Nine Decades on the Air, One Sunday at a Time

When The Lutheran Hour first went out over thirty two CBS stations on October 2, 1930, its speaker was on leave from teaching Old Testament at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Walter A. Maier had agreed to front a new outreach the Lutheran Laymen's League was funding, radio evangelism aimed squarely at listeners who would never walk into a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod congregation on their own. The timing could hardly have been worse; the Great Depression arrived within months and very nearly starved the program before it found its footing. It found its footing anyway. Maier held the microphone for twenty years, until his death in 1950, and by the time he handed it off the broadcast had grown into something enormous: by the end of the 1940s the Laymen's League's income had reached 1.25 million dollars and The Lutheran Hour was carried on more than a thousand stations. A Spanish language edition began in 1940, extending the reach further still.

Oswald Hoffmann succeeded Maier and held the role for thirty three years, into 1988; Michael Zeigler has served as the speaker since October 2018. At its mid century peak the program reached 1,200 stations across the United States and thirty other nations, and by 2012 it still aired on 800 domestic stations plus the American Forces Network. Nearly a century after its first broadcast, under the motto Bringing Christ to the Nations, it remains one of the longest continuously running programs of any kind in the history of American radio.