Why are there so many different Lutherans in America?

Teach and urge these things. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain. (1 Timothy 6:3-5 ESV)

[The following "newsletter article" was assigned during a course on American Lutheran history.]

Have you ever wondered about the label “Lutheran” (and why/how, if you are reading this in a Lutheran church newsletter, it most likely applies to you)? Have you ever wondered about why of our own church body, The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, is so named? Have you ever wondered—or perhaps you were never told—why there are nearly three dozen strands (for lack of a better word) of practicing Lutherans nationwide (that’s more than 8 million Americans), rather than just one post-Reformation, American brand of Lutheranism.

Surely, even the least frequent church-going Lutheran knows where the designation comes from—Dr. Martin Luther hated that any new form of church should carry his brand, so to speak; Luther meant, at least at the onset 500 years ago, to merely make his beloved Roman Catholic Church aware that its improprieties, excesses, and false doctrine obscured the Gospel message and, therefore, its primary mission. (I think the last thing he meant to do was foment a Protestant insurrection that would result in suffering, death, and the fracturing of believers into squabbling sects of differing Christian doctrine.)

It was this Protestant Reformation that tempered those followers of Luther into the first Lutherans, those who agreed with Luther’s teaching, doctrine, and practice, the basis for our Lutheran Confessions, the 1580 Book of Concord. This compendium of 10 confessional documents is the backbone of orthodox Lutheranism and is still upheld by The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod as “the true and binding exposition of Holy Scripture and serve as authoritative texts for all pastors [and] congregations”; however, and unfortunately, not all Lutheran church bodies in America share such an unconditional subscription. And, ironically, the very book that was meant to keep Lutherans together (concordia is Latin for “one heart”), is at the very “heart” of what would divide the first Lutherans to call themselves American in the early- to mid-19^th century.

Between 1840 and 1875 there were approximately 60 organized Lutheran church bodies in the United States made up of European immigrants (and their descendants) primarily from Germany, Norway, and Sweden. A fledgling Lutheran presence in the 17^th century of Dutch (New York), Swedish (Delaware), and German (Pennsylvania) settlers would eventually give rise in the next century to the first permanent Lutheran “synod” in America, the ethnically German Ministerium of Pennsylvania in 1748. The Latin word ministerium (a group of ministers), would soon give way to a more regular use of the anglicized form of the Greek word synodos, from syn- (together) + hodos (way), meaning assembly or meeting. (Thus The Luther Church – Missouri Synod.)

Author and professor of church history, Mark Granquist, writes in his 2015 book Lutherans in America, that “by 1720, Lutherans had been in North America for about a century…especially in the middle [British] colonies.” In 1740 there was still no English language Lutheran worship—there were Lutherans scattered about. Lutheranism in America was still wholly unorganized. The formation of the Pennsylvania ministerium was founded on Pietism, a German form of Lutheranism that placed the burden of salvation on Man over God’s grace, and condemned formal Christianity that accepted church attendance and reception of the sacrament as an indication of real discipleship and denounced a simple assent to doctrine or a verbal affirmation of confessions or creeds as evidence of true faith. And so the “founding fathers” of the first synod in Pennsylvania tried to blend Pietism and orthodox Lutheran Confessions into a prototypical and distinctly model of American Lutheranism. Over the next 100 years, this model would be shaped and reshaped by the culture of the times, as Lutherans in America would be impacted by other Protestant church movements, particularly Baptist and Methodist, as well as the revivalism that grew out of mission work on the western frontier.

By 1830, English was the preferred language of worship among American Lutheran synods, which were continuing to grow exponentially. In the mid-1800s, Pietism was the undercurrent for much of the anti-Roman Catholic sentiment and a fundamental reason that some of the contents of the Confessions were seen as no longer relevant, especially the original or “unaltered” Augsburg Confession (drafted to address specific abuses in the Roman Catholic Church). It was into this backdrop of controversy and competition that The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod came on the scene in 1847. Our synod—confessional, ethnically Saxon, German-speaking, and fiercely conservative—began to grow in the Midwest, amid arguments with other synods over unconditional acceptance of the Confessions. There were other controversies, too, such as differing opinions on the doctrines of Election and Real Presence (both topics better addressed separately in future newsletter articles).

Granquist reports that Lutherans in America grew to be the third-largest Protestant church group from 600,000 baptized in 1875 to more than 2 million by 1900, segregated mostly by ethnicity, rather than doctrine. But that would change as not only doctrine, but semantics would create a chasm between the two largest Lutheran church bodies in the U.S. in the 1920s, the more liberal United Lutheran Church of America (ULCA), with its roots in the Pennsylvania Ministerium of 1748 (and created through a series of mergers; through more mergers, it would eventually become a shadow of today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or ELCA), and the Missouri Synod.

While there had been great hope and enthusiasm for a united Lutheran front in America, at least on the part of the ULCA, the controversy over doctrinal subscription would keep the notion of one united American Lutheran Church body beyond arm’s reach. Granquist notes that “most of the midwestern Lutheran groups were generally sympathetic to the use of the terms inerrant and infallible, both because they believed it correctly expressed the nature of biblical authority and because it brought them into harmony with the Missouri Synod on the issue.” The ULCA and others resisted using these terms, and another Lutheran body at the time, the American Lutheran Church, used one, but not the other. The ULCA tried again in 1949 for national unity among the numerous Lutheran bodies, but to no avail.

We in The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod consider ourselves orthodox Lutherans, as we accept the Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, and we subscribe unconditionally to all the symbolical books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as a true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God. There are other Lutherans in America who claim the same stance (such as the Wisconsin Synod, the 3^rd largest Lutheran body), but other issues, such as type of hymnal, gender identity, roles of men and women in church, and form of church government, keep us apart.

Honestly, it’s very difficult to translate the label “Lutheran” into a specific description. Of the 30 or so bodies in America, it’s also very difficult to decipher why one operates to the exclusion of others; in The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, altar and pulpit fellowship (who is invited to the Lord’s Supper, who is allowed to preach) is based predominately upon “confessional unity.” Is the communicant confessionally sound? Does he or she agree with the Lutheran Confessions as contained in the Book of Concord? Or even know what the Book of Concord is? Does he or she agree with the teachings of our Synod? Can any ordained Lutheran pastor preach from our pulpit?

As a vivid example of the fence between the Missouri Synod and the largest American Lutheran body, the ELCA, comes directly from its website in these statements which they contend justifies their altar fellowship with the Presbyterian Church (USA), Reformed Church in America, United Church of Christ, The Episcopal Church, The Moravian Church, and United Methodist Church:

“Full communion is when two denominations develop a relationship based on a common confessing of the Christian faith and a mutual recognition of Baptism and sharing of the Lord’s Supper. This does not mean the two denominations merge; rather, in reaching agreements, denominations also respect differences.”

I know, all of this perhaps presents our Synod as proprietary among other Lutherans, even among other Christian denominations; however, when the very confessional documents that were presented during the Reformation by Luther and his colleagues and followers to defend God’s Word are altered, ignored, or simply forgotten because popular culture and society deem them legalistic or no longer relevant…well, there can never be unity as long as the world, not God, influence the direction of the Church. It is sad, even regrettable, that the label Lutheran doesn’t hold the same definition for each Christian who wears it.

In the end, our Lutheran label is not as important as our defense of the truth in the face of false doctrine and misleading practice. Our confessions as an exposition of Scripture neither add to or take away from God’s word. If this were the case among all the “Lutherans” in the world, then…well, you get the idea.

С Богом, ya'll.