If you were to do the intuitive thing and type “lcms.com” in your browser’s URL line, you would find yourself at a site whose business is liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry. Typing “lcms.net” will get you to the site of the Lake County Medical Society in Wickliffe, Ohio. In the educational technology industry, the acronym “LCMS” is an abbreviation for “Learning Content Management System.” And if within the last several years you have run across something known as “LCMS.DLL,” you might recognize it as a filename for a Windows operating system component that was suspected to be malware.

To Google “LCMS” is to get search results relating to all these things, but your search will turn up far more results related to The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, which is what LCMS stands for at this site.

You can learn a little more about the core beliefs, confessions and teachings of LCMS churches on our “What We Believe” page (You can learn a lot more on the “Belief & Practice” page of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s website). Below is a thumbnail sketch of the church body’s name and character.

It might be helpful to understand that for a number of the organizations that appear to be Lutheran church bodies, the Lutheran Church is one thing—one church—that finds multiple expressions around the world. The LCMS’s use of the word Synod in its name suggests this. One Lutheran group uses the term “synod” to mean “local judicatory”; several non-Lutheran denominations use it to signify national or regional convocations or congresses. For Missouri-Synod Lutherans, the term means “all of us Lutherans who have agreed to walk together in belief, confession and teaching” (the Greek roots syn and od signify “together” and “walk/travel” respectively). So to be “The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod” is (1) to identify with the worldwide Lutheran Church but (2) to be differentiated according to a specific set of understandings of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions.

What about Missouri? It’s a common—and understandable—misconception that the LCMS is an organization localized in Missouri. In fact, The LCMS was not even founded in Missouri but—officially, in April 1847—at Chicago, Illinois, where 12 pastors representing 15 German Lutheran congregations met and formed the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States (or Die Deutsche Evangelish-Lutherische Synode von Missouri, Ohio und Anderen Staaten). The majority of the early member congregations were located in Missouri, as was the organization’s institution for training church workers. The association’s leader, Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther, was president of this seminary and the pastor at a St. Louis church.

The church body was the result of a migration of about 700 Lutherans to the United States from the German Kingdom of Saxony in the winter of 1838-39. After some false starts and hardships, the majority of the group settled in Perry County in southeastern Missouri, although the church body would eventually make St. Louis its base of operations.

It was actually not until its hundredth anniversary, in 1947, that the church body shortened its long and complicated name to the slightly less long and slightly less complicated Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. By this time, the church had become well known for a number of innovations in American Christianity—notably, its systems for elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education, its Walther League youth organization, and The Lutheran Hour, a nationally-broadcast radio program sponsored by a grassroots organization of laypeople, the Lutheran Laymen’s League.