Significant developments are piling up in the ongoing dispute over doctrine and policy in the 2.8-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). Among them:
• A new group, Lutheran Church in Mission, has been formed by dissident “moderates” to provide a temporary transitional structure for churches that leave the Synod or are tossed out.
• The LCMS ended up with a $350,000 deficit last year, and its budget for 1975 projects a worse deficit that will require cutbacks in personnel and programs, including cooperative work with other Lutheran bodies.
• Seminex (Seminary in Exile), the 400-student protest school founded by Concordia Seminary (St. Louis) dissidents, celebrated its first anniversary last month in surprisingly good fiscal health, received accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools, and named ousted Concordia head John Tietjen—a central figure in the dispute—as president.
• Various reconciliation efforts either have not gotten off the ground of have reached an impasse, each side holding out for conditions unacceptable to the other.
• Faculty-administrative relationships took a sudden turn for the worst at Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, Illinois, an important Missouri Synod school. Moreover, things are simmering at Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois, long considered the Synod’s conservative bastion, and at other Synod schools.
• Ecclesiastical charges have been lodged against several LCMS district presidents, conservative laymen are organizing Doctrinal Concerns Committees to keep an eye out for erring pastors, and some congregations are being torn apart in the turmoil (at least one notable split took place recently).
The new Lutheran Church in Mission (LCIM) organization was founded last month at a Chicago meeting of ninety persons representing forty-eight congregations in twenty-two states. Two of its key architects are pastors Omar Stuenkel of Maple Heights, Ohio, and Thomas Spitz of Manhassat, New York. Spitz resigned last year as chief executive of the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., a cooperative pan-Lutheran agency, to fight the policies of the conservative administration of LCMS president J. A. O. Preus. The LCIM people seemed agreed, at least at the outset, that their function is not to start a splinter denomination but rather to form a “standby organization” to hold together churches leaving the LCMS until a possible alignment with another Lutheran body can be worked out. Chief among the leaders’ fears is that such congregations will instead opt for completely independent status, a move deemed “strategically disastrous, morally irresponsible, and theologically frivolous.”
LCIM is made up of members of ELIM (Evangelical Lutherans in Mission), the anti-Preus group that sponsors Seminex and an opposition mission program. From its inception in 1973, ELIM has disavowed schism, choosing to support dissident leaders while working for a reversal of positions adopted at the biennial LCMS convention in New Orleans in 1973 (see August 10, 1973, issue, page 40). LCIM, on the other hand, says it doesn’t want division either but wants to be ready if it happens. Its leaders see little hope for detente at the biennial LCMS meeting to be held in July in Anaheim, California, and they believe a number of churches will bolt from the Synod out of frustration and anger.
Five LCMS conservative leaders (including Preus) and five moderates (including Tietjen) have met three times to discuss their differences. At the last session, the ELIM spokesmen listed four prerequisites to further negotiations: an end to the use of doctrinal statements passed at conventions as the measure of a member’s loyalty to Scripture; a halt to terminating the ministries of people because of their opposition to synodical resolutions and their support of ELIM; acceptance of Seminex graduates as qualified for the LCMS ministry; and repudiation of policies and actions of the Board of Missions that led to mass resignations of the staff last year.
For their part, the Preus forces refused to budge on their demand for doctrinal conformity, are unwilling to compromise any further on the issue of certification of Seminex graduates, and feel it may be next to impossible for them to rein in all the heresy-hunters who may be loose in the Synod.
A theological convocation on “How big is the umbrella?” will be held next month in St. Louis. Some 300 key LCMS clergymen and laymen are expected to attend. It will feature debate by eleven LCMS theologians on the nature and function of Scripture. An official release describes the event as “a major effort to reach consensus in current theological concerns,” to determine what must be held and what is not essential.
The controversy was given a major share of the blame for the denomination’s financial woes. Preus says those districts where support of Seminex is strongest have let the Synod down.
One of the casualties is the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. (LCUSA). The Synod will give about $200,000 less this year than last, some $350,000 under the $858,000 LCUSA says is the Synod’s fair share. It is no secret that Preus has been unhappy with LCUSA’s campus, educational, and public-affairs ministries, and especially with its news operation. These were among the designated targets of the LCMS slashback. Directors of LCUSA, caught unprepared, met this month to assess the damage and to determine immediate remedial steps. LCUSA head George Harkins says steep cutbacks and personnel reductions will be necessary by June. Meanwhile, Lutheran Church in America and American Lutheran Church officials say they may have to reconsider the “fabric of partnership” in LCUSA since the Missouri Synod took major action without consulting them, the first time this has happened.
