The Pastor: Wilhelm Loehe

Overview
In this practical pastoral resource for clergy who embrace the Reformation, Wilhelm Loehe explains the “how” and “why” of a pastor’s duties in the “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” He clarifies not just Lutheran pastoral practice in the nineteenth century, but also what it means to apply the Means of Grace to God’s people in the twenty-first century, in harmony with the Church of all ages.

Topics include:
• Pastoral practice and ethics
• Homiletics
• Catechesis
• Liturgics
• Pastoral care and counseling

“To the so-called Lutheran, that is the true catholic Christian, belongs the entire past, before and after Luther. The future must belong to him as well. All things true and scriptural are his, when and where they are spoken. The norma normata [i.e., the confessions] of the sixteenth century is for him not congruent with the norma normans [i.e., Holy Scripture] in the sense that the former exhausts the latter, and that God Himself would not be permitted to give something to his Church that either did not exist in the year of 1580, or was not observed.”

—Foreword to the First Edition of Booklet Two

About the Author
Wilhelm Loehe (1808–1872), a Lutheran pastor in Germany, was the main founder of the Missouri Synod’s seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He sent many missionaries to America in the nineteenth century. These missionaries helped form the Missouri Synod and the Iowa Synod (now part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).