The Collector

He wanted to list everyone

Some people collect coins, others butterflies. Arthur C. Piepkorn collected religious denominations, large and small, and if there were contests in such things, he would have been world champion. It all began when he taught a survey course on religious bodies at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and ripened into an obsession when the book house of his own denomination, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, asked him to redo its standard reference work in the field.

That book surveyed 50 categories of denominations; another described 231 U.S. groups. The current Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches lists 328. The meticulous Professor Piepkorn wanted to go beyond this and catalogue for the first time the beliefs of each denomination in existence. Over nine years he classified a staggering total of 735 North American religious bodies.

Piepkorn suddenly died of a heart attack in 1973 at age 66, leaving behind 2,900 pages of manuscript and a file-crammed study. His friend, Concordia President John Tietjen, undertook to edit the project for publication. Soon Tietjen was ousted in the Missouri Synod's ongoing doctrinal war, and only three years later is the first of a projected seven Piepkorn volumes reaching print. The initial installment of Profiles in Belief: The Religious Bodies of the United States and Canada (Harper & Row; 324 pages; $15.95) covers Roman Catholicism, 48 Eastern churches, and 18 groups related to the Old Catholics who broke with the Pope in the last century.

While Tietjen and his friends work on the remaining volumes, they are operating a "Seminary in Exile" and forming denomination No. 736, a schism from the left of the Missouri Synod known as the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches. That is the problem with Piep-korn's goal of listing everyone. The job never ends.

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