LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 235

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RESOLUTIONS
13

Routes to Ministry
To Extol and Equip the Blessed Partnership
between the Royal Priesthood and the Office
of the Public Ministry

If they were forced to grant that all of us that have been
baptized are equally priests, as indeed we are, and that only
the ministry was committed to them, yet with our common
consent, they would then know that they have no right to
rule over us except insofar as we freely concede it. For thus
it is written in 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and a priestly royalty.” Therefore we are all
priests, as many of us as are Christians. But the priests, as
we call them, are ministers chosen from among us. All that
they do is done in our name; the priesthood is nothing but
a ministry” (AE 44:127);

RESOLUTION 13-01A
Overtures 13-22, 13-28 (CW, pp. 452, 455)
Whereas, The apostle Peter affirms the royal priesthood, that
all are called to “proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you
out of darkness” (1 Peter 2:9); and
Whereas, There exists a blessed partnership in the ministry
of the Gospel between the royal priesthood and those called to the
Office of the Public Ministry; and

and

Whereas, The Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope
quotes from the words of Jesus in Matt. 18:19–20, where He says,
“If two of you agree on earth” to affirm that Jesus “grants the power
of the keys principally and without mediation to the church”; and

Whereas, God has blessed the Church with a talented laity,
whom He has blessed with spiritual gifts; therefore be it

Whereas, Martin Luther wrote:
We have been born of this bridegroom and bride through
holy baptism and thus have become true clerics in Christendom in a hereditary manner, sanctified by his blood and
consecrated by his Holy Spirit, as St. Peter calls us in 1 Peter
2:9: “But you are … a royal priesthood” for offering spiritual sacrifices. St. Paul also extols us as priests in the Epistle
to the Romans, chapter 12:1, for he calls upon us “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to
God … .” Now to make sacrifices to God is solely the office
of the priests, as the pope himself and all the world must
admit. Moreover, we are not only his children, but also his
brothers, as he says in [Ps. 22:22], “I will tell of thy name
to my brethren,” and in the Gospel of Matthew: “Whoever
does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and my
sister, and my mother” Matt. 12:50. So we are not only true
clerics and priests according to our right as children but
also according to our right as brothers. This, our hereditary
priesthood with which we are born, we do not want to have
taken away, impeded and obscured; rather, we want to have
it brought out into the open, proclaimed and extolled with
all its honors in order that it should beam and shine like the
precious sun and blind the eyes of the devil and his hypocrisies and abominations, … . (AE 38:187–188)

Whereas, The holy ministry, or the pastoral office, is an office
distinct from the priestly office, which belongs to all believers; and

Resolved, That The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod give
thanks for district, university, and college-based lay training
programs and the many willing lay servants who have sought to
further their theological education and desire to serve in the work
and mission of the Lord’s Church; and be it further
Resolved, That such lay training programs continue their work
and include a major emphasis on evangelism and the task of outreach, as well as mercy, education, visitation, and so forth in our

and also
Committee 13 Chairman Roger Paavola
“13. Routes to Ministry”

U P O N T H I S R O C K • Resolutions

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