I have spent the better part of this week listening to the LCMS convention while I attend to my normal office work. This isn’t the first convention I’ve live-streamed and it certainly wont be the last. The difference is that during this one I’ve also been working on preparing a presentation on the theologian who is, not only my favorite Martin, perhaps the most important voice (outside of her Lord’s) that the church needs to hear. I commend his words below to you. In 1952 Martin Franzmann served as the convention essayist for the 42nd Convention of the Synodical Conference, a now defunct affiliation of conservative Lutheran Church bodies. The theme of his essay was an exegetical analysis and application of Ephesians 4:1–7. The words below, focusing on Eph. 4:2, are directed to the Synodical Conference, and yet, they are directed to us all. 

“With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love;” Eph. 4:2

The hard realism of this last admonition—“forbearing one another in love”—makes it every plain that we here have to do, not with ripe aromatic sentiments which pious ladies of either sex may sigh over, but with the down-to-earth and difficult business of living and working together in the Church on earth, into which the hosts of Satan continually and ominously intrude. Every synod that has entered the Synodical Conference has brought in with it a collection of very active young devils wholly intent on destroying the Synodical Conference; very clever young devils they are, too, and remarkably pious, who teach Missouri to repent of Wisconsin’s sins and Wisconsin to repent of Missouri’s. (I confine myself to these two synods only because I have been a member of both and know this much of the satanic dodge from my own experience.) Let us renounce these devils and all their works and stubbornly draw the line that should run from the New Testament to ourselves till it touches us, and ask ourselves the question that will lead each one of us to repent of his own sins. 

To begin at home: I know a tall, thin man with horn-rimmed glasses who taught Greek at a Wisconsin Synod school for ten years; forty-five miles away was a Missouri Synod school. In it were some other men with horn-rimmed glasses also teaching Greek. But our fine, tall, thin man never met them until he accepted a call into the Missouri Synod. In fact, all he knew about the other school was that it had an annoyingly good basketball team. What right had that young man to go to Synodical Conference meetings and say, “Ja, wir sind Brueder”? Was he his brother’s slave, existing for him, forbearing him, loving him? How will he answer when God asks him, “Where is thy brother?”

And what of our pious zeal to beat each other to promising mission fields, what about all those intersynodical maneuvers that were so correct by the book without being right? Who was sowing the most seed on those disputed concerns? What has been our attitude toward the Synodical Conference as an organization? Have we viewed it as a place where, or a means whereby, we could serve one another, exist for one another, help and sustain, and, of course, forbear one another? Or have we been more concerned with the “rights” which our conveniently loose constitution guarantees us? One might even ask: Does not that constitution in a sense indict us? Ought we not to have grown closer together than this in our eighty common years? Have we, each of us, valued our “independence,” our “history,” our “tradition,” more highly than the oneness of the Spirit? What has happened to us? Our tragedy is not, at bottom, the fact that we have “differences”; the tragedy is that, when we meet to discuss and remove our differences, our words fall in a hard and brittle atmosphere, in an air so tense and charged that no one speaks freely any more. Our words have become like coins with blank faces; in our commonwealth there is no way of telling their value any more. It will not do for us to ask, “Whose fault is it?” We must each of us ask “What is my share in the fault?” For if your  experience is like mine, we shall find that in this one field, this field of nettles, we have achieved a remarkable degree of co-operation.

Martin Hans Franzmann, “The Forgiveness of Sins and the Unity of the Spirit,” Proceedings of the Forty-Second Convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America Assembled at Concordia College, St. Paul, Minn. August 12–15, 1952 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 39–40.