Emergency

Thursdays at Bad Boll · Sep 3, 2026 · 10m

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…