In issuing its budget report, the LCMS board asked “divisive splinter groups within the Synod” to dissolve and publications to refrain from “inflammatory rhetoric.”
Earlier, Preus issued a nineteen-page report on the state of the church. He mentioned membership losses, a “serious decline” in Sunday-school enrollment (25,000 fewer last year), and lagging missions outreach as sources of major concern. Sound doctrine, unity, and progress are the three main needs, he said. The Seminex faculty, he asserted, is the “greatest factor” in the ongoing divisiveness. Two dozen of the 140 Seminex 1974 graduates have undergone procedures with Concordia Seminary certifying them for ordination, he said. (The Seminex degrees were granted through the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, a Lutheran Church in America school, in an arrangement upheld as legal by an Illinois court.) Preus then instructed district presidents to stop ordaining and placing uncertified graduates. He also warned that churches that are a party to such actions are “inviting expulsion.”
Preus went on to ask forgiveness “for my own sins and failure,” pledging he would strive to restore peace and good will to synod life “to the extent that this is possible in keeping with the scriptural and confessional stance of our Synod.”
The report also mentioned the need for peace within the synod’s Asian churches. Last month Preus asked chairman Waldo Werning of the foreign-missions board to apologize to the Hong Kong conference of the Synod for any part he may have had in a schism there last May. Church leaders in Hong Kong accused Werning of writing secret letters to dissidents encouraging the split. Werning attributes it all to a misunderstanding.
This month Iowa district official Alvin L. Barry became executive secretary of the LCMS missions board, replacing William H. Kohn, who resigned last year in a dispute over policy. Kohn is heading up ELIM’s missions arm, which has figured in the overseas unrest.
Peace is indeed a rare commodity in the Missouri Synod these days. At the 350-student Concordia Teachers College in January the faculty senate gave a 21-to-4 no-confidence vote to the fourteen-month-old administration of Dr. Paul Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who chaired the LCMS fact-finding committee that investigated Concordia Seminary, was accused of producing a “tension-filled educational environment” that “threatens the quality of education at this college.” The contracts of several faculty members had not been renewed, and several others reportedly quit over policy differences.
Teachers have also been leaving Concordia Seminary in Springfield, where Robert Preus (brother of the LCMS president) was named president last year. One of them, Victor Bohlmann—brother of Concordia, St. Louis, acting president Ralph Bohlmann—criticized the board’s delayed-tenure policies. “It’s not possible for me to work in an institution which lacks integrity,” he said in quitting.
On another front, various church groups filed charges of malfeasance against three district presidents: Rudolph P. F. Ressmeyer of the Atlantic District, Waldemar Meyer of the Colorado District, and Paul Jacobs of the California-Nevada District. A church in Queens, New York, based the charge against Ressmeyer on his placement of uncertified ministerial candidates. The hearing was conducted by district officials, who dismissed the charges. Now the Queens church is appealing, and it is possible that the case—along with others—could land on the floor at Anaheim, creating further grief.
At this month’s meeting of the LCMS fiscal commission, attended by most of the thirty-eight district presidents, Preus stated that many, “starting with myself, have said and done things for which we should ask forgiveness, and I do. I want to say that I am going to try in every way to seek peace. As one example, I have no desire or intention to take action against a district president unless requested to do so by the Synod. I pledge my support and love to the district presidents.”
His remarks were applauded but came about the same time another LCMS commission announced rules governing the removal of a district president from office.
The fighting is not confined to academic and administrative circles. Salem Lutheran Church of Black Jack, Missouri, a 1,300-member congregation, voted 243 to 50 (with 87 abstentions) to abolish the post of senior pastor. Leaders attributed their actions to a need to cut a sizable chunk out of the church’s $225,000 budget, but observers say it was simply a matter of conservatives’ wanting to shed an ELIM-backing pastor, Paul R. Heckman. Of the approximately 500 people at the meeting, 175 walked out in protest. Spokesmen later announced that fifty families were organizing a new congregation, apparently with Heckman as pastor. Some 400 were attending his worship services this month.
Prospecting for peace in the Missouri Synod may prove to be as frustrating to Preus as searching for the proverbial pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.
BOOK BOOM
Religious book sales are still booming, and many publishers are calling 1974 their record year. Cokesbury marketing manager Gerald Battle says his twenty-eight United Methodist-sponsored stores “are selling more religious books of every kind than at any time in our history” (Cokesbury was founded in 1789). The 1,850 stores affiliated with the evangelical Christian Booksellers Association report 1974 sales were up an average of 14.2 per cent. Sales in CBA stores totaled more than $170 million last year, estimates CBA head John Bass. The average CBA store grossed $47,000 in 1967; the average in 1974 was $93,000.
