The Blessings of Face-to-Face Communication

I have had the pleasure, in the last few days, of reading the ecclesiastical travel journal of early Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod fathers, C.F.W. Walther and F.C.D. Wyneken. In early 1852 these two men took an early steamship from the U.S. back to the land of their birth for the purpose of mending and, perhaps, improving relations with the "mother" Lutheran churches of Germany.

The United States was truly a frontier mission field at the time, "uncivilized" and with a national ethos of church and state distinction that was not imaginable to those who had not lived under it. The fledgling church now known as The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod had to theologize and organize itself independently from the government, an almost incomprehensible concept for those on the Continent. As this happened some of the theological formulations befuddled and alarmed many continental churchmen. A "wedge" began to appear between the mother and her daughter churches.

In response to this the people of the frontier daughter church (LC-MS), after much less-than-fruitful correspondence, purposed to repair the breach by sending two of their most able churchmen, Walther and Wyneken, to speak directly to pastors and congregations in the homeland.

Regrettably, my German is infantile, so much of this very important history was inaccessible to me until recently, when a current LC-MS churchman, Rev. Matthew Harrison, published At Home in the House of My Fathers, a collection of, as his subtitle reads, "presidential sermons, essays, letters, and addresses from the Missouri Synod's great era of unity and growth."

The accounts to which I have alluded come from the early pages of At Home, and I am struck as I read Walther and Wyneken's travel report by how critically important face-to-face contact is, perhaps especially in conflict situations. The reports suggest that upon physically meeting and conversing with church leaders these early LC-MS leaders were able to better explain the nature of their context and confession of faith, all of which were misunderstood by many in Germany. These men knew--and their church (the LC-MS) knew--what much modern communication theory has "proven": real "communication" is primarily non-verbal. How we say something is an important indicator of what we say. What in print is easily misinterpreted is, in person, more readily understood.

Perhaps I will return to this subject again soon, but the implications of these truths about face-to-face contact redound in all areas of life.

P.S. At Home in the House of My Fathers is published by Lutheran Legacy. Here's the link to their site: http://www.lutheranlegacy.org/.