Montana
June 15-18
Billings, Mont.
Elected: 
Forke and other officers were installed during the district’s 31st convention, which had the theme of “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:23).
Convention delegates voted to:
- ask the Synod to terminate the Transforming Congregations Network program, due to its “heavy reliance on corporate business principles.” The resolution states that the theology espoused by the program is “fundamentally inconsistent with our doctrinal position, as detailed in ‘Church and Ministry’ by C.F.W. Walther.”
- oppose the right of assisted suicide, as outlined in a recent judgment by Judge Dorothy McCarter of Helena, Mont. The action also calls on the district president to write a letter to the Montana state legislature, encouraging it to make all necessary laws “to abolish the legal right of assisted suicide.”
- clarify which decisions of the Synod’s Commission on Constitutional Matters (CCM) are binding on members of the Synod by allowing them to be binding “until the next regular synodical convention, where such opinions must be ratified to remain in effect.”
- increase support from the national Synod budget for the LCMS seminaries, gradually increasing that support to an amount of 51 percent of the seminaries’ budgets by 2020.
- petition the Synod convention to ask the Synod president to “take direct and definite action to clarify what is and what is not being taught regarding evolutionary theory as fact in the Concordia University System during the next triennium and to report his findings to the 2013 convention” of the Synod.
- ask the Synod president to suspend the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Synod Structure and Governance, so that a plan for restructuring would not be presented for action at the 2010 Synod convention. That resolution further requests that the 2010 convention “consider none of the recommended changes to the synodical Constitution proposed by the [task force].”
- ask the Synod to overrule CCM opinion 02-2309, which has to do with ecclesiastical supervision and conflict of interest. The resolution states that this opinion amounts to an “improper amendment to Article XIII of the Synod Constitution by precluding action against a member who is, in fact, acting contrary to the conditions of membership outlined in Article VI of the Constitution.”
Re-posted Sept. 4, 2009
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