The opportunities to reach out with the Gospel in Portland were immense and ongoing at the time of its closure. Many, many people were hearing the Gospel for the first time in an incredibly hostile environment. With its closure, those opportunities have gone away.
Scott,
I couldn't agree more.
The challenges of reaching out with the gospel in that part of the country have always been immense. That is partly why Franz Pieper once told the faithful in the NW: "You must grow your own." My grandfather was among the first "home-grown" LCMS pastors to serve in Oregon. He graduated from SL in 1924. My uncle was among those LCMS Oregonian pastors who were "grown" in the next generation. He graduated from SL in 1954. (Some of his friends were among those removed from the LCMS in the 70s as a result of the "Americanization" that Pieper both encouraged and resisted.) While my grandfather served in the NW throughout his entire adult life (including for a time on CUP's faculty in the 1930s), my uncle served there as well as in the Southern District, another "salt-water district" that has seen its own challenges over the years. (He and Orv Mueller came into that district in the same year. They were close friends.)
A little more than 30 years after my uncle graduated from SL, I graduated from the same place. During the decade that I taught on CUP's faculty, a large number of students in my required theology course had had limited exposure to the Christian gospel, since they came from non-religious, non-Christian homes, or they had given up on the Christian church altogether because of its manifest moral failures (e.g., clergy sex abuse, linkage with colonialism, defense of slavery, enforced patriarchy, etc.) or its intellectual failures (e.g., defending positions that run contrary to basic scientific knowledge). The NW USA has merely been a decade or two ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to the rise of the "nones" and the "dones."
The closure of CUP is a very sad episode in the much larger, more disturbing story of the decline of Christianity in the NW part of the USA. For what it's worth, I see evidence of that same decline here in these parts, too.
So the mission opportunities remain.
Matt Becker
P.S. Recently, I've toyed with the idea of writing a novel along the lines of Mann's
Buddenbrooks. It would trace the history of a German immigrant family, whose youngest orphan is sent to Oregon to be raised by relatives who make sure that he is confirmed in the evangelical-catholic (i.e., Lutheran) faith (by the longest-serving LCMS pastor in Oregon history, no less). Later, that orphan's son becomes an LCMS pastor in the 1950s. (His other son nearly dies in the Korean War, while his daughter marries a prominent district attorney in central Oregon.) The patriarch's grandson, who attended the same schools as the grandfather and the uncle, also becomes an LCMS pastor in the late 1980s, and serves at the family's alma mater in the 1990s and early 2000s. It would be a story of decline, of course, but also one with glimmers of hope and moments of grace. But before that novel can be written, I need to finish editing the final three volumes of Edmund Schlink's works, and also complete the second edition of a book on fundamental theology. An excerpt from vol. 2 of ESW will be published in the spring issue of
Lutheran Quarterly. That second volume, Schlink's dogmatics, should come out sometime next summer, d.v. The book on fundamental theology will come out, d.v., in the late fall. Remember: the ALPB is all about American Lutheran
publicity. Hence the public plugs for some upcoming Lutheran offerings in the American setting.
