The Concordia Lutheran Conference (CLC) is a small organization of Lutheran churches in the United States which formed in 1956. It was a reorganization of some of the churches of the Orthodox Lutheran Conference (OLC), which had been formed in September 1951, in Okabena, Minnesota, following a break with Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS). It is the remaining successor of the Orthodox Lutheran Conference. The current president is the Reverend Edward J. Worley, pastor of St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington. All members of the board of directors serve one year terms. It is in fellowship with seven mission congregations in Russia and Nigeria. History In the 1930s, some theologians and leaders in the LCMS began advocating the establishment of altar and pulpit fellowship with the American Lutheran Church (ALC). One of these was Dr. Theodore Graebner, a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. Graebner gave a lecture to a Texas pastors conference in 1934 that criticized what he saw as unnecessary legalism in the synod; it was published as a book, The Borderland of Right and Wrong, in 1935. In subsequent revisions of the book, Graebner took an increasingly less restrictive view of church union. Nevertheless, in 1943, he and a colleague at the seminary, Dr. Paul E. Kretzmann, co-authored a book against unionism, Toward Lutheran Union: A Scriptural and Historical Approach. However, in 1944, Graebner signed the "Statement of the Forty-four" which openly repudiated the synod's stand on church fellowship. Kretzmann, who staunchly supported the LCMS position, filed charges of false doctrine against Graebner. When nothing was done, Kretzmann resigned from the seminary and began organizing opposition. Among those pastors who supported Kretzmann were Wallace McLaughlin, who eventually became, with Kretzmann, one of the founders of the OLC, and Harold Romoser, who was well connected to the president of the LCMS, John Behnken, but did not join the OLC. The synod's 1950 convention provided additional impetus to the eventual split when it approved the Common Confession that had been drawn up with the ALC. However, the big issue that drove the split was the question of whether breaking an engagement should be considered the same as getting a divorce. Historically, betrothal had been seen as the equivalent of marriage and was legally binding; however, the modern view of engagement had become prevalent in the United States in the twentieth century. The two views led to extended