Lyman Stone addresses Former President Jerry Kieschnick's 12 reasons for membership decline in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. We take a heartfelt look at the challenges Kieschnick faced and emphasize the crucial need for conversations filled with love and truth when discussing church governance, mission focus, and theological concerns.
In our discussion, we reveal how demographic trends such as low birth rates and youth retention have led to a generational decline in LCMS membership. With retention rates plummeting from 90% to 40%, and the fading ethnic solidarity among German Lutherans, the church faces unprecedented challenges. We explore the necessity of forging a new cultural identity to maintain cohesion within the church community. By examining the parable of the sower and the potent influence of contemporary culture on children, we highlight the urgent need for unity and proactive strategies, including encouraging higher birth rates among members, to address these demographic hurdles. Don’t miss this enlightening episode filled with practical analysis and solutions for the future of the LCMS.
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Visit uniteleadership.org
Lyman Stone addresses Former President Jerry Kieschnick's 12 reasons for membership decline in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. We take a heartfelt look at the challenges Kieschnick faced and emphasize the crucial need for conversations filled with love and truth when discussing church governance, mission focus, and theological concerns.
In our discussion, we reveal how demographic trends such as low birth rates and youth retention have led to a generational decline in LCMS membership. With retention rates plummeting from 90% to 40%, and the fading ethnic solidarity among German Lutherans, the church faces unprecedented challenges. We explore the necessity of forging a new cultural identity to maintain cohesion within the church community. By examining the parable of the sower and the potent influence of contemporary culture on children, we highlight the urgent need for unity and proactive strategies, including encouraging higher birth rates among members, to address these demographic hurdles. Don’t miss this enlightening episode filled with practical analysis and solutions for the future of the LCMS.
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Visit uniteleadership.org
This is Lead Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman. Here with Jack Kauberg, we get the demographer Lyman Stone. You can go back and listen just a few weeks ago no, it was a few months ago now but I'm going to be transparent about the context for this conversation. Today we released that conversation. It was actually just me talking to former president Jerry Kishnick, and Lyman was among a handful of folks that reached out with questions and concerns about not just what was said, maybe the tone of how it was said.
Speaker 2:And here's the thing I know about Lyman he's got a love for the Lord, a love for data you had us at data and demography, et cetera and we're going to have a response to Jerry Kishnick's 12 reasons for the decline in the synod and we hope to model humility, curiosity, a sense of adventure and wonder at all at what God wants to do in and through the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the mess that we are, the spectrums in which we find ourselves. We need more conversations that are centered in love and truth. So with that, why are you Lyman, thanks for hanging with us a good person to respond to Jerry Kishnick's 12 reasons for decline?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was a little bashful about being a respondent at first, since I'm just like kind of just a, I'm just a lay person in the LCMS. I don't have any particular office or anything like that, but you care. But ultimately I think I'm a good person to respond for a couple of reasons. I'm a convert. I grew up Methodist and then I actually spent most of my life in a non-denominational megachurch with, you know, 30,000 people on a Sunday with very high production value services, no liturgy, no creed, no Easter, no Christmas. I was very, if you want to think, like as low church as you can possibly get. Basically that's how I grew up Little or no seminary, training for a lot of leaders, et cetera. And I'm a lay person in the LCMS now as an adult, et cetera. And I'm a lay person in the LCMS now as an adult. And I've served as a lay person, as a mission partner with Mission of Christ Network in Hong Kong and Quebec. Mcn is an all LCMS organization but it's not a synodical RSO or something. And so my backstory I'm a demographer, which has an obvious relevance to some of this topic, but my backstory is like not an LCMS systems guy, not clergy, not high church, like none of those things and the mission fields that I worked in. I mean, my wife and I have been missionaries working with people who speak Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Creole, French, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish, others.
Speaker 3:We've worked in a lot of different environments. Perhaps the most pagan one was Washington DC, when we lived there, but that's actually where I became a Lutheran was when we lived in DC. I was confirmed at Emanuel Lutheran Church in Virginia. And right here gets to another reason why I might be an interesting person to respond. If you know synodical politics, that's the home church for one of our synodical vice presidents, Chris Esget.
Speaker 3:Church for one of our synodical vice presidents, Chris Esget, who's you never know the right terms, but like it's a church that talks about being Lutheran a lot. Okay, Well, we'll say, well, there you go. Emphasizes Lutheran distinctives. We'll say, and so he was my confirmation pastor and I love Pastor Esget and I love that church. And so, if you know, had a classical school where my wife taught. It's a very high church setting, or sorry, where my wife was an administrator of that school. She didn't teach and today, like if you go through my kids, God parents, you know you'll find three pastors educated at Fort Wayne, a homeschooling family, three classical school educators and a professional church iconographer so good.
Speaker 2:Well, you care, I'm on both sides of this debate.
Speaker 2:Right, right, yep, yep, and I think that's helpful. Let me offer some opening comments regarding the interview with Joey Kieschnicknick. Jerry is so passionate I've known him for for some time, jerry was shocked and we could say kind of wounded. Um, when things turned. He'd worked with the blue ribbon task force, a lot of the structures, governance conversation, and then President Harrison was elected as president and we didn't deal with this in the podcast, but this was before we did the presidential election, before you know, a month or two before the convention, and so he then had to oversee the five days of the LCMS convention after being voted out of, out of office, and so that's a difficult conflict, heavy experience, and it left him. It left him with wounds and some people said the conversation, you know, did very little for unity.
Speaker 2:Well, that was a very not united time in our church, right, and so it's raw, it's real From my perspective. When he says certain things, I need time to kind of think about it. But this is just practical for those who do podcasts. I'm like doing these in between, like I have a time limit, and so when we came to the end and I'm like, hey, jerry, will you choose like one out of these last three, he's like no, I got to choose all three.
Speaker 2:And so then he's like ripping on, not ripping, he's riffing, I guess, if you will, through a number of these heavy topics Like the policy of sacramental hospitality, an office that we often believe that hell doesn't exist, like what, and we seem to have forgotten our mission, like those are not small things to just kind of riff through at the very end and then fly off right, right, right, and so I could have, and will even now maybe give some nuanced counter response, things that I could have said, and I think the Holy Spirit moving between the three of us will get us to a real nice, united place.
Speaker 2:So thank you for agreeing to this conversation. The 12 reasons that Jerry listed these are in his order. The first one was demographics. I was grateful that he started with demographics. So more to add on the demography conversation in the LCMS Lyman.
Speaker 3:So a lot of my kind of responses here are going to be based on what Pastor Kieschnick said, and particularly when he said demographics. When you listen, he talked about how, like, a lot of denominations are shrinking and so the implication there is that what we mean by demographics is basically like society is becoming more secular, which is not what I usually mean when I say I'm a demographer. What I mean is fundamental, you know demos, population processes, birth, death, migration, marriage, fertility, these things. So we have to ask then, what does it actually mean? That we're having demographic decline and I would say that means that there have been fewer births, more deaths and perhaps an unfavorable, what we could call migration, which in our case would be conversion.
Speaker 3:So we can ask something like you know, like life expectancies for LCMS people didn't suddenly fall, so there's not like some crazy trend in death Okay, except for COVID, but so, like death, we can kind of set death aside for a moment. So we're really talking first about fertility, right, and LCMS fertility is pretty low. We average probably something like women who are in their 50s now in the LCMS average around two kids, maybe 2.1, 2.2. Women who are in their 20s and 30s now in the LCMS, based on their current birth rates, are going to hit around 1.8, 1.7.
Speaker 2:That's the national average, isn't it Lyman, Didn't I hear?
Speaker 3:hear that we're close to the national average. We're probably a bit below, um, uh, the national average. Um, we're certainly not far above it. Um, statistical quality is not great. This is interesting because usually you think of religious people as having, like, bigger than average families.
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, that's, that's what I wanted to. To peek into a little bit, because I keep hearing about a super trend, right when we're talking about a trend that may hit America over 80 years, where religious families are actually having more kids than secular families.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's unfortunately not true for the LCMS. So LCMS is an outlier in that trend right.
Speaker 4:Whereas it's true for evangelical at large right.
Speaker 3:I know no, so that's that training. So I've written about a lot like religious people have more kids. So, okay, like who do we mean? Like who are religious people? To demographers? There are people who attend church a lot. Well, who attends church a lot? Pentecostals, like period like.
Speaker 3:If you break out that like fertility effect by religious group, you realize very quickly you're talking about like mennonites, pentecostals and like some conservative presbyterians and dutch reformed um and like. There you're done. And like a subset of catholics really into latin. Um so like, like in the lcms I've in one of the survey reports of the past I showed that like fertility rates are basically the same between like um uh, the like more confessional, traditional crowd and like the more missional, contemporary crowd. Like they have basically the same family size. Um so like it is true that like highly devout religion is associated with higher birth rates.
Speaker 3:But and I'm going to be on like razor thin ice when I say this but like from a sociological perspective, when we talk about highly devout religion, the LCMS would not in general be the type of social organization we would classify that way, because, um, lcms members don't have extremely high rates of church attendance or at home practice. That would be associated with different family norms. Um, I don't say that as like like good or bad. I mean I okay, actually, I do say it as a bad thing. I think this is like like good or bad. I mean I okay, actually, I do say it as a bad thing. I think this is like not a good thing, but that's. We just have to be honest about where we are as a synod. We're not what sociologists classify as like a strict, a strict religious organization of the kind that can motivate anomalous behaviors at this time. Maybe we could get there if we wanted to Do we want to.
