Greetings,
The point of this blog is to provide documents and commentary on a little-known portion of Lutheranism in the 1950s.
For quite some time there was doctrinal agreement among conservative Lutherans in America. Most notable were the Lutheran Church of the Missouri Synod (LC-MS) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS).
In the 1940's, the LC-MS began to hold meetings with the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCS) and actually produce joint documents of agreement with each other. This was alarming to those in the WELS and they spent much time admonishing the LC-MS for its behavior. In a nutshell, the LC-MS didn't listen to the WELS's admonishment and there were those in the WELS that were calling for a decision based on Romans 16:17-18 that it was time to mark and avoid the LC-MS.
In 1955 the WELS did mark the LC-MS as false teachers, but failed to do the avoiding. In fact, they finally did avoid in 1961 because talks with the LC-MS were at an 'impasse' and a majority of WELS delegates voted to avoid the LC-MS.
During the period from 1955-1961, some pastors, their churches, and professors left the WELS because although they believed that the synod was correct in marking the LC-MS as false teachers, they also believed that synod erred by not doing the subsequent avoiding. These men and congregations would join together in 1960 to form and new church synod called the Church of the Lutheran Confession (CLC).
Hopefully, this blog will be useful for those doing research and to those who are just plain curious about the history of either their synod, or conservative Lutheranism in general.
Enjoy!
