United Lutherans

A gloomy inventory of sin and sorrow awaited the attention of the United Lutheran Church in America as it met last week in Philadelphia for its eighth biennial convention. The Church, said its Committee on Moral & Social Welfare, should address itself to the following conditions: "racketeering, gambling, exploitations, bribery, profanity, dissipation, diseases, suicide, sex laxity, lawlessness; organized agencies within society which have in large sections been perverted; infidelity between husbands and wives, disloyalty between parents and children, undisciplined temperaments; racial prejudices: jealousies, greed, grudges between nationalities; the wrong attitude of class toward class in society; great wealth and luxury and abject poverty within sight of each other, but separated by an impassable gulf; leisure because of no need to work and enforced idleness because of no opportunity to work; the palace towering over the hovel; privilege and underprivileged.

Putting aside for the moment this large order, the Lutherans took up other things. The 560 delegates in Philadelphia represented 30 U. S. and three Canadian synods, with 962,461 communicants. The three Canadian synods petitioned the convention to let them out, pleading that as an independent, patriotic group they could better vie with Canada's other merged Protestant churches. Their petition was to be discussed this week.

A committee report proposed that the 13 theological seminaries of the United Lutheran Church be merged, for economy, into five strategic centres across the country. This proposal was put over until this week, as also was one made by the ministerium of Pennsylvania (oldest, largest synod in the church) objecting to the birth control pronouncements of the Federal Council of Churches and urging that the Lutherans withdraw from their consultative membership.

The United Lutherans re-elected as president for the eighth term their ablest man, Dr. Frederick Hermann Knubel, 62, tall, active, Vandyke-bearded Manhattanite, whose many jobs caused him some years ago to give up the pastorate of the influential Church of Our Saviour's Atonement which he founded.

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