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In May 1863, a new General Synod South called its first meeting. Provisional President Nicodemus Aldrich outlined grievances leading Southerners to “renounce [the Gen- eral Synod] as brethren.” The split between Lutherans in the North and the South was complete. Lutheran churches nationwide shared similar roles and burdens despite their different sympathies. Christ Church, established in Get-
tysburg in 1836 to provide English- language services for the region’s growing Lutheran community, served as a field hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg. As war came to Georgia, the
Lutheran Church of the Ascen- sion in Savannah played a similar role. Pews were used for firewood and the cushions as beds when the church, extensively damaged but not
destroyed in Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” ministered to soldiers and the community. Many other congre- gations can tell similar stories. Broad Union advances in 1864 prompted a process of soul- searching among General Synod South churches. Had their cause been just and their theology valid? The war had taken a serious toll, with South- ern churches and educational institu- tions pushed to the brink by the loss of so many young men. Even Bach- man was beaten by Union troops and lost his records to Sherman’s army. Even so, the end of the war in April 1865 didn’t stop the division between Northern and Southern Lutherans. While General Synod Lutherans
argued that any need for separation died with the Confederacy, those in the South weren’t so willing to for- give and forget.
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“Autumn Leaves” Tour Visits Historical East
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1-800-736-7300 30 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org As well, the General Synod had
entered a period of instability with the 1864 admission of the Franckean Synod, which refused to adopt the Augsburg Confession as its doctrinal foundation. The church body would split in 1866, with some members creating the General Council as an alternative system of governance. General Synod South leaders asserted that Southern Lutherans needed their own institutions to address their regional problems. Lutherans began to mend their connections informally. South- ern churches destroyed in the war appealed successfully to their North- ern brethren for help in rebuilding. Josiah Smeltzer, president of both Newberry [S.C.] College and South- ern Seminary, learned to bake bread to sell to Union troops, though he “[baked] so poorly ... that the Union officers accused him of trying to poi- son them,” McArver said. Most Southern churches had few resources and little interest in reaching out to freedmen and freed- women, though the North Carolina Synod undertook a brief experiment with an African-American “Alpha Synod” from 1889 to 1891. Yet formal reunion came earlier for Lutherans than for some denomi- nations. “The Methodists did not reunite until the 1930s,” McArver said. “The Presbyterians did not reunite until the 1980s. And the Bap- tists never have.” In 1918 the General Synod, Gen-
eral Council and General Synod South (by now renamed the United Synod South) merged to form the United Lutheran Church in America. While reunion didn’t bring an end to persistent questions of region, identity and inclusiveness, it did set Lutherans once again on a path toward shared expression of our common faith—a path that today includes 25 years as the ELCA.
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