Speaker 3:There's a whole debate, but that's not where we are. But I actually want to say there's, you know, I want to mention that, like we can say so, when did the LC-MS fertility fall? And the answer is over the course of the 70s and 80s, basically, and this is really important because it means that this has been true for decades. We've known for decades. It's, the evidence has been in for decades that this was a big problem. But you have to ask when was the first time that, say, a synodical president commissioned synodical research into, like, the birth rate in the LCMS? And it was 2013 with president Harrison and he got so much crap for it. Like, like the reports on this you can, you can look them up with some effort, because they're like kind of memory hold now, like they were like critiqued as racist and like all these terrible things. Like, okay, I'm not going to say like everything in these reports was perfectly done, but like I know the social, the social scientist who did the research, he's not a racist guy like this.
Speaker 4:I don't think anybody feels is wants to throw that word out there, and you know I mean, yeah, but people did people, we know Right.
Speaker 3:Like that. That word was like. I've been in the room where somebody said those reports were motivated by racism.
Speaker 4:I think that the best motivation of a critique is is there not a way to grow a church apart from birth rates?
Speaker 3:Or is birth rates the only way that we can think of to grow a church. So, but I think what we have to deal with is like, if birth rates are really low, then like you're paddling upstream, right. So, yes, there are other ways that churches can grow to a greater or lesser extent. But when we talk about demographics, the first thing we have to confront is that if your birth rate is 1.7 on average, even if you have 100% youth retention, if you have 100% youth retention and zero net conversion and a 1.7 fertility rate, then your denomination will shrink by about 10 to 15% each generation. Okay.
Speaker 3:And we don't have a hundred percent retention, we have 40% retention, okay, which means that just to replace yourself biologically, you'd have to have something like five kids each, and we don't have five kids each, okay. So and that's the other part of demography is migration or, in our case, conversion, which involves both retention of children born in the church and conversion out of adults and conversion in of adults and also conversion in of children that those adults bring with them. And on that, on adult conversion, we actually look very statistically normal for a Protestant denomination, we have typical rates of conversion in and actually we have somewhat low rates of conversion out among adults. But when it comes to youth retention, that is, children born in our families remaining in them as adults, we have quite low values, our families remaining in them.
Speaker 2:As adults, we have quite low values. So this is all very helpful. I think there should be great unity in the LCMS at all different levels, from pastors to synod leaders, et cetera, in understanding the demographics. The challenge I don't know, this should not be a political thing the 1.7 birth and I don't think we should. Also and I remember I was a young pastor then, right, just starting out, three, four years in, and I heard things that I thought were a little bit unfair toward President Harrison then and again, you're a young pastor, you're like you know he just said have more babies, we should have more babies. Well, guess what I've said like the last, as this has become like more real, I've said from the pulpit we should have more Lutheran babies, like Lutherans marrying a marriage Like this is a real.
Speaker 3:It's not the only church growth strategy, but it is a church growth strategy to be sure, like there's a real close to where I live, is shaker village of pleasant hill for the shakers, an old, you know, heterodox cult. Okay, there's no more shakers today. You know why? Because they banned marriage and having babies.
Speaker 2:They got huge numbers of converts.
Speaker 3:They grew for the first century of their existence with no babies. It doesn't matter, you do like so, but actually I want to say there's something really important here to grasp, and this is about youth retention and it's but it's really about the parable of the sower. Okay, when we think about the parable of the sower, right, the sower throws seed everywhere. The point of the parable is that he's a bad farmer. Okay, like he's throwing seed on rocks, which you would only do if you have an infinite amount of seed, that is, your seed is costless. But, more importantly, it's to tell us that the quote unquote success or failure of evangelistic effort, if you will, but that applies to catechetical effort of our children isn't about the goodness of our seed chucking skill. It's about the soil that it lands in.
Speaker 3:And I want to really emphasize that church practice has actually not changed that much over the last century. Such data as we have suggests that, like parents in the 1920s and 30s were not like, awesome catechizers. A lot of them, like literally couldn't read their Bible at all. They were illiterate, let alone reading it with their kids. Okay, like it's not like these people were super catechizers, and parents today, just like, are horrible at teaching their children. What really happened is the culture around us changed. The culture around us got way better at teaching children false things. Okay.
Speaker 4:So, what's happened in our society.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the negative world or a paganizing world. Okay, what's happened in our society is, quite frankly, that the rest of the world upped their game and we didn't, and in fact, we lowered our game in one important way. If you look at LCMS churches before 1955, a big part of what defines them is, I can say statistically, is, we could say, surname propinquity, that is to say, the last names are highly concentrated in a small set of last names compared to the wider world. And that's because they were like all Germans. Okay, there was an ethnic identity that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting of the cultural togetherness of the church, and as that faded as it tends to, you know, as you're far away from Germany and you learn English and all these things as that faded, we didn't build something new to replace it.
Speaker 3:Okay, so this is why LCMS used to have 90% retention and now it has 40. Whereas if you look at the Roman Catholics, they used to have 70% retention and now they have 55 to 60. Okay, we all went from like a supportive world to a hostile world for our faith and that hurt all of our ability to retain. But it hurt us even more because we experienced that at the same time that we also lost the base level of ethnic solidarity that was actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting of Lutheran community life, and I think we have to ask ourselves what can we do to replace that, because it's not going to be ethnic solidarity. My last name is Stone. I'm about as Anglo as it comes. It's going to be something else.
Speaker 2:Well I'm curious there Do you have any ideas on what else should and could culturally?
Speaker 3:I have a lot of ideas on them. That could be a whole nother podcast.
Speaker 2:And none of them are definitive ideas on them.
Speaker 3:that could be a whole nother podcast, um, and none of them are definitive, but basically what it comes down to is you have to make your church, um an overwhelming center of social life. Um, you have to convince families in your church that their, their kids church friends are worth investing in for play dates more than the neighbor kids, even if the neighbor kids are more convenient. Or you have to convince your members to live in the same neighborhood, or you have to convince them to. You know, you have to intensively socialize your members to like each other. It is not enough to agree on doctrine, you need to be friends. And I actually think that there's a really powerful and kind of distinctively Lutheran theology around this, like what are we doing in communion? There are three togethernesses in communion, right, there's Christ in the elements, there's us and Christ and there's us. That's right.
Speaker 4:And that last communion and the Holy Spirit gathering us in the community, yeah, yeah, yeah and finding identity in that community that you belong to yeah, and I'm just thinking about like how we we deal with it here at christ greenfield, building a school and the school, then it's not just the church, it's the school and you spend more time there than you do at church, right, yep, like for example, my kids are just getting into school age and there's a really wonderful classical school nearby, a latin school nearby that they're eventually going to be enrolled in.
Speaker 3:It's not Lutheran. Our only Lutheran school in area is just a preschool. It's at our home church. There's a couple other, but there's only preschools in the area, but there's several Lutheran preschools. We could have enrolled our kids straight into the Latin school right away, but we decided to enroll them in our church's preschool, um, even though you know it's logistically a bit trickier, um, but we decided to do that because, like, if our church is offering it, we're going to support it, because that deepens our kids' church friendships. It supports our church Um.
Speaker 3:Other things, like when we moved back to Kentucky, we bought a house that was close to the church, to churches that we thought we'd go to. That just a certain proximity from church was like a hard rule on where we were going to look. If it's too far from church, we're not even looking, and that's the ethos we need to cultivate. And I'm not saying like, be like me, I'm so good, um, but like we, we want, you know, we want people to think of their church as their central social space and particularly. We want to cultivate that in children.
Speaker 3:Well, that doesn't mean like have no non-Lutheran friends, it's just like it's a question of like the centrality of your social identity.
Speaker 3:And again, I'm not talking about like spiritual identity. Even I think it's important to understand that we humans are depraved, we are broken. Our ability to think of a spiritual identity rests on a prior social identity. Okay, like there are visible means for the spiritual fruits and our social identities are a visible means that shapes our spiritual identity. And this is straight out of the book of Concord when it says that the mutual conversation and consolation of the believers is one of the means by which we receive the good fruit of the gospel. It's straight, it's in there as a means that we don't talk about, but it's like hanging out, like fellowship hour is. It would be greatly overstated to say that fellowship hour is sacramental, but it is one of the things that the book of Concord I think it's the small called articles, I think is where this is it specifically says in the article of the gospel how do we get it? And it's like preaching and confession, these things, and it's like and also just like conversations with believers.
Speaker 2:That's right. So two things. I talk about Christ. Greenfield being a village in the midst of the city, there's this village mentality, it's 3,000, 4,000 people, and there's a social construct. There's an economy of sorts relational and economic that tethers us together. It's just you're healthier. And then one of the reasons we've gotten here is American individualism. Just allow me to go. I mean, it's not, it is not found in the Bible Me and Jesus Autonomy, and then me and Jesus going to my neighbor per se. Whenever we're talking evangelism in the Bible and I could be challenged on this it's we, the body of Christ, going on mission to make him known. It presupposes because Moses sent him out two by two, two by two exactly. We're just skipping right past the sociology, the Jewish culture that was way more communal in the sending of the Pentecostal reality, a Pentecost reality, I don't mind saying Pentecostal, it was a movement of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 2 and beyond, that's a correct usage of Pentecost reality.
