Tag: lcms

The Chaplaincy Trap

June 3, 2026 / / 0 Comments


The Outward Turn  ·  Part One

If your church ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside your congregation know it was gone?

Sit with that question for a moment before you answer it.

Not the people on your roster. Not the families who would miss Sunday morning. Not the pastor whose livelihood depends on the doors staying open. I mean the neighbors. The apartment complex two blocks away. The single mom who drives past your building every morning on her way to work. The young couple who moved into the neighborhood last year and has no idea your church exists. The business owner on the corner whose employees walk past your parking lot every day.

Would any of them notice?

For most congregations in America, and I say this not to wound but to wake, the honest answer is no. And that’s not a condemnation of the people in those churches. Most of them are good, faithful, loving people who genuinely believe in what they’re doing. But somewhere along the way, without a single dramatic decision, without anyone choosing it on purpose, the church turned inward. And it stayed there.

That’s the chaplaincy trap. And it’s far more common, far more subtle, and far more dangerous than most church leaders are willing to admit.

How It Happens: Comfort to Competency to Identity

Nobody decides to become a chaplaincy church. It doesn’t show up on a vision statement. No board votes to stop caring about the community outside their walls. It happens incrementally, organically, almost invisibly. And it follows a remarkably consistent pattern.

It starts with comfort. A congregation naturally gravitates toward the things its people enjoy, the programs that feel meaningful, the worship style that resonates, the community events that draw a crowd from within. That’s not inherently wrong. A church should be a place where people are genuinely nourished.

But comfort, left unchecked, slides into competency. We get good at the things we do repeatedly. The choir sounds great. The Sunday school runs smoothly. The potluck is legendary. The small groups are warm and connected. These are genuine goods. But they’re all goods that serve the people already in the room.

And then, and this is the critical moment, that competency hardens into identity. What we do becomes who we are. The choir isn’t just a ministry anymore; it’s the soul of this congregation. The Sunday school isn’t just a program; it’s our heritage. And at that point, any suggestion of change doesn’t feel like a strategic conversation. It feels like an existential threat.

The drift is complete. The church now exists, functionally, to sustain itself. The budget reflects it. The calendar reflects it. The staff structure reflects it. And the community outside the walls? They have no idea the church is there because the church has no idea they exist either.

The chaplaincy trap isn’t about bad people. It’s about good people who stopped asking the most important question: who are we here for?

What It Looks Like in Practice

Pull out your church’s budget from last year. Not the vision statement on the wall the actual budget, where the actual dollars went. Ask yourself one question as you read through it:

How much of this spending is oriented toward people who are not yet in this room?

In most congregations, the honest answer is somewhere between five and fifteen percent. Everything else – staff, facilities, programs, insurance, utilities, equipment – serves the people already gathered. That’s not automatically wrong. But if nearly every dollar is pointed inward, the budget is telling you something the vision statement is not.

Now look at the calendar. Count the events from the last twelve months. Sort them into two columns: events designed primarily for the congregation, and events designed primarily to reach, serve, or welcome people who aren’t part of your church. In most congregations, the second column is nearly empty or at best populated with things like a trunk-or-treat that technically invites the community but is really designed to make insiders feel like they’re doing outreach.

Now look at your staff or volunteer leadership structure. Who has a defined role oriented specifically toward people outside the walls.  Not just hospitality to Sunday morning visitors, but intentional, sustained engagement with the surrounding community? For most churches, the answer is no one.

Budget. Calendar. Staff. These three things tell you more about a church’s actual priorities than any vision statement ever written. And in a chaplaincy church, all three point the same direction: inward.

The Theological Problem Underneath the Practical One

Here’s where I need to say something that goes beyond strategy and budgets, because the chaplaincy trap is not just a leadership failure. It is a theological one.

