A hometown paper in Moline recorded a young man’s summer in 1953. Nineteen years later he wrote the sentence this book takes as its warrant. Why the series runs on Thursdays, and what Edward Schroeder was doing at Bad Boll at twenty-two.Text, documents and sources: badbollbook.com
The last post promised the next one in September. A reader had other ideas.Within a day of the first post, more than thirty people had subscribed; by Sunday it was nearly sixty. One of them was Johannes Oesch, a retired parish pastor of the Evangelical Landeskirche in Württemberg, who wrote the same day to ask two questions — what were my contacts with the church archives in Stuttgart, and with the Evangelical Academy at Bad Boll? The honest answer to both was: none.Then he sent three pages from a German church history published last year, and in them were two paragraphs and a photograph of the American this book has been writing about since 2019.And then he told me who his grandfathers were, and both of them turned out to be in my own appendix.Written and researched by Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources and notes at badbollbook.com.
He was born in Minnesota, raised in China, trained at a St. Louis seminary, and spent his life writing the history of Württembergers who left. Then he came back with an American army.Karl John Richard Arndt is the man who secured Bad Boll. He is also the man in a photograph a reader in Württemberg sent me last week — the only likeness of him I have, captioned by his office and silent about everything else.This episode is the rest of it. The boy who learned Mandarin in Hankow because his father had founded the Missouri Synod's mission there and would not come home. The seminary graduate who did not become a pastor, took a doctorate without ever holding a bachelor's degree, and made himself the historian of the Harmony Society — the Separatists who left Württemberg because the territorial church would not have them. And the man who was then sent to Stuttgart to decide what that same territorial church could and could not do.Also: who else was born at Hankow while the elder Arndt was still there, and what he later became.Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.
Bad is the German for bath. Stuttgart is a stud farm, Württemberg is a hill — and the town this whole series is named after is a spa, whose sulfur springs were found in 1595 and whose Wunderbad a pastor named Blumhardt bought in 1852 so that people could come and stay and be prayed for. This episode is the story of the house: the wonder-bath and its two generations of Blumhardts; the olive grove outside Athens that gave the Evangelical Academy its name; Bishop Wurm's journey through the ruins in June 1945, three brothers named Müller in the car, and the academy Wurm and Eberhard Müller founded at Bad Boll on Michaelmas that year — the first in Germany. And the reason the Missouri Synod's seven men ended up arguing the Augsburg Confession in a health resort: it was the only house in Germany that belonged to nobody in the argument. Also: what the archive at Bad Boll has just sent across the ocean — the Kurhaus's own letter of January 1948 (85 beds, 65 cots, bring your own linen), and the Academy's library copy of Missouri's little 1949 booklet, filed in pencil under one word: Gasttagung. A guest conference. Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.
Emergency is a Latin word about water: emergere, to rise up out of it — what is emergent is what breaks the surface. In 1932 the Missouri Synod was going under, a million dollars in debt in the worst year of the Depression, and what surfaced was a committee with no birth certificate: the Emergency Collection Committee, which first enters the record already at work, on its own letterhead, over the signature of a returned China missionary named Lawrence Meyer.This episode opens the series proper, and it opens with the money: President Pfotenhauer's October appeal to the pastors ("our debts will paralyze Synod at the beginning of the new year"), the nickel-a-week collection, the two-cent schoolchildren, and the one-cent-a-day arithmetic of Meyer's November letter. Then the second emergency: June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, when President Behnken appointed the Emergency Planning Council — "everybody's concern in general, but nobody's business in particular" — run by the same Lawrence Meyer, until it was the one part of the Synod that knew how to move money, goods, and men across an ocean.The machine that carried Missouri to Germany in 1948 was built to collect nickels. This is the story of how it was built.Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.
Relief is a Latin word about weight: relevare, to lift again. Before the Missouri Synod sent Germany a single theologian, it sent $1.9 million worth of milk, clothing, and books — and a telegram its editors printed exactly as the wire delivered it, slip of the key and all. The relief years, 1945–1947, and the first public notice of Bad Boll.Read the post, with the documents and sources, at badbollbook.com/the-telegram
Conference is a Latin word about carrying: conferre, to bring things together. The documents that planned Bad Boll kept reaching for a different word — one with "against" hidden inside it. A Stuttgart living room, December 3, 1947; Bishop Meiser's one request; and the printed invitation that promised not a conference but an encounter.Read the post, with the documents and sources, at badbollbook.com/begegnung