Speaker 4:I don't mind saying Pentecostal, it was a movement of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 2 and beyond.
Speaker 3:That's a correct use of Pentecostal. Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, american individualism has hampered our connection to one another and our winsome witness in the world. What you just said should not be termed because I got some super mission-oriented brothers as saying the church should be a social club for Christians. Only If our social construct is not strong, our witness will be dampened.
Speaker 3:So let me give an example of this. Like okay, so you need to have this tight community that shapes identity. Okay, now it's still important to be inviting people into it, and there's a basic place where a lot of churches fall down on this Google will give you $10,000 a month of free ads If you just ask for it. How many of our churches are doing that? I don't know. I think not many. So, like free money, I don't. I don't know if there's been a best practices talk on, like let's all sit in a room and apply for google ad grants together, but there needs to be um, we usually bring it up in in our engagement stuff yeah, you're right, and so like when we think about evangelism, like building a deep community where people like each other and our friends and invest in each other's lives is not anti-evangelical.
Speaker 3:It's actually what evangelism is, because the other thing is that we often get this category that, like once their members were done, like evangelism happens until their members and now it's not. No, we always need, I need to be evangelized every Sunday. I need to be brought back to the knowledge of who Christ is for me. Okay, but we can talk about this all day and I think this is a place where, like choir preaching, here we go, so like we should get to like more divisive.
Speaker 2:Let's get to the spicy stuff, all right. All right, I'm going to keep going here. Here you go. Failure of the church to impact the lives of people. Anything to say there, lyman.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so my read of what Pastor Kieschnick was saying. Is it better to say pastor or president? Do we give former presidents president? I don't know Whichever is more respectful and proper. Consider I've said that, Like I said, I'm a convert.
Speaker 2:You can't blame me for not knowing these tacit knowledge items.
Speaker 3:So he basically means like pragmatic preaching is how I understand it, like preaching, that's really oriented towards like he didn't go into preaching there.
Speaker 3:Yeah like the problems of life today. And this is actually a really interesting hypothesis because I've surveyed preaching preferences among LCMS members and what I can tell you is people love to hear other people's sins preached about that. Like, if you ask like married people, is it important to preach about, um, the importance of not getting divorced, they're like yeah. If you ask a divorced people is important to preach about, like, the importance of compassion to people in difficult search circumstances, they're like yeah. But if you ask them about divorce, they're like no, no, no, we don't need to preach about that. People with kids think it's important to preach about having kids. People without kids think that's a terrible idea, like everybody. It's like if you just ask people what they want and this is why I'm not asking this in the next survey, by the way, because I was like people just this is actually really sad. But I actually am sympathetic to the idea that preaching matters for the growth or decline of our church, and the reason I say that is it's not ultimately because of the theological truth that preaching probably matters.
Speaker 3:I'm a demographer. It's because you talk to a lot. You talk to converts in the LCMS or in any denomination. Almost always they'll say, one of the things I visited the church and the preaching was really good. That's just like a really common thing that converts actually will tell you about their experience. Yeah, the preaching was really good. That's just like a really common thing that converts actually will tell you about their experiences. Yeah, preaching was really good. So I didn't ask about preaching Like, were you attracted by the preaching quality?
Speaker 3:In this previous survey wave that I did, that you're going to hear details about in a podcast that will be released in a few weeks. On this podcast, I didn't ask about preaching quality, but I'm going to in my next wave because it occurred to me. This is actually an important area. It's a valid question. Yeah, it's basically like, were you attracted to the LCMS because of preaching quality? And I will say again, I want to treat our pastors as fairly as possible, as possible. But I also say, you know, I do wish that our preaching in the LCMS pushed our people harder to open their Bibles and follow along.
Speaker 3:That's something I grew up with was an expectation that when the pastor preaches, you might be reading the Bible and following what he's saying. That doesn't seem to be the norm in LCMS churches. Justin Martyr, the second century Christian says that what a sermon is is a discussion by a leader of the congregation of the text for the day. It's basically a gloss on the text. We preserve this often in the norm that, like, pastors might preach from the lectionary text, but I but even when we do that, often they're from the lectionary but like it's not.
Speaker 3:It's not an exegetical sermon telling me like, walk me through the text and help me understand the Bible. I've had pastors say, no, that's for Bible study. If you want that, come to Bible study. And I I understand where that's coming from. At the same time, I think in a highly literate society and in a society where a lot of people feel intimidated by the Bible despite being very literate, the sermon is, I think personally, without forfeiting the important pointing towards law and gospel and preparing us to receive the sacraments. The important pointing towards law and gospel and preparing us to receive the sacraments. Yes, our sermons really should, I think, be exegetical. And I think if I had a survey of people of many denominations that asked about preaching quality and particularly if I looked at converts, I suspect I would find that there are more people converting out of the LCMS, who cite preaching quality related reasons than converting into it for preaching quality reasons, I'd be inclined to agree with you on that assessment.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying we have bad preachers. We have a lot of very good, talented orators in our denomination. But I'm saying that I think, and maybe you'd say well, people's preferences for preaching are bad. As I've just said, they want to hear about other people's sins, not their own. At the same time, I think there's something to the argument that basically, preaching as here's the text, let's walk through it is is has much to commend it as a, at least as a starting point.
Speaker 4:So that is a fascinating thing. There are strains within Lutheranism that say that a sermon should do nothing but teach law gospel and if you stray away from that, that you're not actually giving a sermon. And I don't know that I agree. I don't know that. I agree with that position. I think that in, like you said, in a very highly literate society where people expect to be challenged and to grow in their biblical knowledge, that, in addition to to like, I think it should include, you know, a really great law gospel message, that there's a great opportunity for people to enhance their biblical literacy and actually understand the application and the context of that text much more. You know, with a respect to the intelligence of the audience that you're preaching to.
Speaker 2:I love how much you guys care about preaching. This is. This is awesome for preaching to hear this Preaching is really important. It warms my spirit. Yeah, well, it's really hard.
Speaker 3:I mean, I want to acknowledge like it's easy for me as a non-pastor and lay person to be like. Well, let me tell you how to preach good Like preaching I totally like. It's really hard and it's a challenging thing that has a lot of and no matter what a pastor does, somebody in the audience will always think in the congregation will always think they can preach better yeah right, like I. I'm not saying like oh, I get, I'm just on the margin.
Speaker 3:I think there's a benefit to shifting somewhat towards exegetical pointing people really straightforwardly and seriously to the text I agree with that jack.
Speaker 4:Final word on this all right we got so much to hit man okay, let's keep rolling.
Speaker 2:so the third point for the reason of decline was the romanization of the clergy and their uh, pastor kishnick called for it's probably one of the more spiciest comments he gave.
Speaker 4:Would you agree?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah maybe, and I had some comments like Romanization means we've rejected justification by grace, through faith alone, we've rejected the solas, and I don't think that's the way he was using Romanization. He was referring more to practices in the church that seem foreign to some of us in varying contexts, such as genuflecting, heavy smells, bells, vestments. I think he referred to kind of prostrating yourself right, private confession.
Speaker 4:Talk about chanting. Well, chanting private confession. Absolution. Mandatory private confession chanting private confession absolution mandatory private confession and there are lutheran churches recently that I've heard of that have installed confessionals so I want to, I want to jump in, and I'm sure you jump in go ahead.
Speaker 3:This is like the longest section of my notes on things to say that's fine I'm gonna try and be as brief as possible, and I think I'm not the only person who listened to particularly this section of that interview and felt that maybe we should be careful of slanderous gossip Not charitable, yeah sure.
Speaker 3:And what I mean is if we were to say a person is prancing around in a miter prancing is sort of an interesting word to use. It's pejorative. Also, you know, when we say, well, I've heard of a church doing this or somebody does this, or someone does this these are vague reference that it's like okay, well, we know what you're saying is. You know, high church people do this, right, it's like that's the implication. It's like people who like high church. They're like this If your brother is sinning, go to him and say so, and if he will not listen, bring someone else. And if he still will not listen, then make it public and say his name. Okay, but like someone does this, there's no way to falsify that. Like, if someone says some LCMS pastor thinks you should cannibalize your children, how am I going to falsify?
Speaker 3:that there's thousands of LCMS pastors Maybe one did say so. Like I think we need to speak. If someone is airing, we should say plainly this person airs. And if we're going to be vague, I think the vaguer we are, the more charitable of an interpretation we have to offer.
Speaker 2:So the only way I hear I'm speaking for Tim and Pastor Tim Allman, christ Greenfield Lutheran Church and School, gilbert, arizona. Right, I'm just speaking for me. I have personally no problem with as high a church as you want to go, with the divine service, god serving us through his word. No problem at all. It's just that the practices have become all the more diverse. It's like we're intensifying some of the practices and this is a collective thing and I've been to Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne and some of their practices and this is a collective thing. And I've been to Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne and some of their practices moving into the divine service were different.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's different than the way I learned leading the divine service in a very traditional manner at my seminary training. Okay, that's it.