United Presbyterians: An Issue Of Conscience
What may prove to be the most serious doctrinal crisis of its seventeen-year history is now shaping up in the United Presbyterian Church (UPC). It began with the denomination’s high court verdict last November overruling the decision of the Pittsburgh Presbytery to ordain Walter Wynn Kenyon, a 1974 graduate of Pittsburgh Seminary (see January 31 issue, page 28). Kenyon had said he could not in good conscience ordain a woman to be a ruling elder, a position in conflict with the denomination’s stand.
A beneficiary of the controversy has been the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the product of a schism among Southern Presbyterians which has grown from 45,000 at its inception in December, 1973, to nearly 80,000 communicants in 370 congregations in twenty-seven states, according to PCA national missions executive Larry Mills. Since the Kenyon decision, six UPC ministers have resigned and four congregations have split over the issue. Also, at least six other churches have been affected by a ruling issued in January by UPC chief executive William Thompson, who determined that previously ordained elders and deacons—as well as ministers—cannot be reinstalled if they hold to the non-ordination of women. (The Presbyterian bodies that formed the UPC endorsed women’s ordination decades ago, but the Thompson ruling made conformity mandatory.)
A recent UPC minister to join the exodus to the PCA is Richard E. Knodel, Jr., who explained that he has long been dissatisfied over liberal trends in the UPC, and that the Kenyon decision was the last straw. He resigned his 415-member two-church rural charge in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, to begin a new work for the PCA elsewhere. Pleas by several parishoners, however, persuaded him to remain and organize a PCA church nearby. A township building was rented and the first service this month was attended by more than fifty people, two-thirds of them from the Plain Grove churches who organized themselves into the Church of the Living Word. The offering totaled $600.
Major splits have occurred in Pitts-burgh-area and Akron, Ohio, churches. When pastor Arthur C. Broadwick of the 564-member Union Church in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, was warned by a committee of the Pittsburgh Presbytery that he should desist from promoting his negative views on ordaining women or “peaceably withdraw,” a third of the congregation reorganized, affiliated with the PCA as Providence Presbyterian Church, and called Broadwick and assistant minister Randy Johovich to serve them. The breakaway group, which has met at a Holiday Inn since February, is off and running with morning and evening attendances of 200 and 120 respectively. Included in the new congregation are ten of Union’s fifteen elders, twelve of eighteen deacons, nine of ten advanced-level Bible teachers, all fifteen members of the evangelism team, all of the youth-work directors, and three-fourths of the choir. A budget of $57,000 has been pledged.
When Mrs. James M. Oxley was nominated from the floor and elected to the session of the 293-member Allenside church in Akron at a January, 1974, meeting, some members objected that they didn’t understand that the vote to close the nominations meant a vote for Mrs. Oxley. A second election was held and a man was substituted for Mrs. Oxley. Pastor Carl W. Bogue, Jr., had expressed his opposition to ordaining women. Mrs. Oxley’s election subsequently was sustained by the local presbytery and the regional synod. She has not been ordained pending an appeal to the UPC’s highest judicial body. The appeal argues that the second election was held according to legal reconsideration procedures.
Interestingly, four of Allenside’s elders and two deacons elected this past January could not be installed under the recent ruling by Thompson. In the resulting upheaval, all but one of the trustees, over half of the elders and deacons, and almost all of the Sunday school teachers and youth leaders withdrew. Bogue, however, has chosen to stay on at Allenside, at least for the time being. Mills meanwhile met with eighty-four members of the dissident group this month in a service at a junior high school.
Mills reports recent correspondence from UPC ministers in California, Colorado, New Mexico, and New Jersey. He anticipates that the number of PCA churches in Pennsylvania may climb from two to between eight and fifteen within months. A substantial number (at least half, he thinks) of the Presbyterian students attending Gordon-Conwell seminary have indicated interest in the PCA. Another source estimates that one-third of Gordon-Conwell’s 100-plus UPC students cannot be ordained in the UPC because of their stand on the ordination issue.
Staunch UPC Calvinists have been meeting privately to contemplate future action. Many have decided to await the outcome of the 1975 General Assembly, which meets in Cincinnati in May. At least two presbyteries are weighing overtures (resolutions) requesting constitutional changes that would permit exception to the rule in individual cases of conscience. Strong support is expected from many who disagree with the dissenters but nevertheless believe that a church broad enough to embrace universalists, for example, should be able to find room in its fellowship for those who are doctrinally sound but have scruples against ordaining women.