The church was not gathered by Christ in order to maintain itself. It was gathered in order to be sent. The Great Commission is not an addendum to the Christian life. It is its central organizing principle. The verb “go” is the first word of the gospel commission. Not “gather.” Not “sustain.” Go.

When a congregation loses its outward orientation, it doesn’t just become less effective. It becomes something subtly different from what Jesus intended the church to be. A community that exists primarily to serve its own members is a club, not a church. No matter how sincerely it worships, how soundly it preaches, how warmly it fellowships.

The Apostle Paul’s image of the body in 1 Corinthians 12 is instructive here. Every part exists for the sake of the whole. And the whole exists for the sake of the world. A body that turns all its energy inward, that consumes its own resources on its own comfort, is not healthy. It is ill. And the illness, if untreated, is fatal.

A body that consumes all its energy on its own comfort isn’t thriving. It’s sick. And a congregation that exists primarily for itself has quietly traded the Great Commission for a much smaller story.

The Way Out Is Not a Program. It’s a Posture.

If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of recognition. If some part of you is thinking yes, this is us, and I don’t know how we got here…I want to offer something more useful than guilt.

The way out of the chaplaincy trap is not a new outreach program. It’s not a rebranding effort, a new series, or a community event. Those things can be useful, but they treat the symptom rather than the disease. What actually changes a chaplaincy church is a shift in posture. It’s a fundamental reorientation of how the congregation understands its own existence.

That shift starts not with programs but with proximity. It starts with leaders. No, not just pastors, but elders, deacons, ministry chairs, and committed lay people. It’s leaders choosing to spend intentional time in the community they say they want to reach. Not with an agenda. Not with a tract. Just present. Learning names. Understanding needs. Asking questions instead of offering answers.

It starts with a budget conversation that asks not just “what do we need to sustain our ministries” but “what would we need to fund if we were serious about the people outside this building?” That conversation will be uncomfortable. It should be.

It starts with a calendar that has white space on it. Space not filled with another congregational event, but held open for something that doesn’t exist yet. New ministry rarely gets started because there’s a perfect opportunity. It gets started because someone decided to make room for it before they knew what it would become.

And it starts with the question we opened with. Asked not once, but regularly. Asked in board meetings. Asked in budget reviews. Asked in staff conversations and small group discussions.

If we ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside this room know we were gone?

If the answer is no, or even maybe, that’s not a verdict. It’s your invitation.

Leader Assessment

These questions are designed to be answered in two stages. Sit with the personal questions alone first. Honest self-assessment is the foundation of honest leadership.

Sit With These Alone First

When was the last time I had a meaningful conversation with someone in my community who has no connection to my church – not to recruit them, but simply to know them?

If I’m honest, do I spend more of my leadership energy sustaining what exists or creating space for what doesn’t yet exist?

What would I have to give up personally to lead the church toward a more outward posture? Am I willing to pay that cost?

Bring These to Your Leadership

Pull out last year’s budget and calendar. What percentage of our spending and programming was oriented toward people not yet in this congregation? What does that number tell us?

Ask the question plainly: If our church ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside this congregation notice? What would need to change for the answer to become an unambiguous yes?

Name one specific neighborhood, demographic, or community within two miles of this building that has no meaningful connection to our church. What would it cost us in time, money, and energy to begin building one?

Next in this series: the case for merging, consolidating, and going multisite not as institutional strategy, but as the most faithful thing a dying congregation and a growing one can do for each other.

The Institution Is Not the Church

May 26, 2026 / / 1 Comment

A hard reckoning about numbers, urban deserts, and what it means when a denomination forgets the difference between preserving a structure and advancing a kingdom.

Last week I wrote about the sale of Concordia Ann Arbor and I asked a hard question about what it reveals when a denomination puts a price tag on a Gospel witness in a growing region. The response was significant. More than I expected, honestly. And that reaction itself told me something.

People are not just grieving a university. They are grieving something larger. Something they can feel but struggle to name. The sense that the institution they love is slowly becoming something other than what it was built to be. That the people in charge of it are speaking a language of stewardship and discernment that no longer quite corresponds to the language of the Great Commission.

