(2 of 9)
Yet Dr. Fry, who has not had a pastorate for almost 14 years, is known as the best man with a grease gun in the business. He has a phenomenal memory (which serves him well on a dais or a Double-Crostic), a lawyer's avidity for meticulous briefing, and relentless persistence. Elected president of Lutheran World Relief after World War II, he ranged Europe on a mammoth repair job that was just as much spiritual as material. "It wasn't just a question of relief," he explains. "Danish and Norwegian Lutherans hated German Lutherans; they felt contempt for Swedish Lutherans. No one would talk to anyone else. At first we got nowhere. But at the 1947 convention of the Lutheran World Federation we surrounded every anti with several pros so he would have to talk to them. And it worked. Now the federation is the most cohesive body of its kind. We've begun to think together more than ever."
A new tendency to think together has been growing in Lutheranism during the past decade. For generations, most U.S. Lutherans were ethnically centered, holding their services in German or Dutch or Scandinavian, and seeing to it that their children grew in the faith and folkways of their fathers. This exclusive attitude put Lutheranism in a special position among U.S. Protestants. It protected the Lutheran churches from the excessive emotion in the wave of revivalism that swept America in the late 19th century. As for the theological liberalism of the early 20th century, it barely touched the Lutherans at all. But the Lutherans' position apart had its disadvantages too. Snug, smug and embattled in their mighty fortresses called synods, they often looked down not only on their fellow Christians but on fellow Lutherans as well. Today, while still strongly tradition-bound, U.S. Lutheranism is emerging from isolation.
Disappearing Labels. Some downtown churches such as First English Evangelical in Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle have had to turn themselves into "friendliness" churches, reaching out among the 9-to-5 weekday population around them for what congregations they can get. Lutherans in the mushrooming suburb of North Hollywood have organized a drive-in church. Pastor Glen E. Pierson of Manhattan's 92-year-old Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church describes a process that is taking place all over the U.S. when he says: "We used to be thought of by our own members, as well as by people in the community, as 'the Swedish Church on 22nd Street. We still have a service in Swedish every Sunday as well as one in English. But now, as our older members are dying off. the national label is disappearing. Our congregation includes Indonesians, Chinese. Negroes and people from almost every European country."
Converts are pouring in. attracted by billboards, magazine ads. TV programs and. in the Lutheran Hour, the most widely broadcast sermon on radio (1,209 stations). A campaign of "Preaching. Teaching and Reaching." organized by the Evangelical Lutheran Church, is ringing doorbells and organizing study groups. The Lutherans support 1,460 parochial elementary schools. New congregations are springing up at the rate of one every 54 hours, and there are by latest count, 7,379,819 U.S. Lutherans, nearly 2,000,000 more than ten years ago.