Speaker 4:It's just different and different is always going to be seen as negative, to be seen as more of what a person might see in a. Roman Catholic. Well, I'll tell you that I joke with Catholic friends.
Speaker 3:They're like, oh, you Lutherans, you're, you're, you know you're Protestants bad. And I'm like okay, tell me, um, can you find a Catholic church in your area, um, that actually conducts the mass in a way that's recognizable for in, say, 1850?. Um, in a way that's recognizable for in, say, 1850. If you stick your tongue out, is your pastor going to actually put bread on it? And they're like oh no, that doesn't happen. I'm like you could do it at LCMS church. It's true that we actually do preserve. In fact, quite literally, we're more Catholic than the Catholics at this point. I mean our, our liturgy is more similar to a pre-Vatican II liturgy than the modern Novus Ordo of the Catholic church. Like that's true, it is empirically the case. And so like, yes, this is a real thing, that's happened, partly because the Catholics are basically non-denoms at this point. But the other thing I think we should say is, like Pastor Kieschnick said, like, oh, I have nothing, he has nothing against chanting. Well, you shouldn't have anything against chanting. Like we should love it.
Speaker 3:And the reason we should love it is because the Augsburg Confession says we changed nothing about the mass except for the language. Like it says that it's in there. It's the book of Concord that we all agreed to. Now I'm not saying there's no space for creativity. Okay, I'm not going to go like so you can't change anything from like 1555.
Speaker 3:Like the LSB has things changed from TLH. Okay, like this is. But like it's not just a stylistic preference to say like we are confessionally committed to insofar as we make changes or as far as we use our creativity to make adaptations of the divine service, we are actually still bound by a formal principle that is in our confessions, that is, there is a confession about if you will style, now that doesn't mean you can't have a guitar. Ok, like pianos as we know them didn't exist at the time. It doesn't mean you can't have a guitar. Okay, like pianos as we know them didn't exist at the time. It doesn't mean you can't have an implicate. It doesn't mean that you can only do the LSB and I think it can be wonderful to have variants over the church here.
Speaker 4:This is a debate that's been raging on and, in a sense, you know uh, to a certain segment of the lcms, this is a resolved, uh, a resolved debate. In another sense, it's not a resolved debate and this has to do with um, the space that we make for contemporary worship within, within the lcms so I actually have nothing against contemporary worship if, if what we mean by contemporary worship is basically a musical style, that's fine.
Speaker 3:Um right, I think what we have to be am is basically a musical style, that's fine, right, I think what we have to keep.
Speaker 4:Am I wearing a robe or am I wearing?
Speaker 3:But even there, like, like a robe. Okay, Like robe is not like, but fundamentally the structure of the service, which is a thing that there is, unfortunately, variance on. But now I've just done a thing where I'm implying, like some churches do it this way, so maybe I'm guilty of what I do.
Speaker 3:Okay, so, chief of centers but but my, my fundamental thing I want to say here is like, yeah, our service probably does sound Catholic and it should, because we are the true keepers of the one Holy Catholic and apostolic faith. We are the heirs of Chris, chris system and Augustine, boethius and Aquinas that's Chrysostom and Augustine, boethius and Aquinas, that's us, not Rome. So, like, if our church sounds like what Christians did for 2000 years, like well done us. And I think that, like, fundamentally, there's a mistake in the idea that, like Lutherans shouldn't sound medieval, like no, if we're who we say we are, that is the true heirs of, of gospel Christianity as it was stewarded through the ages. Like we should sound old on some level.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's the word. That's the word should, though, and that's where we, when we make a should, we're saying that this is the right way, and that another way, but it is a should Right, and so it is a should Right, and so it is a should.
Speaker 4:Right. So the confessions also give freedom in the expression of human traditions and also recognize that worship is influenced by tradition. Yeah, so right, when we define the true church, the true churches is as we define it, where the word is preached and the sacraments are administered properly. And beyond that right, we recognize there should be confession absolution. We understand that there is a place for liturgy, liturgy is a piece of it. And then what is it for? The purpose of liturgy is teaching. So we agree, you're never going to hear somebody from our context say liturgy is bad, but liturgy is adaptable.
Speaker 3:It is adaptable to the community that you're trying to teach yeah, so I think you can go to a genuinely authentic lutheran church in africa, and their liturgy is going to look super different and and they're still teaching the same thing, and it's still authentically true, lutheran yeah, and you can also and I'll say you can also get places that are formally identical in the liturgy, and it's a big problem. Um, when I worshipped in hong kong, the tlh setting had been rendered in cantonese, exactly musically, which is a problem since cantonese is a tonal language and the tones of the music didn't match the words, so literally they were singing like different words. Right, you'd only know the actual words if you read it. If you listened, it's the wrong words, which is kind of problematic. But you said, like, well, no one would say liturgy is bad.
Speaker 3:But I think and I know I'm not alone in this because I know other people heard it the same way that that is actually exactly what Pastor Kieschnick was saying. Right, he says, well, many pastors aren't good chanters, therefore they shouldn't chant. But the thing is like, yeah, chanting can be a bit challenging. It's way easier than any other musical instrument. Okay, like, also, try and find five people for a worship band in a church of 25 people. Like, it's going to be a bad band at best.
Speaker 2:Um, so, yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't think he would ever say liturgy was bad. No, I don't think that's what he was getting at with romanization.
Speaker 4:Jerry would not say liturgy is bad, Because he's a pastor that came from a church that does liturgy right Very liturgical yeah.
Speaker 3:Again, what does liturgy liturgical mean? He identified things like prostrating as a sign of something bad happening, unless he was saying, romanization wasn't bad.
Speaker 2:Let me speak to that. It seems like you thought it was bad. I think it's connected. I think it's connected to point four, and this is great. I think it's connected more to centralization of power and over hyper elevation of the office of holy ministry at the expense. This is where the conversation really leans. If I'm going to, if I'm going to ping on, one pain point right now is, I would say, the over-elevation of the office at the expense of the release of the priesthood of all believers. And I've got there's history on this right In terms of decisions we've made lay leadership development, the mission training center, deacons that whole.
Speaker 2:I mean, I just go down that road there is a folks that respond. They have very, very hurt feelings over a lot of the decisions that were made at synod conventions and things that have been said against lay leaders, and so this is why it's sensitive Lyman is is when we have practices that seem to kind of over elevate. The pastor does these kind of high elevated things, and he's kind of the only one it's easy to see how we would rely and this isn't theology necessarily, this is just sociology. This is the way we connect. It's easy to see how we would see that as a roman, as a roman practice, right driven practice. When we get to that, I'm more sympathetic to some of the concerns.
Speaker 2:But yeah, centralization of power, yeah, I'm not down on romanization okay, you go, you keep, can go on, but that's all I wanted to say in terms of Romanization. I think it has to do with power structure.
Speaker 3:I think that there is something to be said there, but I also want to like. The empty cross came up. Okay, oh sure, sure, I just had to laugh because Pastor Kishnick perpetuated, like a historically known falsehood, that the empty cross originates as a sign of the resurrection. But that's not true. A cross with Christ on it is a rather old symbol Now, the earliest Christians they did depict a lot of empty crosses.
Speaker 3:By the 400s, crosses with Christ on them are very normal in church art, and the reason the early Christians showed crosses without Christ on them is because if they wanted to show Christ on the cross, they had two other symbols for that. The key row and the tower row were staros, both of which you can look at the Greek letters. You squeeze them together and it's a cross with a person. You can see their head on it. That's the top of the row. Like, these are both the corpus on the cross. These were the earliest symbols of Christianity, so much so that we actually have anti-Christian graffiti that was excavated in Pompeii and it's a donkey being crucified as like a mockery of Christians, and you can tell.
Speaker 3:The only reason they're mocking Christians with this is because Christians often show a symbol of Jesus on the cross Christograms. These Christograms did the job of showing the corpus. Moreover, images of Christ on the cross were extensively debated in the Reformation In the iconoclasm controversy. The iconoclast felt very strongly that you should smash the Jesuses on the cross and Luther was like no, why? Why are you doing this? Fundamentally, the idea that these images that modern Americans associate with Catholicism, that this is us Romanizing, is nonsense. Putting Christ on the cross look, you want to have an empty cross, that's fine. You want to have Christ on the cross, that's fine. This is totally Christian freedom, just artistic preference. But if you want to make a theological argument about it, this is a debate we had and Lutherans decided to keep Jesus on the cross in their art in the 15 and 1600s. Now I'm fine if you want to change that. But don't go around saying that other people choosing to make a different aesthetic choice are like crypto papists because they chose to use historically Lutheran iconography. This is unreasonable and ahistoric.
Speaker 3:Now there may be some areas where Pastor Kishnick has a reasonable point. I've never heard of an LCMS pastor insisting on being called father. But I did recently see someone referring to a pastor that way without him asking for it. But maybe there's some LCMS pastor insisting on this. That seems odd to me. Whatever, but maybe it happens wearing a miter. I'm not sure exactly why that's bad. It is a little odd. I've never seen anybody do it, but whatever.