So let’s go deeper. And let’s be honest about what the numbers actually say.

The Numbers Don’t Lie. They Just Get Ignored.

The LCMS peaked in membership in 1971 at roughly 2.88 million baptized members. As of 2024, that number stands near 1.7 million. That is a loss of over a million people. More than a third of the body in just fifty years.

But the membership number understates the problem. Weekly attendance tells a sharper story. Between 2010 and 2020, average weekly worship attendance was declining at roughly 3.35% per year. After COVID, that rate nearly doubled to 7.85% per year between 2020 and 2023. If you do your own math on this one, you can see this could potentially yield just 50,000 average weekly worshippers sometime between 2070 and 2080. At that point, the denomination will have ceased to function in any meaningful institutional sense for a long time already.

Just let that sink in for a moment. Not as a cause for despair but as a cause for honesty.

And here’s the number that should stop us cold: 45% of LCMS congregations now have average weekly attendance under 50 people. Nearly half of our churches are gatherings smaller than a high school classroom. These are not thriving mission outposts. Most of them are in managed decline, serving aging congregations, waiting on a future that isn’t coming on its own.

Meanwhile, in the Ohio District where I currently serve, baptized membership has declined from roughly 70,000 (back in the day) to approximately 54,576. That’s a loss of more than 20% even as Ohio’s population has grown and shifted toward urban and suburban centers where LCMS presence ranges from thin to invisible.

We are closing more churches than we are opening. And the churches we are opening are largely in communities that already have Lutheran options. The urban core, the very places Jesus walked into, we have largely left.

The Urban Desert in Our Own Backyard

Drive through Columbus. Drive through Cleveland. Drive through Cincinnati. Look at Detroit or pretty much any other inner city option. Then pull up the LCMS church locator and tell me what you see.

You will find Lutheran churches in the suburbs. In the exurbs. In the small towns where German immigrants settled a century ago and their grandchildren’s grandchildren are aging out of the pews. You will find Lutheran schools serving mostly families who are already Lutheran. You will find sturdy, committed congregations doing their best with what they have.

What you will not find, or rarely find, is an intentional, well-resourced, mission-focused LCMS presence in the neighborhoods where the city is actually alive. Where young people are moving. Where immigrants are building new communities. Where the spiritual hunger is real and the Gospel infrastructure is nearly absent.

The Ohio District has approximately 154 congregations, down from roughly 170 just a few years ago. The state of Ohio has 11.8 million people. The math on Gospel presence per capita is not inspiring and it gets worse when you factor in that most of those 154 congregations are not positioned anywhere near the population density that is growing.

The Ohio District’s own website has a dedicated page for church closure information. That page exists because it gets used. Regularly. Four to five closures a year in some districts. Friends that’s not an anomaly, it’s a pattern. That’s a denomination managing retreat, not advancing mission.

We Are Not the First to Face This. But We Might Be the Last to Admit It.

I want to be fair here. The trends hitting the LCMS are not unique to us. Across all Protestant denominations in America, more churches are closing than opening. Weekly church attendance in the U.S. has dropped from 42% of Americans to 30% in recent decades. The secular tide is real. Demographics are real. The cultural headwinds against institutional Christianity are real.

But “everyone is struggling” is not a strategy. It is a sedative.

The question is not whether the environment is hard. It obviously is. The question is whether our response to that environment reflects the mission we were given, or whether it reflects the priorities of an institution trying to survive on its own terms.

And here is where I have to say something uncomfortable.

When a denomination is simultaneously closing schools and churches at an accelerating rate, losing a third of its members over fifty years, watching its urban footprint evaporate, and spending significant resources on legal battles with its own universities, internal governance restructuring, and asset liquidation and the primary public narrative from leadership is about “faithful stewardship” and “prayerful discernment” something is wrong. Not with the people in the pews. Not necessarily even with the pastors in the pulpits. But with the institutional priorities of those who are steering the ship.

