Diakonie auf Amerikanisch; Geschichte und Profil des lutherischen "social ministry" in den USA by Teresa A. K. Kaya (review)

How did hundreds of local Lutheran social service providers grow into a nationally recognized organization in less than a decade? How has that organization managed to preserve its religious identity despite shifting government policies toward faith-based organizations? Those were the research questions that prompted this academic study of Lutheran Services in America (LSA), the network that employs more persons and handles more money than either of the two Lutheran churches that created it. Lutheran Services in America was formed in 1997 by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Association of Lutheran Social Ministry Organizations (ALSMO). Although independently incorporated, it still retains close ties with its founding church bodies.

Drawing on secondary sources, the author introduces her German readers to Lutheran history in the United States. The story traces impulses toward social action from "works of mercy" and "charity" through "inner mission" to twentieth-century "welfare" with special attention to the role that Luther's two-kingdom perspective played in the process. The focus is narrowly on the German-origin bodies that eventually formed the LCMS and the ELCA without much attention given to Scandinavian traditions.

Starting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the American government began to assume a role in social welfare that eventually drew on the resources of "faith-based organizations." This process raised constitutional issues of church-state relationships that generated ever-changing rules for partnerships with Lutheran agencies. The infusion of funds promoted unprecedented growth, but with the money came standards, regulations, and uncertainty. Even the question of Lutheran identity arose.

Against this background the author develops a first-hand account of LSA's formative decades, based on interviews with its three successive presidents and other key officials. The interviews are quoted from verbatim transcripts, which help American readers follow the story, although the process reveals some glitches in translation—end-of-line syllables do not follow English rules and one president says that her work is like "hurting cats" (205). Word processing errors also result in duplicate lines (192) and a paragraph of nonsense words (167).

The first goal of LSA was to create a new "We" out of a collection of agencies with diverse missions, ranging from counseling services, foster homes, and elder care facilities to homeless shelters and refugee resettlement programs. Their connection to the ELCA or LCMS varied from integral to historic. Some were local; some spanned the nation. Some were led by pastors, others by professional social workers.

LSA's first president, Joanne Negsted, was well connected to this sprawling network. She had served in many state-wide Lutheran social service agencies and was the executive director of ALSMO, one of LSA's founding bodies. She saw her challenge as communicating to the Social Ministry Organizations (SMOs) that, despite their differences, each one of them was an important part of the greater whole. Beyond that she sought to strengthen their sense of Lutheran identity. To that end LSA has had a Theologian in Residence from the beginning.

Advocacy work begun under Negsted was amplified during the presidency of Jill Schumann. Armed with social statements from their respective church bodies, delegates to LSA's Washington D.C. meetings routinely visited legislators. Those contacts both raised LSA's visibility and helped to shape decisions in Washing-ton that would benefit the work of local SMOs. Under Charlotte Haberaecker, LSA's third president, its headquarters was moved to Washington.

This study concludes that, from an organizational point of view, LSA has maintained its core identity despite many factors that threatened its religious character: the need to attract SMOs that were only vaguely related to the churches, theological differences between LCMS and ELCA, government regulations that limited "evangelizing," and the shift in local leadership from pastors to professional social workers. It attributes this success to the intentions and skills of...