Lutheran Missions

In 1855, Philip Schaff published his wonderful romp through the United States titled America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character. In it he captured the diversity of American life, including how Lutherans fit into it—or didn’t. “It is no easy matter to describe the character and internal condition of the Lutheran confession,” noted Schaff.(1) He was right—and when one tosses Lutheran missions into the mix, the picture gets even more complex.

From inception, Lutheranism has struggled with basic questions of identity, catholicity, ecclesiology, and mission. Is Lutheranism a church in its own right, or is it merely a confessional movement in the larger church catholic? Is it the “true visible church on earth,” or merely a denomination?(2) How do these issues affect its understanding of mission? The questions are many—the answers abound!

Making Sense of Lutheranism

Lutheranism is typically equated with Germany—justifiably so to a point. Of the over 70 million nominal Lutherans in the world today, the vast majority are in Western Europe, and of those some 40 million live in Germany. The Lutheran World Federation (LWF), “a global communion of Christian churches in the Lutheran tradition,” was founded in 1947 in Lund, Sweden, and has 145 member churches in 79 countries.(3) The more confessionally oriented Inter-national Lutheran Council (ILC), which includes my own church, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), is much smaller, having 33 member churches in 31 countries. It defines its confessional commitment as follows: “The ILC is a worldwide association of established confessional Lutheran church bodies which proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the basis of an unconditional commitment to the Holy Scriptures as the inspired and infallible Word of God and to the Lutheran Confessions contained in the Book of Concord as the true and faithful exposition of the Word of God.”(4)

The multitude of Lutheran synods often confounds Lutherans and non-Lutherans alike. There are currently about 8 million Lutherans in North America. They belong to some 21 different church bodies, a sampling of which is located in the box on this page.

Church bodies affiliated with the LWF, ILC, as well as other Lutheran entities, have their roots in a lively sense of mission that has always been a part of the Lutheran tradition. Indeed, the Lutheran churches of North America are in many ways the direct results of a Lutheran theology of mission.

Lutheran Missions

Lutherans, of course, trace their history back to Martin Luther (1483-1546). And while Luther himself did not write specifically to what we today think of technically as missiology, recent studies have shown that engagement with the emerging questions of mission was central to his thoughts.(5) Contrary to some caricatures, Luther had a rather expansive vision of the present scope and future extent of mission, as his comments on Matthew 24:14 show.

Before the last day comes, the church’s regiment and Christian faith must spread out over the entire world as Christ in one of the previous chapters has already said; not one town will remain where the Gospel has not been preached. And the Gospel will run through the entire world so that all have a testimony to their consciences whether they believe or not. The Gospel has been in Egypt. There it is gone. Likewise, it has been in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in France and in other countries. Now it is in Germany. Who knows for how long? The Gospel is now with us, but our ingratitude and disdain for Gospel Word, our greed and pomp, mean that it will not stay for long. And because of this the enthusiasts will enter the picture and thereafter great wars….Then the last day will come. St. Paul says this to the Romans in the eleventh chapter [Romans 11:25], the Gospel must be preached until the Gentiles in full number have come to heaven.(6)

Lutherans, however, have not always been linked with being vigorously active in mission. Part of the problem was the context in which Lutheranism emerged. With church and state inseparably interrelated in Reformation-era Germany, the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) established the principle of cuius regio eius religio (“Whose realm, his religion”) as a means of allowing Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism to coexist peacefully. Whatever the religion of the ruler was, that was the religion of his region. While this temporarily halted the wars of religion, it also truncated the church’s mission as both traditions agreed they would not “try to persuade the subjects of other Estates to abandon their religion.”(7) The arrangement had a debilitating effect on missions, however, because rulers were obligated to evangelize only their own subjects. Indeed, they were prohibited from reaching out to those beyond their borders.(8) This may in part explain the puzzling opinion offered by the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg in 1651, which seemed to limit the scope of the Great Commission. Noting that Matthew 28 specifically applied only to the apostles, the Wittenberg faculty argued that it is the direct responsibility of the rightly appointed rulers to propagate the gospel in the territories God has entrusted to them. Obviously the rulers had fulfilled this duty. World mission was beyond their range.(9)



