It is perhaps a testament to how far our nation has come that, when I showed the following picture to my students in grades 4-12 recently, none of them thought anything about the photo was particularly noteworthy.

The photo was taken here at Our Saviour Lutheran School a couple of years before the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision which paved the way for the racial integration of schools, even if it would take decades longer for that court decision to begin to bear fruit in the wider society.

While other private schools (and Churches) in New York City were keeping black students out, Our Saviour under the leadership of Pastor Berthold von Schenk and Headmaster Robert Christian was going door to door in the south Bronx trying to recruit black and Latino students into the school. The first black teacher would follow in 1955. The philosophy, as von Schenk articulated it, was quite simple:

The church by its very existence must be a house of prayer for all people, regardless of racial differences. This work was started in the school. It was realized that especially in the private school it was necessary for the children to learn to live, pray, study and play with children of other races. Children had to share St. Paul’s understanding, “there is neither Greek nor Jew. You are all one.”  This has been a great experience also in the life of the parish.

A cursory history of the American Lutheran landscape reveals that there was a disproportional number of Lutheran Churches in the inner city who were interested in the Sacramental renewal of the church. Berthold Von Schenk, one of the giants of 20th century Lutheran liturgical renewal, even before he came to the Bronx, had a Sunday School at his parish in Hoboken, New Jersey which had 20 different nationalities and a mission to Italians, Scandinavians, and the Chinese. Arthur Carl Piepkorn, another giant, was a long time member of the Lutheran Human Relations Association (until resigning over their position on the Vietnam war) and established a scholarship fund at Concordia Seminary so that inner city black students could attend sports camps at the seminary.

Sacramental renewal and racial equality, of course, are intimately connected. It should not be all that surprising that theologians who possessed a deep understanding about full Eucharistic participation in the Body of Christ, would press for full inclusion – a fully functioning of the Body of Christ.

As the movement for a reinstitution of the full liturgical services has spread out from the cities and begun to change the landscape of American Lutheran Sacramental piety, it is perhaps a hopeful sign also for the coloring of American Lutheranism. A proper Eucharistic understanding cannot help but lead to a Church that looks like the Body of Christ, since there we become most fully the Body of Christ.