Speaker 2:So I actually had someone reach out and say they know who that that brother was and I don't think it would be inappropriate for me to say his name. He's one of our district presidents at dn taylor and I actually know dn when when he made that comment I didn't know who that was and I've had good interactions with dn taylor, know his heart. He's a faithful district president, to be sure, so yeah um.
Speaker 3:He's referred to as a bishop in his context and it's not, and again, that's not like okay but ultimately what I want to emphasize here is all this aside, as both of you all know from the interview that we did that will be published subsequently for my recent survey report, the idea that these Romanizations are hurting our church is totally wrong. The congregations that are declining the least are those that are the most high church. That are declining the least are those that are the most high church. The fastest decline in our denomination is among the, you could say, more contemporary churches. So, regardless of if you think Romanization is happening or not, or what it means, or how you interpret it or how you feel about it, it isn't true that this is why we're declining. Okay, so if we talk about like 12 reasons the LCMS is declining, like Romanization isn't there, and frankly, if anything, the people tarred as Romanists and actually Pastor Kishnick mentioned this are driving an astonishingly large share of the men who are enrolling in our seminaries. And if other segments of the church are unable to inspire men to pursue and remain for the duration of seminary, that might tell us something about the vitality in different churches.
Speaker 3:Quite frankly, and yes, I know, seminary is hard and it appeals to certain dispositions of people more than others, and we can talk about that and I'm actually sympathetic to some of the critiques of how we do seminary, but still like if you look at where the support for LCMS publications and podcasts and blogs like LCMS church life is largely being kept on life support in a lot of places by these people and they're determinantly fighting for their children in the face of a world that wants to claim them and statistically doing a slightly better job than quote unquote less Romanist people.
Speaker 3:So I'm just, you know, my wife doesn't fail or wear a headscarf and I don't believe that she has to, and I disagree with churches that would force women to and I disagree with churches that deny women the vote. Okay, I oppose the idea of gender separated seating, but at the end of the day, I have to be honest and acknowledge that those churches might actually be declining less than other ones. And also, if they choose to do that that way, like it doesn't hurt me and if my church started doing that, I could go down the road to the other LCMS church. Like acting like, like our decline is about the fact that some churches have decided to like really intensively do things Christians did for 2,000 years. No, it's not.
Speaker 2:So this models what I think we ought to be talking about. You know, I think they're fair points. You know, A lot of what you're saying is adiaphora.
Speaker 3:Some of the things we're just dealing with. Just, I'm not gonna make my wife veil, I think it's wild. Okay, but if there's some church where everybody is voluntarily agreeing to this and it's their norm, like you know, okay, well, I I'm gonna put it this way.
Speaker 4:I do agree that it is adiaphora 100%, and so we'll just use the empty cross analogy. So our church body for many, many, many decades that's how you design churches it was an empty cross. That design was intentional. That design was taught from the seminary. That was widely affirmed there was unanimity on that as the symbolism essentially the liturgy. You could call it liturgy by having an empty cross. So if a church makes an intentional decision to change its liturgy adiaphora, I agree, but it's still an intentional decision to do that Then what is the meaning behind that that they're trying?
Speaker 4:to teach and I think that's where it opens up the idea. Is this trying to teach an idea that's more in alignment with Romanizing right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, because that's an intentional choice to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I can say this was a huge debate when, at a prior church I was a member of, because they were renovating their chancel while we were there and they switched from an empty cross to a corpus on the cross, and we actually had a document from the architect from the 40s that explained why they did an empty cross and what they said was the reason that the cross is empty is because Lutherans do not believe that Christ has any local presence or special presence in the church. Okay, that's false. We don't believe that.
Speaker 2:We actually rather emphasize the real presence.
Speaker 3:We have a document saying that the reason for now in that congregation, this was not a synodical document, it was the architect for that, okay, but it reveals to us what actually a lot of people, what was going on, which was unionism Okay, that a lot of LCMS churches were being built at a time where a lot of people thought that getting more similar to what mainstream American Christianity was a good idea and, as a result, they sometimes made choices that might have been bad choices. For example, the Empty Cross has a very. The modern Empty Cross has a very well-known lineage. It originates basically in Anglophone Christianity in the late 1800s as an anti-Catholic symbol. Okay, so it emerges as a way that Anglophone Christians can separate themselves, particularly in America, and someone in England can separate themselves from Catholics to to distinguish themselves. The LCMS adopted that because it became a Protestant symbol, and then we, and then we articulated a theology that rendered that, that essentially political symbol, meaningful. Okay, and the theology is true. We do believe in the resurrection, and if seeing an empty cross makes you think of the resurrection, great Crossing myself makes me think of baptism, even though, like my, baptism actually involved water, okay, whatever Like, if it makes you think of that, that's a wonderful, pious and good thing.
Speaker 3:I have nothing to say against that. But if you try and say that, what somebody else must mean by this is a bad thing. You don't know their heart and, as it happens, a lot of churches making this switch are making it because they actually do know what people of the past were thinking, because it's in writing. What people of the past were thinking was often really wrong, like it wasn't always good theology.
Speaker 2:Well, what do rituals, symbols, crosses? They story us, yeah, they center us in God's redemptive love story. For me, he claimed me in the waters of baptism. I love the reference to the sign of the cross. That's one of our practices. Here too. You don't have to do it, but you know 25, 30% of the congregation does it.
Speaker 2:During the invocation we remember our baptism and they have Father, son and Holy Spirit. So the liturgy itself. It just connects us to the meta, the grand narrative of God's love for us. The reason we gather around the table is we really believe we need forgiveness of sins, communion with God. He comes to us and he moves us out and wins some witness to the world. So we've been liturgized, we've been storied.
Speaker 2:The problem comes, though, when we develop our self-righteousness around the execution of these principles. Right, and so this is where the devil is, in the details. Here Like it, and it is in the human heart. The pride in the human heart and where I get to have a struggle today, lyman is we are not talking to one another with diverse practices and actually listening to the heart of the practice. With diverse practices and actually listening to the heart of the practice, we've gone to labels around. You're in this camp. You're in this camp, you do this practice. You do this practice rather than elevating the conversation to hey, why are you doing those things? I bet there's a helpful narrative behind it that points me to Christ rather than just elevation of self-righteousness, you know, but we're going to put human beings, put the worst construction on different.
Speaker 2:That's our that's our thing, we see something different, we label it as bad and that is very dysfunctional for the local church. So you can. You can critique and criticize. You know having president Kishnick on all you want. He's. He's put certain constructs on what is going on in our church body. It's what he's seen and he's not had a counter narrative and here's what it honestly gets down to the leadership.
Speaker 3:A further conversation. That's a good thing.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. But what we need to do is lean into the discomfort of the different embrace, a brother who has different practices, rather than what the devil wants us to do is run away from one another. So that leadership on the line blog that I wrote, I mean it all comes down to trust. Do I trust the Holy Spirit to speak through me enough that when I see something will I say something? A couple of brothers that have sent they're in leadership positions and had very strong negative critiques about the conversation. I warmly invited them to basically say a lot of the stuff that you're saying, lyman. I'm sure they would have said it just like you said it, or? Maybe differently.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know, but they didn't want to even have the public conversation. Praise God, we need more public conversations today.
Speaker 3:Go ahead so, and I think that this actually maybe goes well with the next point on centralization. Okay that you know a lot of the debate about centralization is before I was Lutheran. I was, like you know, I was in high school for a lot of these debates. I don't know the ins and outs of it. I'm sympathetic to the idea that you know, a modestly sized organization might struggle to have an optimal organizational form, Like there's a lot of just basic like institutional sociology reasons to think that I'm a bit skeptical that explains our decline. That is, I don't think there's a lot of seven-year-olds losing faith over the structure of synodical offices, but it might be a bad thing anyways. Okay, so like centralization, I'll be honest, I don't understand the terms of the debate well enough to have a deep opinion. I do want to get into one total toss-off side comment, though, from that section, and that is getting the right people in roles, and this is a really important question.
Speaker 2:That wasn't a side comment. In my mind I've been reflecting on this quite extensively, but it wasn't the central argument.
Speaker 3:It is really like talent management is the success or failure of an organization. Like, highly successful companies don't get there because once upon a time they had a better product. They get there because they continue to have talented people who keep the company competitive. You all talked about people being mission oriented, team oriented, competent, emotionally intelligent. And the cool thing is, in my recent survey I included a personality test, a set of questions that measured extroversion, and so I actually happen to know what groups in our synod are more extroverted. And extroversion as a personality trait is pretty strongly associated with traits that sometimes are called like emotional intelligence or emotional awareness, called like emotional intelligence or emotional awareness. And what I find is like if you divide the LCMS into six groups and that is lay people, pastors and other church workers and then within those six groups you basically have like the half of them that are more high church and the half of them that are more low church. Okay, so we'll belabor the details on how we make that, but six groups ish, all the groups have similar levels of extroversion. They have slightly below average levels of extroversion compared to the US norm. So our church is slightly more introverted than the US average, except one group that has above average extroversion, and that is lower church pastors. So if you're more like you self-identify as, like, a missional or contemporary pastor, you tend to be quite extroverted. We also know that within all these groups, evangelistic behaviors like sharing your faith with someone, inviting someone to church, mentioning the early Lutheran conversation, are strongly associated with extroversion. More extroverted people are vastly more likely to like invite people to church. So then that might make you think, well, yeah, okay, so like confessional pastors do a lot less evangelism and like, like missional or contemporary pastors probably do a lot more. Turns out not to be the case. It turns out that within category it all offsets that like pastors do more evangelistic activities than anybody else. Um, but there's no difference between the two groups of pastors, okay. So I thought this was interesting because, um, I think we have a real personality divide in our church. That is, you can like. If all you did was give people a short personality survey, I'm pretty sure you could figure out which ones went to St Louis versus Fort Wayne.
