09/03/2026
On the first of November, 1932, every pastor of the Missouri Synod opened a letter on stationery none of them had seen before. Across the top, in blackletter: Emergency Collection Committee. Down both margins, two columns of names, pastors and laymen together.
Here is what I could not find. Search the Proceedings of that year's convention for those three words and they are not there. The convention adopted the collection — the money — and left the procedure to the Synod's officers and its Board of Directors at their discretion. No resolution calls a committee into being. It simply appears five months later, already at work, on its own stationery.
The Synod was a million dollars under, about twenty-four million in today's money, and behind the deficit stood bank loans it could not cover. The slogan was "A Nickel a Week for Synod's Deficit." Schoolchildren were asked for two cents. President Pfotenhauer wrote to the pastors that October and did not soften it: the debts would paralyze Synod at the beginning of the new year. To keep silent, he told them, would be "robbing some of your members of the opportunity to become rich in good works."
It worked. The Synod did not default, and the committee dissolved, which is what emergency machinery is supposed to do.
Ten years later, six months after Pearl Harbor, a larger emergency arrived and President Behnken appointed a National Advisory Emergency Planning Council. No convention created that one either. Its own report explained the founding with disarming candor: the war had produced situations that "were everybody's concern in general, but nobody's business in particular."
The same man was executive secretary of the first and executive director of the second. Lawrence Meyer had sailed for China in 1917 with a bride of nine days, run the Synod's seminary at Hankow, and been sent home in 1925 with tuberculosis and about six months to live. He did not die of it. The records of both bodies sit today in the same file box at Concordia Historical Institute, in Meyer's own files, which is as close as an archive ever comes to telling you what a man thought.
Emergency promises, in its very grammar, that the flood recedes. It makes no promise at all about what has broken the surface in the meantime. A committee, then a council, then a habit — and in 1948 the habit went to a spa town in Württemberg.
Emergency is a Latin word about water: what is emergent is what rises up out of it. The machine that carried the Missouri Synod to Germany first broke the surface in 1932, on a letterhead, formed to save the Synod from its own debts.
