Missouri's angst. . .

February 19, 1974, was the day when students led a walkout from the Concordia Seminary, 801 DeMun, St. Louis, MO -- only to return to eat supper in the cafeteria as some like to snicker about.  The next day a new seminary was born, Concordia Seminary in Exile (Seminex) and the whole of Missouri's history was forever altered.  Some who were stakeholders in the LCA and ALC would say that their future was also transformed by the fallout from the walkout but that is another story.  I am not here to recount the facts or rehearse the assignment of good guys and bad guys in this footnote in history.  My concern is to wonder why we still talk about it and why we feel it so deeply.

Though some would not believe it, I am an outsider in Missouri.  Though it might appear that I am on the inside (member of a Synodical commission and a district secretary), the reality is that was and remain an anomaly among those who lived through the tumultuous years from the late 1960s to the late 1970s.  At the time I entered St. John's College in Winfield, the numbers of presem students there rivaled the total produced by the entire system in one year today.  There were some 33 presem students in my class and I was one of the oddballs.  It was not my hair (though it was odd) or my looks (I have a radio face) but my background that stuck out.  The vast majority of those preparing for the ministry of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod were sons of pastors or sons of teachers and most of them related in one way or another.  Missouri was inbred almost from the beginning and by the time we got to the early 1970s it was true of the clergy even if is was not quite true of those in the pews.  It was not true of me.  I had only one person on my family tree who had been an LCMS pastor -- my great uncle Henry Krohn.  My mother was not Lutheran before she married and my father owned a hardware store and ran a plumbing and electrical business.  I was on the outside of Missouri but the profile of those preparing for the ministry was decidedly tilted toward those on the inside of Missouri.

In many respects then, the conflict of Missouri was not simply about power or theology but relationships. Others can argue the doctrinal and personality issues of the conflict.  I wonder about the personal.  What makes us so preoccupied by the events of 1974 (now 50 years ago with all the principal leaders long dead and the youngest participants in the struggle now ready for retirement) is that this was a family fight.  If it were not so personal, we would long ago have gotten past the unpleasantness but because it was familial it is harder to shrug off -- on both sides.  What complicates it all is that the Preus' brothers were viewed as outsiders and interlopers on Missouri's territory and in terms of Missouri's history.  That fact is not easy to recall with the host of surnamed Preus folks on our roster.  At the time, however, nothing got under some Missourian's craw more than the fact that this mess seemed to be stirred up and controlled by folks who were not us.  It still remains an issue for some families.

Furthermore, the interrelated character of many of those on Synodical boards and commissions and teaching in Missouri's colleges and seminaries meant that positions were not simply ideological but personal.  What I find ultimately fascinating is that the Presidents of Missouri were from Texas and now Texas seems to be the District voted most likely to secede from the Synod and that many of the leaders and faculty members of Missouri were from the then Atlantic District (a salt water district) and that district is now a shadow of its former size geographically and very weak in terms of numbers of people and pastors serving in that district.  Looking at things today you would never imagine how things looked in 1974 (the year I entered Concordia Senior College).

Though few actually left (a little over 100,000 people and some 200 congregations out of nearly 3 million people and 6,000 congregations), the impact of the split was felt much more deeply than the numbers tell.  It was who left and who they were related to and what congregations left and who had come up through those congregations into the ministerium of Missouri that remains a story to be told.  Though the numbers are dwindling due to age, infirmity, and death, those who left are still arguing that they represented the true spirit of Missouri and those who stayed (also declining numbers) continue to insist that they are the true and rightful heirs of Missouri's theological tradition.  In some respects, it could be possible to set aside the theological issues and see siblings fighting over who the sandbox belongs to.  I do not at all mean to suggest that I do not think there were theological issues.  Of course, there were and are and the problems in the ELCA are, in part, a testament to those issues.  Yet, we must never forget that this dispute was as personal as families who ended up on different sides of the fight, brothers who ended up in different seminaries, parents and children who ended up in different church bodies.  For this reason alone, I suspect, we will be talking about the split as long as there is anyone left alive who can remember it.  It will not become history until our memories are gone and we no longer feel the personal pain of the conflict.