Speaker 3:I agree that is actually not necessarily a theological distinction or a practical distinction. That is, a lot of these people are actually doing and believing the same things, and an unfortunate thing is that I think that we often allow personality distinctions to moonlight as theological distinctions. You all know from my prior reports that there's really no difference in evangelistic behavior between quote unquote confessional and missional people. But I can tell you what there is a difference is is extroversion this personality trait. In a lot of our fights, in our churches. This person doesn't prioritize mission or this person is giving the farm away to get people in the door, when most of what we're actually saying is that person's an introvert or that person's an extrovert, and I think we need to abandon that. I mean we need to stop doing that. We need to abandon that. I mean we need to stop doing that. We need to recognize that actually, like um, by and large, even people with the atypical personality trait for their behavior are being behaviorally similar so let me piggyback on that jack after you go.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no what do you define as, uh, evangelical behavior? Right, so I have four measures.
Speaker 3:Thank you for asking. One of them is have you invited a non-Christian to church in the last month? One of them is have you discussed your religious views with someone who doesn't share them in the last year? One of them is have you discussed your religious views with someone who doesn't share them in the last month? And when you meet someone new, do you usually mention that you're a Lutheran? So they can score from zero to four based on if they are a one, on how many of those they're a yes on.
Speaker 2:So it's a bit of a crude scale.
Speaker 3:It's not a perfect scale, but it captures multiple dimensions. It captures discussion of belief, invitation to community and presentation of identity, which are typically seen as the three major axes of religiosity.
Speaker 2:So my research has been on behavior, not personality, and I think we see a correlation. I'd have to go on the dynamic and passive behavioral sets. What I could tell you right now we're imbalanced. Passively, this is a Harrison behavioral assessment tool, not President Harrison, this is a secular tool. So I always have to say that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so we were imbalanced passively, and there's definitely a correlation between passive behavior and introversion. And then the aggressive continuum. There's definitely a correlation to more extroverted, aggressive, dynamic behaviors like moving in, take them out. So we've got much more in the aggressive side. We've got much more risk tolerance, much more kind of entrepreneurial, edgy kind of, and maybe even the adaptability towards seeing a number of different solutions to problems, maybe even community engagement connected to worship practices, for instance. Right, I mean. So there definitely is is a court.
Speaker 2:So how do we balance one another out? What I'm basically saying in the centralization of power and this is this is not, this is systemic, this is also there's bylaws here in terms of voice, of who gets leadership roles, because we're congregational and a congregation I think you know this, lyman a congregation of 20 gets the same pastor lay vote as a church of 2000,. Right, so it is what it is. So we're imbalanced passively and a number of our more aggressively, you could say extroverted pastors have not been at the table in the room invited to various leadership positions. Now, this has not been I'll in the room invited to various leadership positions. Now, this has not been you. I'll say something publicly, I think, jerry President Kishnick in his term may have been imbalanced with this group up here, for his term Could have been. I was a young guy at that age, but I know some of the leaders who were in.
Speaker 2:I know some of the leaders who were in his cabinet and so, president Harrison, there's always this kind of push-pull. Could he have invited a few more passive leaders into those roles? Maybe? So this goes down to the prior approval list Like a number of probably more extroverted pastors, more entrepreneurial, still faithful, under the same confession, have probably not been on a number of those lists because they have. Well, okay, because of just the pastoral formation, conversation, creativity, trying church planting, a number of these maybe newer ventures to share the gospel in this day and age, that group is not invited to the table right now to talk, at least in an organized fashion. And I could list a number of those pastors and a number of those groups and they're still doing stuff. And I could list a number of those pastors and a number of those groups and they're still doing stuff. Now I'll put myself in this category we're still doing stuff, we're just saying well, synod doesn't really want to talk, yeah we're unsupported, synod doesn't really want to engage with us, and I totally agree.
Speaker 2:It's not theology, it's sociology, and we have a high amount of extroverted folks that are not at the table.
Speaker 3:I think this cuts two ways. One is exactly, you know, I again I know nothing about inside baseball of synodical politics, so what you're saying could be true. I have no idea what I will say. There's the other side of this too, which is that introversion is typically associated with more passive behavior. That's true, but what I'm saying is that in actual data on, for example, evangelistic behavior Both are evangelical it turns out that the personality linkage breaks down. Yeah, sure, I can see that breaks down. Yeah, sure, I can see that.
Speaker 3:So, like, the issue that I have is sometimes I'll talk to somebody and they'll be like you know, giving off the personality vibe of like you know somebody who probably is not going to be a very energetic um, uh proclaimer outside the doors of their church, um, but then I actually get talking about their actual ministry and I'm like, oh no, he just pushes right through his personality on this, like, like it's really hard for him, but he's just doing it because he thinks it's important.
Speaker 3:And I'm not saying that's like better or worse, I'm just saying that like, we can observe the personality differences in a very short interaction with somebody. So, like you can get with. You know you can talk to another pastor and really quickly figure out where he lands on that scale, because people broadcast their personalities very rapidly. That's kind of what a personality is, but the inference from there to behavior is actually often rather weak, and so I think we have to be careful about saying well, this person, from my six interactions with them, seems like this, so probably their. You know, activities or proposals in a committee meeting are what is predicted by that might not be at all.
Speaker 2:So the cool thing? The cool thing is that personality doesn't change necessarily mild adaptations but behaviors do change, and behaviors do change based on the community in which you surround yourself, because we're communal beings, right, and so it's so complex, it's so beautiful, being in the church is so messy and it's really, really fantastic to have these conversations. So let me run down the list. I don't think you're going to do what President Kishnick did and say I got to talk about all of these, but you probably got two more. So he went down the list. Sinful pride, worshiping worship, failure to recognize the body of Christ, failure to honor and utilize the priesthood of all believers We've talked about that a fair amount. The reticence, reluctance to recognize service of women, and then it's hospitality hell and a forgotten mission. Which one of those are you like? Hot?
Speaker 3:button. I've got my notes on. All of them are quite short, okay, so, like so. Quite short, okay so, um, like so. On the pride one, I think we all agree pride is bad, done on worshiping worship.
Speaker 3:Um, I think this is fair and like I early kind of gave the you know win to the mat for, like the confession say, form of worship, okay. Um, here I think it's worth noting that like, uh, I've actually never heard somebody on the traditionalist side be like if everybody would just use lsb, setting three, the church would grow, like I've never heard that argument made. Maybe it exists, but I've never heard it. Um, pastor kishnick did say that the reason we're declining is because of people worshiping worship, that is, you know, thinking that their form of worship was so correct, whatever. Like I don't think form of worship actually matters much at all for growth for a variety of reasons, and I think that, yeah, we shouldn't worship worship. The only people I hear doing that are people who argue that like traditionalism is killing us, because it's rare to hear traditionalists being like we would grow if we would just use incense.
Speaker 4:I have to. I have to push a little bit on that, because I've had a lot of discourse with people um, where?
Speaker 2:I do hear that there is a lot of pride.
Speaker 4:Well it's. It's one thing to say, hey, it's one thing to say. I love this form of worship.
Speaker 3:It's great, it lights me up oh, to be clear, I'm not saying they're not jerks about it, I'm just saying they don't argue that growth comes from it.
Speaker 4:Well, fine, that's fine. So I think what Pastor President Kishnick is saying is that, okay, let's put a person on the outside in. They're not arguing that it's going to grow. What they're saying is this is the right way and everybody else is doing it the wrong way. So when you hear that, I mean that is not a culture of hospitality, that's bringing people into a church, and so he's reasonably inferring that's a barrier to growth and I would agree if that's the discourse, if that's how people are talking about their worship styles, if they're going about saying how superior it is to other forms of worship.
Speaker 4:I've I've heard this about screens, just having a screen in the church. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know this.
Speaker 3:You know, yeah, no, I know exactly what you're talking about and I would just say one empirically, it does seem that the churches that are a little more obnoxious about their form of worship are declining less. So they have a bit of a point. But two, they may be obnoxious about it, but more commonly what you hear from that group of which, to be clear, I count myself part of um, I'm kind of obnoxious about this stuff Um, usually what you hear is well, it would just be better if we were a smaller and a tougher church Like they're. Like, yeah, we don't cause growth, but we'd rather be small and faithful than big and whatever. Like that's usually what you hear.
Speaker 3:So I'd say that, on worshiping worship, it's not the case that the churches that seem to be more obsessive about traditionalism are actually less welcoming. They have more adult, new confirmations. And two, it's not the case that they're out there saying that if everybody would just be like them, then we would grow. But you do hear that argument from others who argue that if we would just be contemporary, then our churches could grow again. We'd reach the young people and grow. So, like I agree, worshiping worship is bad. We should allow different. You know, there's a degree of creativity in worship that's healthy and good for the church, but the person I hear stomping on that creativity is pastor kushnik.
Speaker 4:All right, so I'm gonna I'm gonna throw even a bigger question out there so we may see data that um the traditional churches have more adult conversions, but is that growing right?
Speaker 3:they have less decline in attendance or confirmed membership or baptized membership, right.
Speaker 3:So I mean, it depends on, you know, okay, it's not true spiritual growth, that's true. We can't measure that. But on anything we can measure, they appear to be somewhat healthier, not a ton healthier. I'm not saying they're growing, they're declining too, just slightly less slowly. And I can also say they're not growing by taking people from other LCMS churches. If I group at the metro area, if your metro area has more highly liturgical churches, lutheranism grows more, even than less liturgical churches. Okay. So, like, a Lutheran ecology in a metro area with more highly liturgical churches tends to be healthier. Um, but this gets to recognizing the body, which is the next point. Um, uh, um is uh, um, body of.
Speaker 2:Christ yeah.
Speaker 3:How do you recognize the body of Christ? And he's argued that maybe we should have more open diplomacy with other denominations. Maybe that's a good point. You know, I'm not. I'm not averse to that. I don't think that explains why 13 year olds are becoming atheists.
Speaker 4:Are we talking about the Lord's supper here? Is that what we're talking about? No, no, no. This is church fellowship.
Speaker 3:This is church fellowship. Yeah, so like I just maybe, I mean, maybe it's a fine point, you know, I there's some churches were in fellowship that I'm like really we're in fellowship with them, and then others were not in fellowship with him. I'm like, why are we not? So whatever, Okay, sure, there's, there's issues there. I just don't think it probably has anything to do with our growth or decline. Um, priesthood of believers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, I'm super sympathetic to this one because I actually have um encountered versions of serious limitations on letting lay people do things they should probably be allowed to do. On letting lay people do things they should probably be allowed to do. This is a real thing. I think that there's actually a real argument that our growth is affected by an idea that pastors have to do everything and lay people can't do anything. I will say, in my personal experience, the people I mostly encounter that from are actually not pastors. Today I had a lunch with a pastor and I was trying to tell him we should, like, do a thing in our church, okay, and it ended with him being like so you're going to do the thing, right? Um, uh, and this is what I usually hear from pastors they're like all we want is for lay people to please do something. And I hear this from, like super, I hear this from guys who are swinging incense, walking down the center aisle of their church, okay, and they're like I just want a lay person to step up and do a thing.
Speaker 3:Um, the people I usually hear the pushback from are lay people. Um, lay people who say I won attend a lay-led Bible study because it doesn't have pastoral authority. Or lay people who say, well, if the pastor's asking me to do it, why are we paying the pastor? Or lay people who just say, oh, I couldn't do that, I'm not a good chanter, I just feel too anxious to do that, I feel ill-equipped to do this. I'm not saying no pastor has ever discouraged lay workers. I'm sure that there happens somewhere. I'm just testifying to my experience that, like when, when we lived in DC at a very high church, our pastors had no problem with us standing up a lay led Bible study meeting in homes. Okay, the only objection we got to it was from other lay people. So, yeah, yeah, I think this is a real problem, but I'm not sure that like super confessional pastors or super traditional pastors are like the barrier. I think it's sometimes lay people being like we paid them for a reason. These pastors should do it.
Speaker 2:No, I agree with that, and this is of all of them again coming back, going back to the office of holy ministry and releasing the priesthood of all believers. Ephesians four pastors exist to equip the saints for loving good deeds.
Speaker 3:Like we all agree about that.
Speaker 2:I think we want to do that and so, like, if someone labels the work that we're doing in terms of, like, leadership development, we would love to work with the highest church Lutheran congregation to develop a leadership development structures, serve, lead, lead, coach, direct to provide. And I think there is an argument that, because we don't have the right labels or terms, because people like it, like what am I being invited into, what is a job description, et cetera. I think in a lot of churches we're not being clear in asking and this is in Sutter, baseball, lyman, this is like what, this is my vocation, right? We're not being clear enough to ask will you do this task for this amount of time? And then we train the. I see in you some leadership potential. Could you lead this respective team ushers, altar, guild, whatever?
Speaker 2:I don't think our ass and frankly I don't think pastors have been trained, because there's a sales element to this right and working with people to ask them to do the thing. So that is a lot of the training. It's just real world, life on life, having pastors equip the saints for real work, both within the church and then, if they have an evangelical gifting, if they have the ability to teach and to share. You know they have an evangelical bent man. Move them out, get creative in how they are winsome witnesses to share the greatest story of all time. Like that should not be a contemporary, traditional conservative. You know that should not be a divisive issue at all. Let's release and equip the saints Jack. Anything more to add there?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think what this conversation is kind of reflecting to me is, you know, it's something that has kind of a truth for me serving in this role as executive director. If I want to get better in my role as executive director in this church, I'm actually going to have to start looking outside of our church body to figure out what it looks like to raise my game and to raise the game of our ministry. Not entirely sure that our body in its entirety has really quote unquote cracked the code on what it looks like to grow and multiply the church, whereas I do believe that there are church bodies outside of us that are doing a much, much better job. And I think that would be an interesting if you had the ability to be able to do that kind of study and see, like, what are the characteristics of church bodies set aside, you know, the fact that they're not lutheran or whatever that might be what are the characteristics of church bodies that are doing an amazing growth?
Speaker 4:well, there are so few that are growing that it's a very difficult study to design, right, and what you do is, you see it in the non-denominational, uh, world, and not kind of, maybe entirely, in the non-denom, but within certain expressions of it, right. So there are church bodies that are growing. I won't.
Speaker 3:I won't belabor the question of how non-denoms count their statistics and how much we should trust their reported growth, right, um, but uh, jumping onto the question of women in the church, um, you know, uh, we kind of talked about like veiling and head covering, already in favor of it, but I also don't think like that's why we're declining.
Speaker 2:but I did yeah, hold on on that. I had a brother say, hey, do you know any women who wear head coverings? I do, to which I said, no, I so I'd love to love to meet, and I imagine I'd hear their story.
Speaker 4:I observed it. Oh, I've observed it. Yeah, you observed it.
Speaker 2:At the seminary.
Speaker 3:I know LCMS women who do, and I could understand the reasoning why.
Speaker 2:No, they don't. No, they don't. So I can understand the reason why. We do have in the confessions, though, jack, where? Because my brother said 1 Corinthians 11, this is where it's found. What would we say from a Lutheran perspective? I don't think these women are finding their self-righteousness based on this. I think it's a natural law, it's coming under the headship of their husband, recognizing his biblical leadership, etc. But, yeah, go ahead, jack.
Speaker 4:Any thoughts from the confessions? The length of your hair and whether you wear a head head? Covering it talks about in the confessions that nobody should be nobody should think of the righteousness of god and just to be.
Speaker 3:I think it's worth mentioning here because, like sometimes, sometimes we talk about people without saying names, which is bad, right, like goddess deinst had a blog, a long post, where they said you can't force people to like have a certain hair length or wear a head covering.
Speaker 2:Like they said that you can't force this so like I really think I don't hear anybody, there's a lot of churches forcing.
Speaker 3:This is.
Speaker 2:This is no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 4:I agree with that, it's just different what you could say is that there's people forcing themselves. That might possibly be the case. Yeah right, there might also be a form of spiritual forcing themselves to enjoy the david crowder band.
Speaker 3:But I'm sorry, uh, right um so but I did one.
Speaker 3:One other thing on the role of women that I just wanted to mention. I I laughed when jerry mentioned the role of prophetess. Um, because here's the thing about prophets and prophetesses they don't have jobs. Like jeremiah has some strong words to say about prophets who take paychecks and maybe like what part of hell they go to. That like the function of prophet or prophetess is a charismatic role outside the normal hierarchy, who is given a special word from God and has their office purely by virtue of the universal recognition that they're from God and you can't ignore them. Okay, that's a prophet or a prophetess, and I think we actually like often have women like that in our church who write books or novels or or do various things, and it's like you know that, like if you want really great advice for your life, you go and talk to that lady. Like, um, the idea that we would need to have, like, a pension plan for prophetesses, just like wow, this is so far from this biblical role. So I laughed at that.
Speaker 4:I don't think you would say that. Well, you talked about, shouldn't we call them? You talked about like calling the office Right. Oftentimes, prophecy in the New Testament context is a synonym for preaching the gospel, though at the same time.
Speaker 3:So there would be some lexical debate on that.
Speaker 4:Deaconess which we have, and we have deaconesses.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it's worth remembering we were one of the first Protestant denominations to have a called role for women in deacon, like we were one of the first um with with deaconess. So all that to say there's I think there's very important roles for women in church work. I just laughed at, like I'm not sure, prophetess as like job title honestly, I have not. The main benefit is people throw rocks at you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, I have not that, so that's why I didn't push up Like, okay, that's what it is. Jerry, you've thought about this way deeper than I have, and all I know is deaconess, and maybe there's a prophetic role, like in Ephesians 4 when it talks about a prophet's path for the evangelist. Maybe there are some women that have more of a prophetic bent, but I don't know that it's necessarily an office. But I've not done the deep work on that. Anything else you'd like to say around?
