LCMS Commission on Constitutional Matters — Minutes St. Louis, Missouri — May 12, 2017, Page 5

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the Synod is granted no explicit supervision of the life of those in the districts, he can have no
backup supervision over their doctrine and practice, is clearly without merit.
•

Of present interest is the ability of the President of the Synod to initiate formal proceedings only
when the District President has failed to act or declined to suspend. This is not a procedurally
primary authority, on par and simultaneous with that of the district president, but a backup
authority, intended to see to the carrying out of Synod’s objectives (especially Const. Art. III 1, 8,
and 9) when a district officer has failed, given every reasonable chance to carry out his
responsibility in this regard, to do so—when, that is, he has failed to apply to a particular case
within his district the one standard of doctrine and practice the Synod has set forth by its
subscription to the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions and elaborated by its doctrinal
resolutions and statements.
Const. Art. XII 7 reads, “The district presidents shall, moreover, especially exercise supervision
over the doctrine, life, and administration of office of the ordained and commissioned ministers of
their district and acquaint themselves with the religious conditions of the congregations of their
district…” Thus, while district presidents have fundamentally the same office as, or an extension
of the office of, the President of the Synod, “but only insofar as [the rights and duties of that office]
apply to the district and only within the boundaries of their districts,” they are not equally (with
respect to the President of the Synod) but especially 5 charged with the supervision of members
within their districts.
The question is not whether the President of the Synod has the same authority as the district
presidents, but whether he has the authority, should they fail, to carry out properly the due process
disciplinary action required and intended to see to the maintenance of “unity of doctrine and
practice in all the districts of the Synod.” We are thus dealing with an exceptional case, like the
long-recognized one that, should a district or Synod president be shown to have a conflict of interest
in a potential expulsion case, a vice-president should act in his stead. While not explicit in Const.
Art. XII 7–8, this provision is necessarily understood as contained implicitly and organically within
the concise constitutional framework. The Constitution does not, after all, invest a man with
authority but creates offices to further the Synod’s purposes. The argument, therefore, that the
President of the Synod cannot have backup authority, in an exceptional circumstance (namely,
when an accuser protests that a district president has not acted appropriately in response to charges
laid against a member under his supervision), because Const. Art. XII 7–8 does not say so, is also
untenable.

Thus, the properly focused question is: Does the Synod President have a constitutional authority, in a matter
involving doctrine and practice, and when the District President charged with supervision fails to act or
declines to suspend a member, to initiate formal proceedings against (i.e., suspend) the member? CCM Op.
16-2791 answered in the affirmative, on the basis of the convention’s 1956 determination that, at least in
those circumstances, such action by the President of the Synod would be “by virtue of the power given him
in the Constitution (Article XI B 1–3).” 6 The commission finds no compelling reason in the assertions of
the request for reconsideration to find otherwise, answering the substantive arguments of the request as
follows:

5

See the detailed treatment of this term under part 4, below.
When the 1956 provision was being effected the Committee on Constitutional Matters then understood this as a
“clarification” in the bylaws of a power pre-existing in the Constitution (the rationale of 1956 Res. 6-11, proposed by
the committee, being that “It is necessary to clarify Article XI B, 1, 2, 3, concerning the powers of the President if
District officers fail to act…” (Proceedings, p. 451, emphasis added).
6

CCM Minutes – May 12, 2017 – Page 44