LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1979, Page 71

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PRESIDENT’S REPORT 71

working and often neglected teachers who serve in
modesty and humility, and who often make enormous
financial and personal sacrifices in order to teach our
children. Let us show them also the respect and honor
which their work and their office entitle them to.

Governmental Relations

In the area of relations with government some
problems have arisen.

A committee appointed under the auspices of the
Board of Directors has been meeting several times with
the Office of Governmental Affairs of the Lutheran
Council in the U.S.A. regarding the many ways in
which our respective churches (and other Lutheran
churches also) are affected by actions of our govern-
ment. Our legal counsel and Board of Directors are
closely watching all of these matters.

The Family

On a much broader scale the church of the ’80s faces
the open doors of ministering to a society which isin the
process of revolutionary and traumatic changes. Each
of these doors presents problems but also great oppor-
tunities and challenges. One of these areas is the family.

We are living at a time of vast social upheaval. I
heard a futurist speak recently who said that the world
is probably in its most revolutionary phase in many
centuries, and he even compared it to the discovery of
the wheel and of fire in being revolutionary.

Among the greatest victims of this revolutionary age
is the family. We face a situation in which divorces by
the end of the next decade may outnumber marriages.
We face the fact that an enormous percentage of the
present generation of children may grow up in single-
parent families or without any natural parents. We face
not only the matter of absentee fathers but also an
increased number of cases of total child abandonment,
in which both mother and father walk off. Our papers
scream with articles dealing with battered children,
delinquency, the necessity to “socialize” the coming
generation, meaning to make them in some way fit
members of society, when they have neither mother,
father, family, religion, nor any kind of training in what
it means to be a helpful and productive member of
society.

We hear all kinds of talk about gatherings of people
into homosexual marriages, communes, the day care
center serving as the family, and dozens of other ideas.
We must remember that the same God who created
Adam and out of Adam made Eve, also instituted the
family. We are not talking here about something that
merely comes under the heading of “options” but some-
thing that is basic to human society and civilization. If
there is any place where the church ought to be on the
ball and doing something positive, it is here.

The Future

About 70 members of our church, people from the
administration, from among District and Synod execu-
tives, District Presidents, professors, lay leaders, and
parish pastors, recently attended a very significant

meeting in Houston, Tex., sponsored by the Lutheran
Brotherhood Insurance Company. The meeting was
interesting in that it brought together representatives of
10 Lutheran church bodies—something that in itself
was unique.

But the great purpose of the meeting and the real
significance of it lay in the fact that it was a colloquium
on the future and particularly as the future unfolds for
the church. While we heard many things with which
none of us would agree, many things on which we
disagreed with one another, and many things on which
we all agreed, the fact of the matter is that the church
needs to be about the work of planning for and thinking
of the future. It should not accept the possible or
probable future but rather should use its influence to
create a preferable future. I’m not referring only to the
future in eternity, on which we have very clear assur-
ance from God’s Word, but to the future of our world and
the role of the church in it.

If one is looking for apocalyptic thinking and the
idea that the world may come to an end before most of us
finish our lifetime, there was some of that expressed
also. One notable futurist told me that many of the
people of his profession do not expect the world to last
until the end of the century. He went on to say that he
was an optimist and gave the world a fifty-fifty chance
of not being totally destroyed by either a nuclear war or
the leakage from nuclear wastes. Other experts at the
meeting obviously disagreed with him and talked as if
the world would go on forever. ;

Looming large was the matter of the depletion of our
fuels, our petroleum, natural gas, coal, and other forms
of energy, as well as the slow development of the things
like solar energy and other methods of supplying energy
for the machines and homes of our world.

Ihave already made reference to the gloomy predic-
tions regarding the state of marriage, the family, and
our children. Coupled with this, of course, were predic-
tions regarding starvation in a world which by the end
of the century, conservatively, will have at least six
billion people on it. I am not here interested in getting
into argument as to whether their predictions are
correct or as to what the world’s agriculture can produce,
but the fact of the matter is, as we all know, that evenin
our day with four billion people in the world there is vast
starvation, an enormous amount of sickness, the prob-
lem of the old, the already evident deterioration of the
family, and political and social structures which are
being strained far beyond the thinking of those who

established them.
I could go on at great length viewing with alarm and

expressing the concerns that were expressed by many
people, both the futurists who were present as well as
the church people who had an opportunity to express
themselves, but suffice it to say that there needs to be on
the part of all of us at every level in this church,
beginning with the man, woman, and child in the pew,
some serious and careful thinking about the future as
we look at a shrinking dollar, soaring costs, and the
ever-present need to do the work of presenting Christ,
the incarnate Christ, to a world which really no longer