https://tube.collver.biz/videos/watch/d6ebdf8c-8669-4d37-a03c-d45f69644863 The Call of the Cross is the Missouri Synod's own founding story, told as a drama: a fifty-one-minute sound film of the Saxon emigration of 1838 and 1839, staged with actors. WHAT IT SHOWS The film opens in a superintendent's office in Saxony, where a congregation's protest over a new hymnal is read and filed. A layman who can no longer come to the Lord's Table with a clear conscience is told he may go elsewhere. A young pastor, C. F. W. Walther, is told that he is pledged "not to the words, but to the spirit of the confessions." Then come the five ships from Bremen to New Orleans in November 1838, the loss of the Amalia, Perry County, the log-cabin college, sickness and hunger, and the Altenburg Debate of April 1841 ("Are we a church or not"). It closes with the first issue of Der Lutheraner and a century of growth. WHO MADE IT, AND WHEN The title card reads: "Released by the Publicity Department of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, & other States. L. Meyer, Director of Publicity." "Call of the Cross" was the name of the Synod's whole program for the centennial of the Saxon immigration. The 1941 convention at Fort Wayne thanked the Department of Publicity and Missionary Education, which "was eminently successful in producing The Call of the Cross, the sound film portraying Synod's early history" (1941 Proceedings, pp. 155–56). The film was made, then, between the 1938 and 1941 conventions. Associate producer: Hardcastle Films, Saint Louis. WHY IT IS POSTED HERE In the summer of 1948 the Synod's representatives carried this film to Germany and showed it after supper to the pastors and professors of the German churches at the Bad Boll conferences. President J. W. Behnken's published diary for Thursday, June 24, 1948, records it as the first film shown: "This surely aroused much, very much interest among the German preachers. I had to answer all kinds of questions after the showing." The story of that evening is told in "The Fourth Film," in the series Thursdays at Bad Boll: https://badbollbook.com/the-fourth-film/ SOURCE Video copy of a print preserved at Concordia Historical Institute, Saint Louis. Posted by Dr. Albert B. Collver III with the research for the forthcoming book Bad Boll: Missouri at the Crossroads (Concordia Historical Institute). Sun, 04 Oct 2026 07:46:54 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://tube.collver.biz https://tube.collver.biz/lazy-static/avatars/7d2ac1a6-bd42-4514-9115-a0c2bd7b2152.jpg https://tube.collver.biz/videos/watch/d6ebdf8c-8669-4d37-a03c-d45f69644863 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tube.collver.biz/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.