Half and Half
We just finished the second round of voting for LCMS Synodical President, and the synod still doesn’t have an answer.
According to the results posted at lcms.org, Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison received 46.3 percent. Rev. Dr. Joel Biermann received 46.0 percent. Three-tenths of one point apart. Merely 14 votes separating the two. We are now headed to a third round, June 20–23, with a fourth still possible after that if no one breaks 50.
Think about that for a second. We have now voted twice, synod-wide, with thousands of pastors and congregational delegates participating, and the result both times has been functionally a coin flip between the top two names. This isn’t a fluke of round one that’s about to resolve. It’s hardening.
I think we need to be honest about what this means, because I don’t think it means what either side is currently saying it means.
It does not mean one side is winning and the other is losing. It does not mean confessional Lutheranism is being vindicated or confessional Lutheranism is under threat, regardless of who you think represents that label. A margin this thin, repeated across multiple rounds, means something far more sobering: we are a church body split almost exactly down the middle, and neither half is a fringe minority that can be waited out.
This was never really a contest between two men. It’s a referendum on which markers we’ve decided define faithfulness, and we don’t agree.
Somewhere along the way, this synod started treating specific, debatable, non-doctrinal practices as if they were litmus tests for orthodoxy. Worship style. Particular curricula. How evangelism gets framed. How a church structures its staff or its outreach. None of these are clearly commanded or forbidden in Scripture. And yet, functionally, your stance on these markers tells people which camp you’re in faster than your view on justification does.
That’s the actual divide. Not Harrison versus Biermann. Marker versus marker. And we’ve made some bold assumptions that someone for Rev. Dr. Harrison is for a specific manner of ministry and someone for Rev. Dr. Biermann is for a totally different kind of ministry. Roughly half the synod has decided one set of practices signals faithfulness, and the other half has decided a different set does. Both halves are quoting Scripture. Both halves believe they’re defending the gospel. And neither half, if we’re honest, can usually produce the specific chapter and verse that actually settles the practice in dispute because the dispute typically isn’t about doctrine at all. It’s about preference wearing doctrine’s clothes.
This is not a new fight. The Jerusalem church faced a version of it in Acts 15, when the question wasn’t whether Jesus was Lord pretty much everyone agreed on that. The question was whether Gentile believers had to adopt circumcision and the Mosaic law to be considered legitimately faithful. Paul’s response in Galatians is blunt: requiring a human practice as the price of belonging is a different gospel, even when the practice itself is good and biblical. The article our own confession devotes to this, Article XV of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology, on human traditions, exists because the Reformers knew this exact mode would keep recurring. Good, time-tested, even beautiful traditions are still not the same thing as the gospel they were meant to serve.
A synod this evenly split cannot be resolved by who eventually wins the gavel.
Whoever crosses 50 percent in round three or four, close to half of our voters are going to experience that outcome as something to endure rather than embrace. That is not a healthy church body making a decision. That is a body that has discovered, through two consecutive rounds of voting, that it cannot produce a majority because it no longer agrees on what the minimum bar for faithfulness actually is.
So here’s my actual ask, and it isn’t partisan toward either name remaining on that ballot. The man sitting in an office in St. Louis is not the highest priority in my life and ministry right now. But I do love this church body and believe very strongly that we have so much to offer Christendom at large. Before round three closes and we tell ourselves a tidy story about who “won,” can we at least be honest about what just happened? Twice. Can we name our actual markers out loud and ask, for each one, “is this commanded by Scripture, or is this just how we’ve always recognized our own side”? Because if the honest answer is the second one, we are not fighting over doctrine. We are fighting over identity and dressing it up as faithfulness.
A repeated coin-flip vote is not a mandate for either man. It’s a mirror for all of us. And right now it’s showing a synod that has confused its markers for its mission, almost exactly in half, two rounds running.