You cannot tell me an institution is healthy when it has a dedicated committee to help churches close, a declining count of congregations year over year, and growing urban regions with nearly no intentional Gospel presence. That is not stewardship. That is hospice.

Jesus Is Lord of the Church. That Is Not the Same as “Jesus Will Save Our Institution.”

Here is the theological core of all of this, and I want to say it carefully. The point is not to be provocative. This is true and important and pastors need to say it out loud.

Jesus Christ is Lord of the Church. The Body of Christ, you know the living, breathing, Spirit-indwelt community of believers across every nation and tribe and tongue is indestructible. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. Christ promised. And Christ keeps his promises.

But…He did not promise to preserve the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

He did not promise to preserve any institution, any denomination, any particular governance structure, any set of buildings, or any administrative apparatus. History is littered with denominations that once thrived and now are footnotes. The Church of Jesus Christ absorbed them and moved on. It will do the same with ours if we are not careful.

And here is the danger: when we confuse the institution with the Church, we start to make decisions that serve the institution at the expense of the mission. We consolidate campuses not to serve the Gospel but to service debt. We close urban congregations not because the mission is finished but because the building costs too much and the congregation is too small to sustain the budget. We fight legal battles over institutional control while the neighborhoods outside our offices grow more desperate for the one thing we are supposedly in business to give away.

Institutional idolatry doesn’t look like bowing to a golden calf. It looks like choosing institutional survival over missional risk. It looks like protecting assets instead of planting flags. It looks like a denomination so focused on what it is that it forgets what it is for.

What Faithful Stewardship Actually Looks Like

I am not calling for abandoning structure. Confessional Lutheranism has a theology, a liturgy, and a polity worth preserving. Order matters. Doctrine matters. The confessions matter. I believe this deeply.

But stewardship of a confessional tradition is not the same as institutionalism. True stewardship asks: what does this tradition have to give to the world? And where does the world most need what we have?

The answer to that second question is not “in the same suburbs where we’ve always been.” It is in the cities. In the neighborhoods where the Gospel is most absent. It is among the immigrants, the young adults, the working poor, the spiritually hungry people who would never walk into a Lutheran church because they have no idea what Lutheran means and no one has ever come to find them.

Luther himself was a reformer. That means he was someone who looked at a church that had become fat on its own structures and said: this is not what the Gospel requires. His courage was not primarily institutional. It was theological. It was missional. He nailed something to a door and trusted God with the outcome.

We need some of that energy right now. Not recklessness. Not the abandonment of what is true and good. But the willingness to say: if the structure is not serving the mission, the structure needs to change. Even if changing it is costly, even if it upsets people, even if it requires admitting we have been protecting the wrong things.

The Questions That Deserve a Public Answer

I will close with this. I am a pastor in the LCMS. I love this church body. I believe in Lutheran theology. I am raising families in these pews. I am baptizing people, preaching the Word, and building the kind of community I believe the Scriptures describe.

I want the institution I serve to be worthy of the mission I have been given. And right now, I need answers to some questions that are not being asked loudly enough:

What is our concrete, measurable plan for urban mission in the LCMS over the next ten years?

How many new church plants have we started in the last five years, and how does that compare to closures in the same period?

Where is the money from liquidated assets going? Is any of it being deployed into high-need, low-presence mission fields?

When we talk about “faithful stewardship,” are we measuring faithfulness by the mission of Christ, or by the solvency of the institution?

These are not hostile questions. They are the questions a church body that takes its mandate seriously should be asking in public, with transparency, and with the humility to admit that the current trajectory is not good enough.

Jesus is Lord of the Church. That means he is not impressed by our organizational charts, our endowment balances, or our carefully worded governance resolutions. He is looking for people who will go. Who will cross the street. Who will plant a church in a neighborhood where no one asked for one. Who will spend the inheritance, not bury it.

The institution does not need to be preserved. The mission needs to be pursued. Those two things are not always the same, and right now, in the LCMS, I’m not sure we know the difference.

God help us to learn it before it’s too late to matter.

$60 Million and a Gutted Beacon: What the Sale of Concordia Ann Arbor Really Tells Us

May 19, 2026 / / 15 Comments

The grief is real. But the question underneath the grief is more important.

I’ve been watching the reaction to the sale of Concordia University Ann Arbor this week. The alumni posts, the lament threads, the old yearbook photos dusted off and shared one more time. For some the grief is real. Alma maters matter. The place where your faith was sharpened, where you met your spouse, where a professor looked you in the eye and said “you can do this.” That place is sacred ground in a way that defies a spreadsheet.

But I need to say something plainly, even if it’s uncomfortable:

The loss of a memory is not the issue. The loss of a mission is.

And if we stop at the nostalgia, if we cry our tears and then move on, we will have missed the harder and more essential question. And since I’ve never been one to avoid a hard question, let’s go there.

Ten Became Six. Six Became Five. What’s Next?

The Concordia University System was founded in 1992 with ten institutions. That number was itself the product of a century of church investment. These were academies built to train pastors, school teachers, deaconesses, church workers. Brick by brick, generation by generation, the LCMS built a network of places where Lutheran young people could be shaped for a life of faithful service.

Then the erosion began.

Concordia College Alabama was closed in 2018. A historically Black Lutheran college, the only one of its kind. Gone. Voices silenced as if nothing ever happened.

Concordia University Portland was then closed in 2020. Faculty and staff displaced. Five thousand students scattered. A second-largest teacher preparation program in the state of Oregon was extinguished in seconds.

Concordia College New York closed in 2021. Its campus sold to Iona College.

Concordia University Ann Arbor was absorbed into Wisconsin in 2013. Its historic Geddes Road campus of 140 acres on the Huron River in one of Michigan’s fastest-growing university corridors has since been sold to the University of Michigan this month for $60 million.

And Concordia University Texas, which tried to govern itself independently and found itself in a protracted legal battle with the Synod for the privilege. Now no longer part of the LCMS Concordia University System.

Ten institutions. Now, generously, five with full standing. And a denomination in a courtroom fight with one of its own universities.

Someone explain to me how this is a picture of flourishing.

We didn’t lose a campus. We lost a post. And the question no one wants to answer is: who gave the order to abandon it?

The Official Story and the Smell Test

The official explanation from Concordia University Wisconsin and Ann Arbor is tidy. Years of operating losses. Extended careful analysis. Prayerful discernment. Consultation with the Board of Regents. A decision to steward resources faithfully.

Those phrases are true enough, as far as they go. Small private colleges are under enormous pressure across the country. Enrollment declines, tuition dependency, bloated administrative costs. These are real structural problems in higher education, not merely invented ones.

But here’s what doesn’t add up.

When Concordia Ann Arbor’s story began to unravel in early 2024, the new university president announced the campus needed to be “reimagined.” Eleven of eighteen board members were brand new at the time. Some hadn’t even received their board orientation yet when this announcement was made. Board members who reportedly felt the financial story was being shaped to justify a predetermined conclusion. One insider described it plainly: “I think they thought they could sell CUAA to make Concordia, Wisconsin all the more viable and then were trying to weasel to tell the financial story, to make it seem like our hands are tied.”

Hands are never fully tied. Hands are positioned. And the position here looks less like stewardship and more like consolidation.

The question worth asking: was this campus sold because it was unsustainable, or was it sold because it was inconvenient to a larger plan to concentrate resources, reduce complexity, and centralize institutional power within the Synod’s preferred structures?

I don’t have a smoking gun. But I have a pattern.

The Pattern Is the Problem

Alabama. Portland. New York. Ann Arbor. Each one announced with careful language about financial realities. Each one mourned and then absorbed into the institutional memory of the Synod. Each one a place that had educated pastors, teachers, nurses, social workers, people who went into communities and built churches and taught children and loved their neighbors in the name of Jesus.

And each one: gone.

Meanwhile, the Synod’s gravitational pull has been increasingly toward centralization. A 2021 proposal was made to dissolve the Concordia University System and replace it with a new “Commission on University Education,” a structure that would give synodical leadership more direct oversight of “ecclesiastical functions” at each school. Governance battles. Legal fights. A denomination in a lawsuit with its own university in Texas.

Is anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?

The issue is not just whether individual campuses were financially viable. The issue is what vision is being pursued, and whether that vision was ever put to the church for its discernment, or whether it’s simply being executed from the top while the rest of us are handed press releases about prayerful consideration.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that $60 million from a single campus sale in a growing university corridor, in a region with a young population represents a story where every option was exhausted.

What Is the Vision? Because I Can’t Find It.

Here is what I want someone to answer publicly, clearly, and without the language of corporate discernment:

What is the LCMS’s vision for Lutheran higher education in the United States in 2030?

Is it five campuses? Three? One online platform and a seminary? Because the trajectory we’re on leads somewhere, and I want to know where church leadership believes it leads and whether they believe it’s good. Better yet is it God honoring?

If the vision is to consolidate and strengthen what remains, then fine. Make the case. Argue for it. Show your work. Tell the church what you believe a sustainable, faithful model of Lutheran higher education looks like in a disrupted landscape.

But don’t shut down beacons one by one, collect the assets, and call it stewardship. Don’t let 140 acres on the Huron River, in one of the most university-dense corridors in the Midwest, in a city that is growing, not shrinking go to the University of Michigan for $60 million while telling us there was no other way.

Because I’ll tell you what I see when I look at that sale: I see a growing area. I see a young population. I see a university-saturated culture hungry for an alternative. Looking for a place grounded in something bigger than credentials and career tracks. I see exactly the kind of context where a Lutheran witness should be leaning in, not cashing out.

And I see $60 million which, let’s be honest, is not going to build a new campus or launch a new model of mission. It’s going to service debt and fund operations somewhere else. The kingdom did not just gain $60 million. It lost a post.

The Price Tag on a Baptized Life

There’s something theologically grotesque about putting a dollar value on the loss of a place where young people were baptized into faith communities, formed in Lutheran catechesis, sent out as pastors and teachers and nurses and musicians and parents and neighbors.

I’m not being sentimental. I’m being precise.

The Great Commission is not a metaphor. “Go and make disciples” is not a strategic aspiration. It’s a mandate. And a Lutheran university, however imperfect, however financially stressed, was a mechanism for that mandate. It was a place where the church said to the next generation: we will invest in you, because you matter to the mission.

When we sell that place, not to another mission-minded institution, not to a church partner, but to the University of Michigan and we bank the $60 million and call it responsible stewardship, we have made a choice about what we value. We have revealed something about our priorities.

We have put a price on a beacon of the Gospel in a growing region. And that price was $60 million and a politically worded press release.

Has our leadership lost their way? I don’t know. But I know a leader who has lost their way will never stop to ask the question. That’s on us.

The Hard Question We Cannot Avoid

I want to be careful here, because I am not inside the rooms where these decisions were made. I don’t have access to the debt schedules or the enrollment projections or the full burden of what the board knew. Good people can make difficult calls under real constraints.

But I am a pastor in an LCMS congregation. I preach the Word. I baptize children and adults. I send people out into a world that is desperate for something true and enduring. And I need to be able to tell my congregation with a straight face that the institution we belong to is governed by people who share our priorities.

Right now, I’m not sure I can.

