The November issue of The Lutheran Witness is all about planting Lutheran churches, both at home and abroad.
- From the President: On Faith — Matthew C. Harrison
- Life in the Church Year: The Church Year in Community— Kristen Einertson and Tessa Muench
Print Features
- We Plant — God Gives the Growth: Theology of LCMS Church Planting— Quintin Cundiff
- ‘Go Therefore’: Planting Lutheran churches on the mission field— Adam Lehman
- Set Apart for Church Planting: Friedrich Pfotenhauer on mission— James Baneck
- At the Crossroads of Confession and Mission: Church planting in LCMS history— Lawrence R. Rast Jr.
Departments
- Snippets: News from around the LCMS and the world
- Commonplaces: Selections from Scripture, the Confessions and Lutheran hymnody on church planting
- Walking Together: Pioneers on the New England frontier — Rachel Bomberger
- Searching Scripture: Following the Formula Article XI: Predestination and election — Carl Roth
From the editor
Church planting. Maybe it’s just the latent pioneer spirit in me, but those words bring a thrill to my heart. The thought of zealous, intrepid Christians courageously staking their claim in an uncharted spiritual wilderness, establishing new outposts for Word and Sacrament ministry — well, it’s frankly awe-inspiring.
Romance aside, though, I do know that church planting is often hard, lonely work. It can take years of faithful labor before a fledgling congregation grows into a thriving community of faith — if it ever does — and in the interim, opportunities for discouragement abound.
My great-grandparents, the Rev. Dr. George and Clara Maassel, knew this well. In 1921, straight out of seminary and soon after his marriage, the newly ordained pastor was sent to the Black Hills region of South Dakota to plant a church. For two years, he labored under adverse conditions, leading services in his home with a sewing machine for an altar. He drove an old Model T miles through the barren landscape to visit the far-flung farmers who struggled to subsist in an area known for its poor soil and brutal climate. The few photos we have from this era include one with Clara (who looks a little thinner than in her wedding photo) lighting candles beneath a sparsely decorated tabletop Christmas tree. There are no presents.
According to their surviving children, George and Clara rarely talked about those days after he took a call to an established congregation in Ohio in 1923. Did the church they worked so hard to plant ever take root? We aren’t sure. There is no LCMS church in New Underwood, S.D., today.
But it’s clear that Pastor Maassel never lost his heart for missions or his zeal for church planting. Like Lawrence Rast, he “was born into a Missouri that expected to grow — and that planned to grow. It was simply a part of who we were and are.”
Their zealous optimism was not unique. Christians throughout time have understood, as Quintin Cundiff points out, that the church “is not simply the result of mission. It is also the launching point for more mission.”
Think about it: Every church you’ve ever attended was planted by somebody. The New Testament congregations at Antioch and Ephesus were once church plants. Europe’s great cathedrals were all built on the foundations of earlier church plants. The 14 churches that first banded together to form the LCMS in 1847 all began life as church plants. Some were established by groups of laypeople who banded together to organize a congregation and call a pastor; others were begun by missionaries, circuit riders or colporteurs. But in each new church, the Holy Spirit was at work, calling sinners to faith and drawing them together as the Body of Christ.
There may not be an LCMS church in New Underwood, S.D., today — but the Lord did not abandon His people in that place. Neither did LCMS church planters. By God’s grace, there are now five congregations — planted in 1910, 1950, 1970, 1987 and 1999, respectively — located within 25 miles of the spot where Clara once lit her Christmas candles.
From the Great Commission to the Second Coming, the work goes on. In great-grandpa’s time as in our own, we plant.
In Christ,
Rachel Bomberger
Managing Editor, The Lutheran Witness
