Why gather in a church assembly to function as a pseudo-congress?
There are four reasons given below, in ascending order of importance. First, after World War II, Lutherans in the United States developed a bad conscience about alleged “Quietism” among many Lutherans in Germany during the Nazis regime-even though the religious situation in Germany at that time was quite complex and it may not have been primarily, or at least not singularly, a matter of theological “quietism.” Second, the decade of the 1960s-when many of today’s mainline Protestant leaders were coming of age-was a time of hyper-activism. Many of these activists as well as their younger counterparts-who come out of seminaries having been taught by the old activists-continue to be drawn to issues which come down the pike as concerns of the secular, political left. Activists old and young convert such secular concerns into resolutions for consideration at synodical and churchwide assemblies. Third, discussing and supporting such foreign or domestic policy resolutions plays a psychologica