As the eighteenth century opened, a new era of mission work emerged as well, with Pietistic Lutherans at the forefront.(10) The efforts of Philip Spener (1635-1705) and especially August Hermann Franke (1663-1727) at Halle would bring mission to the forefront of Lutheran thought and practice. By 1706 Heinrich Plütschau (1678-1747) and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1683-1719) arrived at the Dutch colony of Tranquebar in India, under direct instructions from King Frederick IV of Denmark (reigned 1671-1730) to “instruct the ignorant in the first principles of Christian doctrine” on the basis of the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions and to “teach nothing besides it.”(11)



Lutheran missions had arrived. The growth and development of Lutheranism as a world movement over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries led to the Lutheran tradition extending itself to the ends of the earth.(12) Today Lutheranism is growing rapidly in the emerging “global south,” especially in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Indonesia, among other places.(13)



Present Challenges



A number of missiological challenges face Lutheranism in the present. Historic questions on the authority of Scripture and confessional subscription continue to pose themselves to Lutherans. Additionally, questions about women in ministry and sexuality, among others, have more recently captured Lutheran attention. However, one of the most pressing issues facing Lutheranism today is a demographic one. In a recently published study of religion in America, the racial and ethnic composition of evangelical Protestantism is 81 percent white, while mainline Protestantism is 91 percent white.(14) As striking as these numbers are, they are higher for Lutherans. The LCMS is approximately 95 percent white. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), which committed itself from its inception in 1988 to an aggressive outreach to all people groups and mandates that its leadership provide representation for minorities, is approximately 97 percent white.



These realities will necessarily impact American Lutheranism in the next generation. Today American birthrates are at about 2.1 children per childbearing woman. That merely replaces the existing population. However, among the primary demographic category for Lutherans, the birthrate is below the repopulating threshold. In contrast, birthrates among African Americans and Latinos are much higher. If these current demographic trends continue, by 2050 whites will be a minority in America. The results for largely white Lutheran churches are obvious. Growth trends will be flat at best (something the LCMS has experienced consistently since 1970). Decline—a reality for many of the mainline churches since at least 1970—may accelerate (something currently being experienced in the ELCA).



This is already the LCMS’s experience. In the 1980s, when the LCMS prepared for its national youth gathering, it had a pool of approximately 250,000 teenagers it could seek to attract. At present, there are merely 95,000 teenagers in the Missouri Synod. It is also true for the ELCA and WELS. The implications for the future are clear: Lutheran churches in the United States are aging rapidly.(15)



Conclusion



A number of years ago, historian Mark Noll wondered about the “newsworthy potential” of Lutheranism. Noting it lacks glamour, Noll argued that the Lutheran tradition still has something more important to give to the American religious scene.



Lutherans continue to struggle with issues of identity, confession, ecclesiology, and mission. They do so in the context of a rapidly changing world. They do so, as well, with a renewed sense of focusing on the centrality of God’s mission, which has been such an important part of Lutheran thought and life from its inception, even as we hear from Luther in a 1524 sermon on Matthew 22:9-10:

Lutherans do have much to offer to the wider American community, but only if they can fulfill two conditions. First, to contribute as Lutherans in America, Lutherans must remain authentically Lutheran. Second, to contribute as Lutherans in America, Lutherans must also find out how to speak Lutheranism with an American accent….Lutherans are heirs to a better way. They possess confessions that have stood the test of time, that arise from the major themes of Scripture, that present a cohesive picture of the Christian’s relationship to God, to fellow humans, and to the world.(16)

Afterward, the Gospel gets its start through the apostles. Now he says, “Go out!” Here no one is excluded. Christ concludes that all are children of the devil, so he sends out his own; otherwise it would have served no purpose. “Whoever you meet, bring here!” “Go out!” The apostles did this until the table was full. And this continues still every day, and the servants will continue to do so until the end of the world.(17)