Robert Scudieri

The Rev. Dr. Robert Scudieri grew up in Flushing, New York, attended Resurrection Lutheran Church (Flushing, NY), and graduated from Concordia Junior College in Bronxville. It was there he met the love of his life, Lynn Gollenberg. Bob then finished his undergraduate work at Concordia Senior College in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Bob attended Concordia Seminary, where Lynn supported them as a Lutheran school teacher.

After graduating from Concordia Seminary in 1971, Dr. Scudieri served thirteen years as full-time parish pastor in the New Jersey District, first at Redeemer, Orange, and then at Christ Memorial for nine wonderful years. During that time, he served as the NJ District Evangelism Committee chairman and met Dr. Leroy Biesenthal. Leroy recruited Bob to teach Dialog Evangelism on the East Coast. Bob furthered his education by receiving a master’s and then a Doctor of Ministry degree at New York Theological Seminary. When someone asked Lynn if her husband was going to work towards more degrees, she responded, “In his next life or with his next wife.” The family left East Brunswick in 1984 to move to West Bloomfield, Michigan when Bob was called to be the Mission Executive for the English District (seven years).

In June 1991, after a sabbatical as a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Yale Divinity School, he wrote the book Apostolic Church: One, Holy, Catholic and Missionary. In 2012, a Metropolitan of the Georgian Orthodox Church read a Russian Translation of the Apostolic Church in a PhD program in Moscow. He invited Dr. Scudieri to be a presenter at an ecumenical conference in Tbilisi, Georgia.

In the Fall of 1991, in response to a study begun by President Ralph Bohlman and Mission Executive for the LCMS Board for Missions, Dr. Ed Westcott, the family moved to St. Louis. Bob’s call was to implement Blueprint for the Nineties, an initiative to see North America as one of the world mission fields of the LCMS. Bohlman and Westcott had seen the large number of immigrants coming to the US, an example of what Westcott called “Centripetal Missions,” where God was bringing unchurched people to the United States to hear the gospel. Bob served for eighteen years as head of missions in North America for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. During that time half of all new church starts were among refugees and immigrants.

In 1992, he and Prof Eugene Bunkowske began the Lutheran Society for Missiology, the publisher of the journal Missio Apostolica – now Lutheran Mission Matters. For twenty years, Bob served as the chairman of the board of LSFM and continues to serve on the journal’s editorial board, now called “Lutheran Mission Matters.”

In 1995, he was the founder of the Center for US Missions, an organization based at Concordia University, Irvine, that, for the next twenty years, interviewed and prepared hundreds of church planters for North America.

In 2016 Bob and Lynn began Mission Nation Publishing, a ministry to strengthen the church in America by providing resources to help churches reach an ethnic group different from their own. The books are used in churches to sensitize members to the gifts of new missionaries to America. They are also being piloted in Lutheran schools in Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Kansas. Mission Nation partners with Lutheran Braille Workers, allowing LBW to put its books into Braille, large print, and audiobooks for free.

As interest in reaching new ethnic groups grew, Dr. Scudieri secured a grant from the 2020 National LWML Convention. In partnership with the Florida Georgia District, the initiative called “Rev7.9” was begun to inspire and equip churches to reach an ethnic group different from their own. Learnings from the pilot will be brought to other districts and congregations of the LCMS. Dr. Scudieri stepped away from the office of president and CEO of Mission Nation Publishing on July 1, 2022, when Professor William Schumacher became president and CEO. Bob continues to serve MNP in the areas of development and marketing.

Dr. Scudieri and his wife Lynn love spending time with their two adult children, Nathan and Alison, their daughter-in-law, Erin, and their five beautiful grandchildren – Stella, Charlotte, Robert, Peter, and Beau.