About

In the summer of 1948, in a spa town in Württemberg, American and German Lutherans sat down together in a country still in ruins. They called the meetings Begegnungen — encounters, not conferences. They went on meeting, year after year, until the money ran out in 1958.

This book is about what came of them.

The book

Bad Boll: Missouri at the Crossroads is forthcoming from Concordia Historical Institute.

Before it was a theological enterprise it was food. The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod went into postwar Germany with relief parcels and a fundraising machine built in 1932 to save the Synod from its own debt. What followed the parcels was harder to account for: a decade of conferences at Bad Boll and beyond, from London to Gothenburg, where two churches that shared a confession discovered how differently they read it.

Three roads ran out of Bad Boll. One led to Uelzen in 1952, where a committee met in a parish church on Oldenstädterstraße and became the first executive committee of what is now the International Lutheran Council. One ran through a seminarian who attended in 1953, wrote in 1972 that the conferences had changed a teacher named F. E. Mayer, and walked out of Concordia Seminary in 1974. The third ran toward the fracture of the Synodical Conference, where Bad Boll was one factor among several and the charge was unionism.

The conferences were cancelled in 1958 for financial reasons. The treasurer resigned that year for reasons of health. This book leaves the causation where the sources leave it.

Built from the files at Concordia Historical Institute — letters, cables, conference programs, travel diaries, and a film recovered and transcribed for this book — it is an account of an enterprise that never became an institution, and of a question it never settled: whether work with other church bodies is church relations or missions. The Synod has not settled it either.

The series

Beginning Thursday, 3 September 2026, Thursdays at Bad Boll runs here as a pre-publication series — eighteen Thursdays through the end of the year. Each post reproduces one document from the archive and asks the question it raises. No post gives away a chapter's argument; each gives away one document.

Why Thursdays is the subject of the first post.

The author

The Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver III is a Lutheran pastor, theologian, and church administrator whose ministry has carried him across six continents in the service of confessional Lutheran fellowship. He came to the international work of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) in 2005 as executive pastoral assistant to the executive director of LCMS World Relief and Human Care, and from 2010 to 2019 he served the Synod as Director of Church Relations. In the same years he served the International Lutheran Council (ILC), first as Executive Secretary and then, from 2012, as General Secretary, leading the council to incorporate as a legal entity in 2018; and from 2016 to 2019 he was senior managing director of the International Lutheran Society of Wittenberg.

Dr. Collver earned his doctorate at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, where he studied under Dr. Norman E. Nagel and wrote his dissertation on the development of the term “Real Presence” in sixteenth-century discussions of the Lord’s Supper. He is the author of the LCMS strategic emphasis “Witness, Mercy, Life Together,” and he founded the Lutheran Leadership Development Program, which graduated its first cohort in Troy, Illinois. He has taught Lutheran mission, ecclesiology, and ecumenism as an adjunct professor and has been a frequent guest on the Issues, Etc. radio program.

Over fifteen years he represented the LCMS on more than 225 international trips to some sixty countries, establishing formal working agreements with more than twenty Lutheran church bodies worldwide. Since 2020 he has served as pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Troy, Illinois.

His translations of the Hermann Sasse correspondence printed in Appendix A first appeared in the Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly; his four-volume International Ministry Documents (2005–2019) preserves the primary records of the global church-relations ministry whose beginnings this book traces to Bad Boll. He is co-author, with Charles P. Schaum, of Breath of God, Yet Work of Man (Concordia Publishing House, 2019), and the author of We Are Doves, a history of the Collver family.

Contact

Correspondence about the book, the series, or the sources is welcome at info@badbollbook.com.

Researchers are welcome to write about the archival material. Documents reproduced here are from the collections of Concordia Historical Institute unless otherwise credited.