LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1979, Page 84

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84 ADDRESS OF RETIRING GENERAL SECRETARY OF LCUSA

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Dr. George Harkins, retiring General Secretary, Lutheran Council
in the U.S.A.

cause all the church bodies have discovered that the
council assists them as they carry out God’s call as they
understand it, and as importantly, I trust, because they
have perceived that cooperative work through the coun-
cilis often the best way to further the mission of the one,
holy, catholic, and apostolic church in which we Lu-
therans are a confessional movement.

It has been almost five years that I have been part of
your staff, as it were, as general secretary of the council.
As many of you know, I officially retired from that post
at the end of June. For this transitional month my
successor, John Houck—who will bring you a few words
of greeting shortly—and I are on the job together.

I won’t spend my few minutes reviewing what you
find printed in the report on pages 21 to 31 of Section A
of Today’s Business. I urge you to review that printed
report, however, for it details a wide range of activity,
much of which you may not have been aware of or may
have taken for granted. Since most of the council’s
activities receive funding from the Synod, you should
view what is reported there as an extension of your
ministry.

A few council staff members are here during your
convention: the Reverend Reuben C. Baerwald, the
Reverend Charles V. Bergstrom, Mrs. Marion Dawson,
Mr. Thomas H. Dorris, and the Reverend Clement W. K.
Lee. I hope you will feel free to approach them during
these days to exchange your opinions and ideas about
anything that appears in the report. In areas you have
chosen they also are extensions of your staff.

This being my valedictory address to a church body
convention, I first considered reflecting on the five
years we have been through together. Like all of life
they have been a mixture of bad and good, failure and

success, deep disappointment and pleasant surprise.
But then I decided to take Moses on Mount Nebo as an
inspiration, and look forward rather than backward. Of
course, I wouldn’t want to press that parallel too far. I
don’t mean that the past has been wilderness, or that
the future is going to be the promised land, or even that
my observations come divinely engraved on stone
tablets.

But I would like to lift up three areas of our life
together as Lutherans in North America which I think
could and should be particularly worthy of note—not
forgetting, of course, that many other cooperative
areas—military chaplaincy; youth-agency-relations
work; specialized pastoral care and clinical education;
research, planning and development, to name but a
few—continue to contribute importantly to our mission
and ministry as Lutherans.

We seem these days to be flooded with Lutheran
anniversaries. The catechisms are 450 years old this
year; the Augustana is 450 years old next year. The
whole Book of Concord reaches its 400th anniversary
also in 1980. These are important opportunities for us
Lutherans—not to thank God that we are not like others
who do not have our confessional heritage, but rather to
do two other things: first, to ask humbly His forgiveness
that we have not been worthy of the grace given through
our heritage; and second, to resolve to share what God
has given us, even as we want also to share and learn
from the ways in which God has blessed other Christian
traditions.

Currently we are involved in four theological dialogs
in this country—with United Methodists, Baptists,
Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics. The first three
are under the auspices of the council. The last is
coordinated for Lutherans by Lutheran World Minis-
tries. In all, you have provided vigorous representation.
We have learned not only that people with a variety of
styles and attitudes fall under the name Lutheran but
also that not all officially designated LCMS represen-
tatives are identical in all respects. It is a healthy
reminder of the Biblical truth that a shared confessional
subscription does not presuppose uniformity at every
turn.

Second, let me highlight the area of church-state
relations. Earlier this year the council concluded a very
fruitful series of consultations on the subject, in which
many of your representatives played major parts. Let
me mention especially your Secretary, your attorney,
Philip Draheim, and the past president of Valparaiso
University, the Reverend Albert G. Huegli, who proved
an excellent choice to chair the process. As you probably
know, the document was unanimously endorsed by the
church body representatives at the council’s annual
meeting last May.

Now, however, comes the important followup phase,
coordinated by the council’s Office for Governmental
Affairs. We must try to speak with a united voice in a
society and to a government which in an age of increas-
ing secularization seem less and less able to hear what
Christians are saying. As Lutherans we have an impor-
tant perspective related to our understanding of God’s