Emergency

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.