Religion: Lutheran Concord

In the past 75 years, the number of Lutheran church groups in the U.S. has been reduced by merger from about 60 to a more or less manageable 14. By fall there will be only ten—and the prospects are strong that even more unity is in the offing.

∙ In Minneapolis a fortnight ago. delegates to the annual convention of the Lutheran Free Church (membership: 90,000, largely Norwegian-Americans) voted 530 to 112 for merger with the big (2,365,000) American Lutheran Church—itself the product of an earlier alliance of three smaller churches. Dr. John Stensvaag, the Free Church’s president, says that it can no longer afford the luxury of remaining a splinter group if it is “to go forward worthily in a manner good for the Kingdom.” The American Lutheran Church will vote on the Free Church’s application for membership at its own convention in October, probably will dispense with a ballot to approve the merger by acclamation.

∙In Detroit’s grandiose Cobo Hall this week, four Lutheran bodies—the United Lutheran Church in America (2.500,000), the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church (630,000), the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church (36,000) and the American Evangelical Lutheran Church (25,000)—will simultaneously hold their final conventions as separate bodies. Next morning, the 6,000 delegates and visitors will go back to Cobo Hall for the first Holy Communion service as mem bers of the nation’s newest and largest Lutheran body: the Lutheran Church in America. “Unless and until Lutherans are sitting on the same side of the table in interdenominational conversations,” says Dr. Malvin Lundeen, who is the chairman of the unity commission that brought the four churches together,”the Lutheran contribution to the ecumenical movement will be seriously compromised.”

∙ For years, the biggest barrier to serious discussions of Lutheran unity has been the independent stand of the doctrinally conservative, fast growing (2,500,000 members) Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Historically wary of cooperating with church groups that do not share its theological views, the Missouri Synod has never joined the National Lutheran Council—the service organization that coordinates such matters as public relations, welfare and mission activities for most of the nation’s other Lutheran groups.

Now. says the Missouri Synod’s executive director, Dr. Walter Wolbrecht, “we want to see what church work the several bodies can do together better than they can do separately.” Last week, at its annual convention in Cleveland, the Missouri Synod adopted a resolution that proposed an international synodical conference “designed to embrace all Lutheran bodies.” To succeed its president of the last 27 years, Dr. John Behnken, 78, the synod elected Dr. Oliver Harms, 60, of St. Louis, the church’s first vice president for the last three years. Says Lutheran Harms: “We shall continue conversations with as many Lutheran church bodies as we can, firm in our testimony and praying that God will bring church bodies under the confessions and Word of God into one.”