Official Handbook Source Text
Handbook page 22
Source: LCMS Handbook 2023, page 22.
This page reproduces text from the 2023 LCMS Handbook for study and navigation. Readers should verify procedural, legal, parliamentary, or governance questions against the official LCMS Handbook and appropriate LCMS authorities.
(3) Commission on Handbook
(4) Commission on Theology and Church Relations
(d) Concordia Plan Services : Concordia Plan Services is a controlled entity of The Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod created to manage the Concordia Plans.
(e) Concordia Plans: The Concordia Plans, while operating under the supervision of the Synod Board of Directors, are trust agencies whose assets are not the property of corporate Synod.
(f) Corporate Synod: The Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod, the Missouri nonprofit corporation, including its offices, boards, commissions, and departments.
(1) “Corporate Synod” is not an agency of the Synod.
(2) The Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod, in referencing the laws of the State of Missouri in these Bylaws and in the Synod’s Articles of Incorporation, intends to acknowledge its responsibility to be subject to civil authority. In all such references, however, the Synod intends to retain all authority and autonomy allowed a church under the laws and Constitution of the United States and the State of Missouri.
(g) Council: An officially established group elected or appointed as an advisory body. The council of the Synod is the Council of Presidents.
(h) District: A division of the Synod as determined by a national convention of the Synod.
(i) Ecclesiastical oversight: The responsibility, primarily of the district president, to monitor; to make inquiry and receive a response thereto;
to make suggestions; to bring concerns to the attention of a higher authority, namely the Synod status granting office, as relates specifically to the ecclesial relations of a recognized service organization operating within his district, and the impact and/or reflection of its work on the mission and ministry of the church.
(j) Ecclesiastical supervision : The responsibility, primarily of the President of the Synod and district presidents, to supervise on behalf of the Synod the doctrine, life, and administration of its members, officers, and agencies. Such supervision, subject to the provisions of the Synod’s Constitution, Bylaws, and resolutions, includes visitation, evangelical encouragement and support, care, protection, counsel, advice, admonition, and, when necessary, appropriate disciplinary measures to assure that the Constitution, Bylaws, and resolutions of the Synod are followed and implemented. Thus, ecclesiastical supervision is also the presenting, interpreting, and applying of the collective will of the Synod’s congregations. Ecclesiastical supervision does not include the responsibility to obser ve, monitor, control, or direct the day -to-day activities of individual members of the Synod, whether in the conduct of their work or in their private lives (cf. Bylaw
2.14.1 [a]). Further, those constitutional articles and bylaws pertaining to ecclesiasti cal supervision shall determine the full definition of ecclesiastical supervision.
(k) Governing board: A board that directs a separately incorporated agency of the Synod. Governing boards are such as a board of directors,
