Delegates to the Wyoming District convention, May 4-6 in Casper, elected Rev. Richard Boche on the first ballot to his first three-year term as district president.
Boche, 5
8, has been senior pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church, Cheyenne, since 1988.
He succeeds Dr. Ronald M. Garwood, who announced before the convention that he was retiring from the district presidency after serving in that post for four terms, since 1994.
Boche and others elected this year were installed during the convention.
After giving approval to the district having three regional vice presidents, compared with two previously, delegates elected the following:
- Rev. Shawn Kumm, pastor of Zion Lutheran Church, Laramie, first vice president, for the Central Region;
- Rev. Richard Neugebauer, pastor of Faith Lutheran Church, Gering, Neb., second vice president, East Region; and
- Rev. John Christensen, pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Thermopolis, third vice president, West Region.
By an approximate two-to-one margin, delegates voted down a resolution to return the position of district president to “parish-based” and part time. Later, in a vote of 38-37, they adopted a separate resolution allowing a congregation to call the full-time district president “to perform limited pastoral duties.”
Delegates also adopted several resolutions that speak to issues in the Synod.
One of those calls for next year’s Synod convention to rescind 2004 LCMS convention Resolution 8-01A and “its resulting bylaws” that deal with ecclesiastical supervision and dispute resolution between members of the Synod.
The Wyoming action also calls for “a new adjudication process, based on Scriptures and our Lutheran Confessions, to be designed to replace Resolution 8-01A and be presented to Synod in a timely fashion for approval at its 2010 convention.”
After noting five “concerns” about the 2004 Synod resolution, the Wyoming action also resolved “that this new adjudication process take into account not only the wisdom and necessity of Biblical conflict resolution, but also the wisdom and necessity of true ecclesiastical adjudication of public error as it was practiced in the first fourteen decades of our Synod.”
Wyoming delegates also adopted a resolution calling for the 2007 Synod convention to rescind Resolution 3-08A of the 2004 LCMS convention which affirmed the conclusions of the 1994 Commission on Theology and Church Relations’ report titled “The Service of Women in Congregational and Synodical Offices.”
The district resolution says the CTCR report “did not adequately address the place of ‘the Order of Creation, … but instead focused heavily on distinctive functions of the pastoral office by replacing the basic biblical principle that women should not have authority over men with one application of that principle, that women should not become pastors….”
Among other actions, Wyoming delegates adopted resolutions to uphold the biblical position regarding the unborn, to step up efforts to inform members on practicing good stewardship, and to receive and use the Synod’s new Lutheran Service Book and its companion resources.
Posted May 19, 2006
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