Word: synods
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When Lutherans of the Missouri Synod (5,000 churches, 2,000,000 members) decided to get into TV five years ago, controversy raged among the ministers over the best way to "merchandise" Christianity. The Rev. Herman W. Gockel, a religious counselor-by-mail for radio's popular Lutheran Hour, quoted St. Mark, who said that Jesus always drew on drama in His preachings: "Without a parable spake He not unto them." Since then, the Lutherans have produced more than 150 half-hour parables, distributed free weekly for showing on some 280 TV stations across the U.S. (sufficient to reach...
...nonsectarian show at "the great unchurched-they are our potential customers." The first shows were a serialized morality play about Druggist Carl Fisher of Middleburg, U.S.A., a sort of male Ma Perkins whose soda-fountain stools spun with ordinary people with ordinary problems. After 3½ years the synod elders decided that the Fisher family had come to be simply "busybodies snooping around the neighborhood hunting for something to stick their noses into." So Life abandoned the Fisher pharmacy for separate, self-contained dramatizations of modern social problems-how a family reacts when polio strikes, how a man adjusts...
...Behnken, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: "I do not believe that there are at the moment many deep religious convictions among these seekers...
...spent $12,000 to win a competition that guaranteed only $4,000 in expenses. But judged by the results, Saarinen's total approach pays off. His work has won the applause of the glass and steel purists, yet pleased clients who include small-town bankers, a Midwest Lutheran synod, university presidents, and the giants among U.S. corporations-General Motors, T.W.A., International Business Machines...
...members). The resulting new denomination, to be called the American Lutheran Church, will probably be organized in 1960, and its nearly 2,000,000 membership will make it the third largest branch of Lutheranism in the U.S.-after the United Lutheran Church in America anc the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod both slightly over 2,000,000 each...