Forgive me, I knew that but I forgot in the moment. When I think of another church in communion with y’all, I think of the AALC, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is not present in Canada (although I suppose they could setup shop there with a “CCLC”, but that would be pointless and such duplication would lay the groundwork for a future schism). Which reminds me, insofar as WELS is in Canada, what do they call themselves?
The LCMS and LCC are so much alike, right down to having an English District, that I tend to think of you all as Canadians originally from Missouri who make pilgrimages to St. Louis. I jest of course, as we have discussed, the LCMS and LCC were founded by the descendants of the doctrinally Orthodox Lutheran half of the Church of Prussia, with the descendants of the Calvinists (who in Prussia included the Royal House of Hohenzollern, which produced the last German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II). In contrast Saxony had Lutheran monarchs and also the “Saxon system of economics” which my friend Jan Bachmann explained as “In Chemnitz they produce, in Leipzig they sell, in Dresden they waste the money, and in Munich they are envious.” And the most beautiful Lutheran church I have been in anywhere in the world is the Nicholaskirche in Leipzig, which was, along with the Thomaskirche, under the musico-liturgical control of Johann Sebastian Back during his tenture as Thomaskantor. These days Thomaskirche gets most of the attention due to its excellent boys choir (fortunately the
Reichskirche Evangelical Church in Germany hasn’t done away with it in the interests of the political correctness that pervades both the it and the Catholic Church in Germany) and the Bachorgel, which is an extremely important instrument as it is tuned so that A = 466 Hz, which was the tuning used in Leipzig while Bach was alive before the ISO standard of A = 440 Hz was adopted. However, the Nicholaskirche was an extremely important site in the history of the downfall of the DDR, in that protests against the government were held for days prior to the opening of the Berlin Wall, and the study door of the parish proved sufficient to keep the Stasi from forcing their way in (of course, they eventually would have brought out an APC and smashed their way through with much loss of ife, but the Berlin wall collapsed). Touchingly, when I visited the parish with my mother in 2001, we noticed the paint on the kneelers was worn off from the fervent prayers. Nicholaskirche also has an amazing organ with an otherworldly sound.