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THE CHURCH’S MINISTRY OF WORD AND SACRAMENT Virgil Thompson Among Lutherans the question of the church’s ministry, surprisingly, at least to me, appears to never have gone away. Not in five centuries. To the extent that I am familiar with the history of our tradition, the question of what constitutes the church’s ministry seems to have arisen in every generation since the sixteenth century. The present generation appears to be no exception. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. As Roy Harrisville wrote in 1990, just after the merger of three Lutheran bodies in the United States (which two decades later fractured into at least four Lutheran bodies in the United States), “The question of ministry will not die because it is linked to events in which the Christian community believes it encounters God.”1 Still, while what fashions itself as Christian ministry in the local community may be all over the map—not to say in some places no longer on the map at all—and while historians may quibble over the linguistics of the Augsburg Confession, the original Lutheran confessors give, to my ear, clear voice to their view of what constitutes
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