The same year that Wilhelm Loehe began his pastorate in Neuendettelsau, more than 600 emigrants under the leadership of Martin Stephan departed Germany to establish their Lutheran Zion on the Mississippi. It had been twenty years since Claus Harms issued his own ninety-five theses provoking a resurgence of Lutheran confessionalism in the face of the Prussian Union. (1) This confessional revival shaped both Loehe and the Missouri-bound Saxons, and it would provide common ground for their eventual contact and cooperation even as unresolved issues of church and ministry within nineteenth-century Lutheranism (2) would ultimately lead to a parting of their paths. While C. F. W. Walther would give the Missouri Synod its theological and ecclesial shape, Loehe's influence was essential to the confessional orientation and the missionary character of the Synod in its early years. It is not without reason that Wilhelm Loehe is hailed as "the father from afar," (3) even though leaders of the fledgling synod would come to see him as a prodigal father. Hermann Sasse identifies the rift between Loehe and Walther as "one of the most grievous events in the history of the Lutheran Church in the 19th century." (4)