Speaker 3:sacramental hospitality. Okay, let's move on. Sacramental hospitality Let a man examine himself. Yeah, I mean, I get where it comes from on that. My concern with it is that communion is not an individual thing, the idea that communion is us all together, but it starts with a totally and completely individualized process where you just look at yourself, like I understand the desire and I genuinely understand the desire to like it's unreasonable to put a pastor in a place of weighing the heart of each person At the same time, like we have to come up with something we can actually say this is the norm, this is what we do in terms of visible and externals, and I think we just let each person examine their own heart. Like that, ain't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I agree that while the scripture says a lot more than that, right, the context is very, very helpful. In first Corinthians Go ahead, jack All right.
Speaker 4:So I'm going to give a personal story here, right? Because I'm a convert to Lutheranism. So my first expression, my first visit with Lutheranism? My parents were going to a Wisconsin Synod church at the time. I came as a visitor. I was in the Army. I came as a visitor, come check it out. My mom wanted me to come. She brings me up to the pastor to introduce me to him and he says oh, jack, he shakes my hand, says oh Jack, it's great to meet you. I just want to let you know you can't have communion with us. That was his. That was his, him greeting me to the church, and I said well, don't worry, that's, that's never going to happen here. But I told him I'm never coming back, so don't worry about it, right?
Speaker 4:So, um, we, we catechize every single service that we do that has communion. We are doing catechism about what's going on with the communion. That's what we do, and I found that practice splendid, like absolutely splendid. We are boldly confessing that this is the true body and the true blood of Christ given for the forgiveness of sins. We are confessing our sin. We are seeking, you know, yep, we are confessing that we're baptized believers, right? So we've got. We've got a liturgy that we do. That actually helps people work through that process of examining themselves and making that very, very clear for them.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's four questions, if anybody wants, that it's not. It's not rocket science, but we, you know, we're a larger congregation. That it's not rocket science, but we're a larger congregation. God has brought many people to worship with us and so we must to be faithful. Let people know this is different than your mainline evangelical, different than our Roman Catholic neighbors down the road right, obviously different than our Mormon neighbors.
Speaker 2:So these four questions Trinitarian, baptized in the triune God, confessing my sin, needing the forgiveness of Christ, recognizing he is here, the real presence of Christ in, with and under the bread and the wine is the body and blood of Christ. And desiring to walk in communion with Christ and communion with one another, filled with the Holy Spirit, as we winsomely live out our faith out in the world. If this is your confession, this meal is for you, and I do have people that will come and say, hey, I'm from LCMS congregation. Can I take part? Absolutely so anyway, yeah, but we do have to do more teaching. What I have found and this is again very minimal experience in some churches that are higher church like the explanation of what is occurring here in this meal maybe gets glossed over as we move straight from say the Lord's prayer yeah, as we travel in the summer to like do fundraising for missions.
Speaker 3:Um, there is almost no part of the LCMS service that has more variety in it than what the pastor says right before communion.
Speaker 3:Like some, some people say nothing, some people give a whole spiel about these things. Our church in Montreal we had we you know, on any given Sunday, a quarter of the church was a non-believer. So we just started like, if you want to be baptized, now's your moment, like it was like right there, like anybody you want to hear more about this, let's do it. So it's. There's a huge amount of variety and I do wish we had better guidance for pastors on what should you say right here, um, in terms of telling people what's about to happen and why it works the way it is, and it's. You look in any church bulletin and like the first page is a communion policy and I'm like, if this is something every church is having to, like like dance around, we should settle this and like like have a text that we think this is a good thing to say. I know we're way over time, so on the last two, this is I see these together that don't believe in hell and forgot mission.
Speaker 3:I know that pastor Kieschnick means these as rhetorical turns of praise. Taken literally, they are rather dramatic accusations against other LCMS members that, if they were true, would be justification for excommunication. I understand he means them as metaphors. I think that using metaphors that imply other people should be excommunicated if they were taken literally is not a good way to carry out conversations with each other, and I know he's not calling for that, but I think it poisons the well of discussion. Yeah, it's fair enough.
Speaker 2:You know, do we have evangelical fervor in traditional, in our traditional or contemporary communities? I pray that's the case and I'm grateful for your research, Lyman, because you know you're just missing some myths that may be around with sound data. You are a churchman, You've handled yourself great and respectful and for President Kishnick, I don't know if this is going to get as many views as your video did, but hopefully you see it as a helpful response that keeps the conversation going. That's the ultimate thing. That's the reason lead time exists. If you want to disagree and do it agreeably, centered in scripture and the confessions, filled with the Holy Spirit, shoot me an email. I don't care, Lyman, it can be. I can't believe you didn't say this.
Speaker 3:We can say my initial email to Tim was was not the most diplomatic document I've ever written.
Speaker 2:No, no, it's, it's all right and and I, I need to be held responsible. You know, to those who speak publicly, we're held to a higher standard, not just not just from a pulpit or a platform as a preacher, but those who have ideas and want to put them in the public square Like we, should be held accountable to what we say. So, yeah, I and here's, here's my heart Like I'm slightly aggressively imbalanced, okay, in terms of my, but I also will and, jack, you know this to be true If I'm found in error, if I've misspoken, if I, if I should have said something and didn't, or vice versa, I will be the first one to say, hey, yeah, could we have done better in that conversation? Could I have asked better questions to follow up on various things? I didn't have an hour and a half for a podcast, I had an hour, so that did color. Maybe the end where I could have asked more things.
Speaker 2:Jerry, do you really believe that people don't believe there's hell and that we don't want to reach people with the gospel? Like I don't. I don't know if that's the best rhetorical device. Nonetheless, it sparked conversation and I pray it moves us closer together. In nuanced. What you heard today is nuanced, adiaphora filled conversation, right, and if you've got a diverse view, man, bring it. We need diverse perspectives. Why? Because the gospel does not change, but our context, our world, the polarity, the polarization today in our world is so great that do we.
Speaker 2:I want to double down on what you say. Do we actually believe that we are the true, visible church on earth where the word is rightly preached and the sacrament is distributed? I say yes, like I signed up to this subscription because I believe. Yes, I believe our law, gospel distinctions, our tension filled theology, luther's understanding of what it means to be a Christian and be a follower of Jesus, the soul is, et cetera. Like I actually believe that with all of my heart. This is why I'm doing this. I'm not doing, and I see the church of Jesus Christ being pulled apart in the same direction that the world political conversation is going, and it should not. It just should not be. We're brothers in Christ, sisters in Christ, and where we see things that are different, may we have the courage to have the difficult conversation, to engage it and I applaud you for your courage, lyman Jack anything to close with to engage it, and I applaud you for your courage, lyman.
Speaker 4:Jack, anything to close with bud? No, I'm very thankful, lyman, for you coming on board and being very, very direct with data Like this is, I would say, a really great accountability tool for us. For the sake of honesty right, we can, always it's the subjective to the objective Can we be objectively true in our understanding of what's going on and then be very realistic? Because if we can, you know, if we can challenge, you know what we think is true with what is actually true? Now we have some tools to actually lean forward and actually do the right kind of problem solving that God has called us in to do in this role. So I'm really thankful for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Lyman, any closing comment?
Speaker 3:No, I mean, Tim, you largely gave the closing comment that I had written for myself in my notes, which is that I actually, as much as I've been critical of Pastor Keishon's comments, standing up and making these arguments and saying what you really think is hard, and I've been trying for a number of years and reports that I published, to encourage more public conversation about this. I appreciate somebody standing up and making the public conversation much more prominent. I hope it can be productive. But I want to emphasize what you're saying. If our decline in numbers motivates us to put our heads together, to be solidaristic towards one another, then I think it can generate real fruit for our church in the future. Future generations will think what happened in these generations.
Speaker 3:But if that's not what happens, if our decline motivates us to launch a blame game, if we use our decline to attack each other, if we wield decline statistics as a cudgel to refight the extremely tired wars of who voted for what in which synodical convention two decades ago, then we're doomed is not sociological, it's theological. If our response to hard times is to ignore the truth about real social causes and instead to live by lies and battle against each other and attack our fellow believers about unrelated and trivial things. If slandering each other is basically how we do things, then simply we have it wrong and we're not Christ's church. So I think we are Christ's church, and so I think we will get through it and we will find ways to, despite disagreements and differences, move forward together, and so I'm grateful for the chance to have these conversations, and I hope they can continue to happen in a way that orients us towards true reasons for our decline, that lead us to think about the kind of soil in the world we're facing and how we can tackle that.
Speaker 2:Amen. This is lead time. Sharing is caring Like subscribe, comment and even if it's negative comments. You got diverse opinion, please share it, but I pray we can do it with a spirit of love and charity and kindness. As we move forward. We promise to continue to have Jesus centered hopefully truth centered conversations with folks that have been in my camp or whatever the camp is folks in my network, you know, and folks that may be outside of my network, and we would prioritize you. If you are, jesus loves you. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day. Awesome work, lyman. Thanks Jack.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.