Religion: Conservative Missouri

For ten days, in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium, 1,000 delegates to the 44th triennial convention of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod labored to keep their closely knit conservative denomination (2,200,000 members) as closely knit and conservative as ever. To further both aims, the convention re-elected Dr. John W. Behnken president for another three-year term. To 75-year-old Dr. Behnken, who has headed the synod for the past 24 years, sound and solid doctrinal agreement is the only safe basis of collaboration with any other church body; his election is a guarantee that the Missouri Synod will continue to stay outside the Lutheran World Federation, an international organization of 57 churches in 28 countries.

"Where indifference to doctrine prevails," Dr. Behnken warned the delegates, "and where men insist on compromises rather than sound agreement in doctrine, termites have been doing their destructive work . . . What Lutheranism needs is not greater and greater numbers at any cost, but a. positive and unflinching loyalty to God's word and the Lutheran confessions."

The convention backed Dr. Behnken in voting to make a 1932 statement of the Missouri Synod's doctrinal position binding on all pastors and teachers with the force of the Bible and the confessions themselves. Known as the "Brief Statement,'' it is an 8,000-word document that holds, among other things, that the Bible contains "no errors or contradictions," historical, scientific or otherwise.

The synod also adopted a new statement of principle on racial prejudice: "It is a violation of God's will for any man to treat his fellow man with contempt or to despise any particular race of man."