Anatomy of an Explosion

The story had to be told, the story of a large, confessional church body gradually, almost imperceptibly but seemingly irrevocably, losing its evangelical and confessional character and identity. But then, contrary to all expectations and historical precedent, a reversal of a trend which has dominated modern church history! The lay people and rank and file clergy of the Missouri Synod take a stand. They elect new leaders with a mandate to turn the direction of their synod back to the old ways, to the evangelical orthodoxy they had learned and known so well. They support an investigation of the doctrine of the largest and at the time most prestigious seminary of their synod. They study the issues confronting their church, they review their doctrinal position; and in convention assembled they take the bold unprecedented step of condemning the doctrine taught at that very seminary which was founded by and flourished under the greatest theological leaders the synod had ever known. The majority of the faculty members denounce the action of their church, and at what seems like a propitious time they refuse en masse to carry out their call to teach in the church. Students by the hundreds follow their professors into what was called an exile, but was really more a sort of captivity, led by the prestige and persuasions of their teachers and by the incredibly great pressure of their peers. And for the most part both faculty and students are still lost to the church, lost not because their friends and former brethren have not tried to retrieve them, but because they reject their synod, not merely its leaders and some of its actions, but also its theology. The scars inflicted on their church by their departure are deep, and they will last beyond the lives of any of us.