JOSEPH M. HOPKINS
Joint Tenancy
An overflow crowd was on hand last month for the opening of Canada’s first joint Catholic-Presbyterian church, located on the east side of Toronto. Known as the Flemingdon Park Catholic-Presbyterian Worship Centre, the $450,000 facility houses the John XXIII Catholic congregation and the Gateway Community Church.
It all started when the developers of a 25,000-resident housing complex got into financial trouble, leading to the elimination of several proposed churches from the plan. The Presbyterians (nearly 100) had bought a building, but the Catholics (about 300), with no property, were meeting on school and community premises. After a series of legal battles, community park land was offered to churches on the condition that it be developed ecumenically. At first, the Presbyterians tried to interest other denominations in a cooperative project with the Catholics, but without success. So they undertook it themselves. The land was leased for ninety-nine years at $1 a year.
The main problem was not theology (Catholic rector Rodda Regis, says the groups found much in common) but contrasting methods of church government. In a Catholic church the priest is the hub and decision-maker, while Presbyterians run the church through representative bodies called “courts.” Explained Presbyterian pastor Rodger Talbot: “We almost had to have a caucus before any joint meeting. If anyone said something, especially me, the Presbyterians would argue back and forth. But when the priest expressed his view, all the Catholics were likely to vote with him!”
Father Regis, a Franciscan, likes simplicity. So the issue of having statues or a crucifix in the jointly used 450-seat sanctuary, which would trouble the Protestants, wasn’t an important consideration for him.
But because of differences in styles and concepts of worship, they had to struggle with questions like whether to have movable pews (no) and whether the sanctuary could be used for purposes other than worship (yes). Agreement on who will use the sanctuary when came easily enough.
In addition to offices for the clergy, there is a specifically Catholic chapel and a Presbyterian lounge, with kitchenette, for small groups. A large room and two classrooms will be used by both congregations and for community activities.
VALERIE DUNN
FIGHTING NUN
When a 24-year-old robber grabbed a bag filled with $2,400 in cash and fled from an office in a Chicago South Side parochial school, Sister Ann Rubly took off after him. Outside, the thief turned, pointed at her with hand in pocket, and threatened, “If you follow me, I’ll blow your brains out.” He hit her and ran again.
Undeterred, the 30-year-old Sister Ann—all 135 pounds of her—tackled him, and he fell to the sidewalk. Passersby helped to hold him until two policewomen happened on the scene and took him into custody.
“I couldn’t see him get away with that money,” commented Sister Ann. She said she didn’t realize until the last minute that the thief, an ex-con who had attempted to murder a Chicago policeman in 1971, had no gun.
Together Against Hunger
An “Interreligious Coalition on World Hunger” is being established to enable religious leaders “to consider together the short- and long-term aspects of the present crisis.”
Plans for the coalition were laid at a recent meeting of sixty representatives of “four major religious communities of our nation—Roman Catholics, Jews, Evangelicals, and Protestants and Orthodox related to the National Council of Churches.” The group met for two days at the National 4-H Center in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Correspondent John Novotney of Religious News Service reported that the new coalition would be formally brought into being at a meeting of the steering committee in mid-March in New York. The committee consists of Sister Carol Coston, O. P., of The Network, an organization of nuns; Father J. Bryan Hehir, associate secretary for international justice and peace of the U. S. Catholic Conference; Dr. Ronald Sider, dean of Messiah College’s Philadelphia campus; Dr. Eugene Stockwell, head of the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches; and Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.
A statement issued at the close of the meeting said that a major purpose of the coalition would be to sponsor a National Conference on Religion and World Hunger early in 1976.
Of the sixty participants, fifteen were from evangelical groups, fifteen from the Roman Catholic Church, fifteen from Protestant and Orthodox churches related to the NCC, and fifteen from Jewish bodies.
The evangelicals were among those identified with the Chicago Declaration of evangelical social concern.
Sider said the evangelical-ecumenical encounter indicated that the NCC “is taking evangelicals seriously and that evangelicals are becoming involved in social issues.”
“But I don’t intend to back off my biblical commitment,” he added. In the past, he said, evangelicals have been described as concerned about “pot, pubs, and pornography, but not with institutional racism and economic injustice. Both are sins that need to be confessed, neither more nor less than the other.”
The consultation statement said participants “share certain common realities and assumptions” which include: “A faith rooted in Scriptures, with the pastoral and prophetic Word that binds us by God’s act as a community under God; a common sense of responsibility for the sin that leads to hunger and starvation for many in our nation and around the world; a determination that Jews and Christians can and must come together to tackle the present crisis with some new unity; and a hope that God will take our efforts and multiply them beyond what we can now foresee, to accomplish God’s purposes on earth for a more just and full life for all persons.”
