Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod

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.

The synod's closed communion and its insistence on strict confessional agreement, the same commitments that let it organize in 1847, nearly split it apart again in the 1970s. Through the 1960s, professors at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, the synod's flagship school, increasingly taught the Bible using the historical critical method, reading Scripture as a historically conditioned text open to the same critical tools scholars applied to any other ancient document, rather than the historical grammatical approach that treated it as the inerrant word of God. Many pastors and lay members in the pews saw that shift as a departure from the confession the synod had organized around in the first place.

The conflict came to a head on February 19, 1974, when synod president Jacob Preus suspended seminary president John Tietjen. Most of the faculty and student body walked out the same day rather than accept the suspension, regrouping under the name Concordia Seminary in Exile, Seminex for short, and holding classes on the campus of Saint Louis University, a Jesuit institution, while the dispute over who controlled the flagship seminary played out. Seminex operated from 1974 until 1987, affiliated for part of that span with the newly formed Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, a body that later folded into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the LCMS's larger and more theologically liberal Lutheran counterpart. The walkout cost the LCMS a significant share of one generation's pastors and left the synod firmly on its confessional side of a divide that still separates it from the ELCA today.