The congregations that founded the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod did not begin as a single body. A wave of Saxon immigrants had sailed for Missouri in 1839 under the pastor Martin Stephan, fleeing what they saw as rationalism and forced union with Reformed churches back home. Stephan was deposed within months of arrival, accused of financial and moral misconduct, and the leaderless colony spent several difficult years working out what kind of church it actually wanted to be. The young pastor who did the most to answer that question was C. F. W. Walther, who argued that authority rested in the congregation itself and its call, not in any bishop or synod standing above it, a position he defended at length against a St. Louis lawyer, Franz Marbach, in a public debate remembered as settling the colony's direction.
That congregational principle, joined to a promise of strict doctrinal agreement rather than administrative control, is what let scattered German Lutheran congregations across six states trust each other enough to organize together. On April 26, 1847, twelve pastors representing fourteen congregations in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin met and signed a constitution forming the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States. Walther, thirty five years old, became its first president. The synod grew mostly by welcoming other German and Scandinavian Lutheran bodies who shared its confessional commitments rather than by winning converts from outside Lutheranism, and it kept that shape into the twentieth century: a fellowship of congregations, not a hierarchy over them, still organized today into thirty five districts whose delegates, lay and clergy in equal number, meet in convention every three years.