Full Text for Church History 3 - Volume 64 - The Lutheran Landscape Today (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-064 PROFESSOR LAWRENCE RAST PROFESSOR WILL SCHUMACHER Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> JOSHUA: I know that we are at the end of this course so let me ask one final question, one which looks more toward the future than to the past. What is the Lutheran landscape today in the United States? In the world? Where are Lutherans headed? >> DR. WILL SCHUMACHER: Well, Joshua, you've asked a question about the future, and I'm not sure that historians always make the best prophets. But since you've asked a question about the Lutheran landscape, I think we could at least make a stab at describing what Lutheranism looks like today in America. That's not always a predictor of where it will go, but let's try to describe what it looks like. I would start by saying that the map of Lutheranism in America really has two main continents, the two largest church bodies by a very significant margin, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the ELCA, and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. These two church bodies have very different profiles and very different histories. The ELCA is a fairly recent creation within the last 20 years and is the result, actually, of a century of mergers and unions between Lutheran church bodies that had very different theological characters and ethnic profiles. That means that in the ELCA, difference and diversity is simply a fact of life. The ELCA, as it exists today, wouldn't have come into existence at all unless its founders had made up their minds to live with a high degree of difference within the church body. I don't think I'm caricaturing the ELCA when I say that. The Missouri Synod, on the other hand, has an extraordinarily long, continuous institutional identity and history. The Missouri Synod, in its history, hasn't so much as merged with church bodies as absorbed smaller groups that simply become part of the Missouri Synod. That's not necessarily good or bad, but it means that we have a continuous history over the last century and a half or more. And this means that members of the Missouri Synod very often have much more invested in the organizational or institutional identity of the synod. There's a sort of long institutional memory in the Missouri Synod that doesn't exist in a church like the ELCA. I think this came out a few years ago as we celebrated our 150th anniversary, and press releases identified the Missouri Synod as the oldest Lutheran church body in America. Well, technically that was true. We've been in existence longer than any of the bodies that currently exist, but it gave the impression that that was somehow a badge of distinction or even, I think, perhaps was even misunderstood by people to mean that the Missouri Synod was the first Lutheran church body in America which it certainly wasn't. But there is a kind of pride taken in this long institutional history that we have in the synod. That makes our character quite different from the ELCA which is the product of a long series of mergers and brings together very disparate elements. It means that we put a much higher premium on unity and even uniformity in many respects in the Missouri Synod. We tend to think and act institutionally almost like a family. That changes the dynamics of these two church bodies. Would you agree with that generalization? ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *****