I have always believed in the priority of the Christian congregation. Someone put it well in saying that the Church cannot be any more the essence of the Church than when it is celebrating the Eucharist. At the same time I don’t find that bishops are necessarily in opposition to that foundational Eucharistic assembly.

I am one who hopes that the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod will seriously consider an episcopacy as part of the reorganization of 2010. The Blue Ribbon Task Force for Synod Structure and Governance will have made it’s recommendations by the time this column appears. At this writing I don’t know what the Task Force will say.

I am hoping for smaller districts where a bishop or District President can be a pastor to pastors and an overseer for the sake of those Eucharistic assemblies. Pastor Sam Nafzger, a Synod theologian, is obviously correct when he says, “Lutherans do not believe that the Bible lays out the specific organizational structure and governance we must have in the church.” (Reporter, August 2008.) The Augsburg Confession goes so far as to favor rightly formed episcopacy. (Article 28.)

Within the Missouri Synod there is suspicion of, even animus against, any suggestion of episcopacy. Bishops are presumed guilty of standing in sharp opposition to the Eucharistic assembly. That is reinforced by the conventional view (myth) of our origins. According to that account a band of Saxons immigrated to Missouri under the despotic rule of Bishop Martin Stephan, who turned out to be an adulterer. They were freed from their tyranny and embarrassment by C. F. W. Walther whose victory re-established the doctrine of justification (Law and Gospel) and the priority of the Lutheran Confessions. 

According to that telling, Walther also discovered the “correct” biblical polity. It turned out to be a very American congregationalism, common to all American Lutherans as well as the majority of Protestants here. Within the LCMS it has been assumed that any episcopacy, any bishop, would necessarily be in total opposition to the interests of congregations. The ominous figure of an evil Stephan lurks in the background whenever the possibility of bishops arises.

The 1953 history of Missouri’s origins, Zion on the Mississippi, (by O. W. Forster) tempered some of that skewed myth. There, Walther and the other emigrant clergy are shown to have been less than heroic. Still Forster found little in Martin Stephan to admire. Now we have a more sympathetic account of Bishop Stephan.

In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan’s Journey. Philip G. Stephan. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2008. 323 pages.

The above-mentioned myth of a villainous Stephan has never been unanimously held in the LCMS. Every generation following Martin has had at least one Stephan pastor. Pastor Philip Stephan is Martin’s great, great grandson and was LCMS but now is ELCA.

Then there was Pastor William Koepchen of New York City who did extensive research and in 1938 wrote a manuscript much more favorable to Stephan. For some unknown reason Koepchen’s work was never published. Philip Stephan relies heavily upon the data uncovered by Koepchen.

Other voices of dissent in Stephan’s favor have been the Lutherans of the Southern Illinois District where Stephan established a congregation after his deposition from the Emigration Society. That congregation has a modern monument near his grave. Among achievements listed is, “First Lutheran Bishop in America.”

Bishop Stephan seems a tragic figure. It does seem probable that he committed adultery. He had left his wife and children (save one son) in Germany. He had stated his intention to bring them to America soonest but may well have been prevented by his abrupt expulsion from the utopian Emigration Society when all his possessions were stolen from him.

Yet Stephan was a charismatic preacher and mentor to young pastors. It is clear that Walther is indebted to Stephan for his confessional commitment and his clear articulations of proclaiming the law and the gospel. Both habits (confessional seriousness and keen distinction of law and gospel) have long characterized Missouri when it is at its best. We are all indebted to Stephan.

The summary deposition of Stephan became the first Missouri Synod reorganization. It is a sad chapter in our history. The members of the Emigration Society inevitably learned that they had not found Utopia in the wilderness of frontier Missouri. Discontent and unrest abounded. Nothing had been imposed upon them that they had not agreed to, but life was not like it had been in Dresden. For the sake of the community someone had to take the blame. Walther seems to have stumbled upon the idea of making a scapegoat out of Stephan, his bishop to whom he had pledged obedience and who had formed his theology.

Long before they left Saxony, the emigrants knew the rumors of Stephan’s womanizing. The discovery in Perry County could hardly have been “shocking.” Shocking, though, is the breach of the confessional seal by Pastor Loeber followed by the complicity of Walther,.who used the woman’s confession to summarily depose and to expel Bishop Stephan. There was neither civil nor ecclesiastical trial.

That and much more can be learned by Philip Stephan’s biography of his great-great-grandfather, the father of the Missouri Synod, our first bishop. We have come a long way since then. Today we would certainly handle cases like his with much keener justice. The “Stephan episode” does not make the case against bishops per se. In our greater maturity we can accept episcopacy for the good of Christ’s church. In our next reorganization we probably will. We can do better than the reorganization of 1839.