Lutheran Churches of the Reformation
Association of Lutheran congregations
The Lutheran Churches of the Reformation (LCR) is an association of Lutheran congregations. The LCR has its roots among groups of Lutherans that broke with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) in the middle of the 20th century, and was formally incorporated in 1964. Church services are generally traditional and reverent in the style of the mid-1900s conservative Christians.
History
In 1951, the Orthodox Lutheran Conference (OLC) was formed by pastors and congregations of the LCMS who were critical of the theological changes occurring in that body. The OLC itself split in 1956 when Paul E. Kretzmann, a professor in the OLC's seminary, suspended church fellowship with some congregations after they charged him with teaching error in class. Those congregations formed the Concordia Lutheran Conference, while most of the others, along with Kretzmann, later joined with other conservatives leaving the LCMS to organize as the LCR.
After the 1959 convention of the LCMS, conservative members of the synod began holding State of the Synod Conferences to discuss the problems they saw. Kretzmann, Wallace McLaughlin, and Harold Romoser, who all had been involved in the formation of the OLC, were also involved in these conferences. At the first conference, a 200-page book of documentation prepared by pastor Herman Otten of Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven, Missouri, was presented. It listed every controversy within the LCMS since 1950, with sections on Martin Scharlemann, Jaroslav Pelikan, Martin Marty, the Common Confession, and Biblical authority and inspiration. The conference on May 15–16, 1961, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was attended by over 400 laymen and pastors who hoped to make progress on their concerns at the synod's upcoming convention in 1962.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lutheran Churches of the Reformation” is association of Lutheran congregations. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lutheran, Churches and Reformation, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “association of Lutheran congregations” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4569346. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1951, 1956 and 1959.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Lutheran Churches of the Reformation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.