Ashes on the Prairie: What We Just Let Die in Iowa

Two altars in rural Iowa have gone cold. The pews are going to auction. The building fund, the memorial gifts, the hymnals with someone’s grandmother’s name still penciled inside the cover…all of it will be scattered now, sold off or shuttered, like ashes thrown to a prairie wind. That is not a metaphor. That is what closing a congregation actually does to the physical, sacred residue of a hundred years of baptisms, funerals, and Sunday mornings. It scatters.

And here is the part I cannot make peace with: it didn’t have to happen. Carter Nath was standing right there, ready to be trained, ready to be examined, ready to give his life to those two congregations. He wasn’t 40 yet. So the system closed the door. And now so have two churches.

I am not interested in villainizing the people who wrote that age requirement. I’ve said that already and I mean it. But I am done being gentle about what this decision actually cost, because gentleness has let us talk about “policy requirements” and “attrition data” for months without ever once saying the sentence that’s actually true: we let a rule outrank the doctrine of the call, and it closed two Gospel outposts.

Say what our own confession says

We teach, as LCMS Lutherans, that the call to the pastoral office comes through the congregation. Not through a district office. Not through a policy committee in St. Louis. Through the people who gather, who know their own community, who identify the man among them ready to be examined and formed for Word and Sacrament ministry. That is not incidental to our polity. It is the doctrine of the call, and it is not a minor doctrine.

Two congregations exercised exactly that discernment. They looked at Carter Nath and recognized a man they believed God was calling to serve them. And a number on a policy sheet said no, with no path to say otherwise. Not a single Biblical guideline prevented these congregations from pursuing Carter as their shepherd. A number on a piece of paper in an office in St. Louis trumped the Biblical guidelines for a pastor. When an administrative rule can override a congregation’s exercise of the call with zero appeal and zero exception, we need to be honest about what just happened to our own confession. We didn’t just lose two buildings. We let procedure outrank a doctrine we claim to hold as non-negotiable.

“Just find another church” is not an answer for everyone

The sentence I keep hearing: the members can just find another LCMS congregation. Maybe. But honestly that’s ridiculously ignorant of reality. Sure some of them will drive the 30, 45, 60 miles. Faithful people do remarkable things to stay planted under Word and Sacrament, and some of them will prove that again.

But I am not only worried about the members on the rolls. I’m worried about the people who weren’t members yet. The neighbor who was three years from walking through those doors for the first time because a friend from that specific small town in that specific pew finally invited them. The family who would have found Jesus at that font, in that town, because that church was five minutes away instead of an hour. We have a word for people like that in mission-minded circles: not-yet believers. Not-yet Lutherans. People who were never going to drive an hour past three other churches of other stripes to find a “biblically and doctrinally sound” congregation, because that’s not how the overwhelming majority of unreached people come to faith. They come to faith close to home, through a relationship, in a building they can actually get to.

By the way, a quick search on the LCMS church finder site will show you that even at the widest search parameter of 50 miles from La Verne, Iowa will yield ZERO results. No LCMS churches found.

Those people didn’t lose a building. They lost their access to the Gospel in that town, full stop. Nobody is coming to replace what just closed. That mission field is now unattended, and it will stay that way until someone decides it’s worth the cost to plant there again from scratch. Which is a far harder and far more expensive thing than training the man who was already standing in the room.

What I actually want said out loud

Our polity means more than a community’s salvation story is currently allowed to weigh in the balance. That sentence should offend us. It offends me, and I helped build some of the very governance structures in the congregation I serve I keep writing about. Boundaries matter. Rules matter. But when the rule and the mission collide, and the rule wins by default because nobody built a way for the mission to win instead, we have told the truth about our actual priorities whether we meant to or not.

I don’t think anyone intended that truth. I think we backed into it, one reasonable-sounding policy decision at a time, until it showed up as two locked doors in Iowa and a town full of not-yet believers with nowhere close to walk toward Jesus. Intent doesn’t undo the consequence. Two Gospel outposts are gone. That is not administrative. That is a mission catastrophe wearing a policy memo as a disguise, and we should be furious enough about it to actually fix the thing that caused it, instead of writing another paragraph about attrition rates and calling it wisdom.

But if we’re going to talk attrition rates, has anyone done a study on how many men start seminary and actually finish? Or how many finish seminary and obtain their first call only to leave the ministry altogether in the first 5 years? If we’re going to measure attrition then we probably should look at those numbers because I am pretty sure we’d be shocked at what we find.

Carter Nath was ready. The congregations were ready. The only thing that wasn’t ready was us. We weren’t ready to admit that a boundary we built can do more damage than we ever intended, but I sure hope we’re ready to change it before it happens a third time.

Source: Truth & Light Media, “It Begins: The New LCMS 40-Years-Old SMP Requirement Results in the Closure of 2 Rural Iowa Congregations; Why Was No Exception Made?” — read the full report.