ministry in the former American Lutheran Church (1960). As I’m sure many of you here
know and remember, at that time, that body had enjoyed
fellowship with the LCMS for some 11 years, a relationship
which was to end one year later. As many of us then realized with increasing awareness, the tradition of American
Lutheranism, even in the confessional household of the former Iowa Synod, was surrendering its birthright for a mess
of philosophical pottage. It did so by applying a methodology of doubt to the study of the sacred Scriptures. Only by
returning to its confession of faith could this tragic course
be reversed.
In that return, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
proved itself a true friend and brother. Early in its history, in
order to clarify its stand on the inerrancy of Holy Scripture
and the authority of the Lutheran Confessions, the AALC in
convention adopted unanimously your own Statement of
Scriptural and Confessional Principles. And in order to stave
off both biblicism and Gospel reductionism, the Association
Council endorsed the CTCR report written in 1974, Gospel
109

and Scripture: The Interrelationship between the Material
and Formal Principles in Lutheran Theology.
The voice of brothers and sisters in The Lutheran
Church—Missouri Synod has found a welcome and eager
hearing in the AALC. From Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann in
1989 to Dr. Larry Rast last month, your members have
taught and encouraged and emboldened us as keynote
speakers at our conventions, and you have never turned us
down! Thank you and God bless you for that!
You have been a continual blessing to us! After I received the kind invitation of Dr. Dean Wenthe at the synodical convention in St. Louis three years ago to send our
seminarians to Ft. Wayne, we have, in fact, moved our entire seminary to CTS—perhaps this was more than Dr.
Wenthe bargained for—but there our future pastors receive
world-class theological training and spiritual formation as
those who will bear Christ’s presence for the sake of the
world. The apostle Paul writes, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another” (Romans 13:8a). Both for the incredibly generous help we have received, and for love’s
sake, we are hugely in your debt!
I have sometimes been asked what are the differences
between our two church bodies. I have mentioned two that
stand out to me. The first is a difference in size. I make it
out that the LCMS is twice as large as the AALC—you
reckon the number of your congregations in four digits. We
currently require only two.
More revealing is the difference in our histories. Last
month, Dr. Nafzger, in his greeting to us on behalf of President Kieschnick, reminded our delegates of the context in
Germany out from which the LCMS traces its origin. In the
2007 Convention Proceedings