Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1958, Page 32

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382 Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Convention

In fact, one man recently assured me that the sermons he had
been hearing from his minister could just as well have been
preached by a Unitarian. Fortunately for this member, the
obnoxious minister followed a call to another congregation.

Has such a change actually come over our preaching?
It occurred to me to read a few sermons in C. F. W. Walther’s
Evangelienpostille, published in 1870, and in a group of Adolph
Hoenecke’s Lenten sermons translated into English by Werner
Franzmann and published in 1939, and then to compare them with
sermons appearing recently in the Lutheran Witness and the
Northwestern Lutheran. I was struck by the remarkable simi-
larity —the same clear outlines, the same doctrinal content, the
same distinction between Law and Gospel, the same restriction
to Biblical phrasing and references, the same absence of practical
illustrations, meaning anecdotes. This type of sermon was also
exactly what I heard in church services I happened to attend by
chance on a tour of the West three years ago.

Yet I have heard the other type of sermon too and from highly
placed men, the type in which the text is very short and serves
as a motto rather than as the subject of Scriptural explication, in
which the doctrinal element is not so prominent as the inspira-
ional — in fact, this sermon does shade over into the inspirational
lecture. I must confess that this type of sermon, whatever its
defects, does hold one’s interest. There may be a trend here, and
in some minds it may have become a tension.

I said that we are all agreed that the Gospel should be
preached to all men everywhere. But haven’t many of our inter-
synodical tensions and controversies resulted from the fact that
each synod occasionally interprets the phrase “to all men every-
where” to include the home mission fields of other synods? There
is a widely held notion that we have been crowding into each
other’s territories, founding opposition churches, straining the
bond of brotherly love, and building up one part of God’s temple
by tearing down another.

Sometimes the element of pride or excessive synodical loyalty
plays a part. It is most pleasant and inspiring to hear that one’s
own synod is growing at a steady, perhaps even spectacular rate
and that a definite number of new congregations are being founded
each year. But the statistics do not tell that one or two of those
new congregations may have to depend strongly on recruitments
of members — usually disgruntled members — from a sister synod.
Only the congregations involved will know that, and the District
Presidents who receive complaints and who will appoint commit-
tees to study the grievances. The committees will work for months
without accomplishing anything except perhaps to strengthen the
convictions of a number of people that we are after all competing
instead of co-operating church bodies.

I realize that I am oversimplifying the situation, since other
factors are often involved. Old congregations may have been
partly asleep on the job and need to be jostled out of their lethargy

yy some new mission in areas which they barely reached anyway.
In these unsettled times, furthermore, groups of earnest, intelli-
gent Christians sever their connections with a local church because
of the synodical controversies and request the services of the
synod of their choice. Such pleas cannot be lightly considered.