What I want, what I think many faithful LCMS pastors and laypeople want, is not nostalgia. It’s accountability. It’s transparency. It’s a leadership that will stop announcing decisions with pastoral language and start actually pastoring the church through the hard questions.

What is our vision for Lutheran higher education?

What happened to the proceeds from Alabama, Portland, and New York?

Who is asking whether the consolidation trend is a strategy or a slow institutional collapse dressed up as discernment?

And if the answer is that we’re down to five universities and comfortable with that trajectory, then for goodness sake just say so. Own it. Defend it. Let the church weigh in.

Because right now, it feels like the decisions are being made, the assets are being converted, and the rest of us are being handed processed grief and told to feel grateful for what remains.

We deserve better than that. And more importantly, the mission deserves better than that.

One More Thing

I am writing this not as a voice of despair, but as a voice of conviction. The church of Jesus Christ is not dependent on institutions. It has outlasted empires. It will outlast the Concordia University System and the LCMS itself if it comes to that.

But stewardship is not merely financial. It is missional. And a church that measures stewardship only by balance sheets and not by the number of pastors formed, teachers sent, communities served, lives changed has already lost something more important than a campus.

It has lost its north star. It has lost God.

God grant us leaders who know the difference. And God grant us the courage to demand they lead accordingly.

Stewardship Means Structure: 3 Moves We Can Make Right Now

April 29, 2026 / / 1 Comment

If we’re serious about moving from calling out the problem to actually changing the trajectory, then we need to get practical.

Not someday.
Not when things get worse.
Now.

In the last post, I outlined six pathways forward. Let’s take the first three and press into what they actually look like on the ground because if we don’t define them, they’ll stay ideas instead of action.

1. Deploy Real Transition Teams (Not Just Advice. Actual Help)

Right now, when a church starts to struggle, the “support system” often looks like this:

  • A meeting or two
  • Some general encouragement
  • Maybe a suggestion or two

And then… they’re largely on their own.

That’s not enough.

What a Transition Team Could Actually Look Like

Imagine instead a designated transition team that walks with a congregation for a defined season (6-18 months for starters). This team would be made up of:

  • A seasoned pastor with revitalization or merger experience
  • A trained lay leader (governance, finance, or organizational leadership)
  • A district representative who knows available resources and processes
  • A facilitator/coach who can lead hard conversations without emotional entanglement

This isn’t a task force that decides things. It’s a team that guides, clarifies, and moves the process forward.

What They Would Do

  • Conduct a real assessment of congregational health (not just attendance numbers)
  • Lead structured conversations with leadership and members
  • Lay out clear pathways: revitalization, partnership, merger, or closure
  • Help create a timeline with actual next steps
  • Keep the mission front and center when emotions run high

The Reality We’re Ignoring

We already have people who could do this. Within the district and synod structure, there are:

  • Circuit visitors
  • District presidents and vice presidents
  • Mission and ministry staff
  • Experienced pastors who have navigated these waters before

The issue isn’t a lack of people. It’s a lack of intentional deployment.

What if instead of waiting for churches to hit crisis mode these teams were proactively assigned when early warning signs appeared?

That’s not control. That’s care.

2. Normalize and Resource Church-to-Church Partnerships

This one is HUGE.

And honestly, it exposes something deeper in us. Because the resistance here isn’t logistical. It’s personal.

We like “our church.”
Our programs.
Our people.
Our traditions.

But the mission has never been about ours. Jesus even said he came to seek and to save the lost – disconnected – not here yet ones.

The Current Reality

In the same community, you’ll often find:

  • Multiple churches running under-resourced ministries
  • Multiple VBS programs competing for the same handful of kids
  • Multiple part-time staff stretched thin
  • Multiple congregations quietly declining separately

And we call that independence. But it’s often just inefficiency.

What Partnership Could Actually Look Like

  • Shared staffing
    • One pastor across multiple congregations
    • Shared Directors of Christian Education or Family Life
    • Joint outreach coordinators
  • Shared ministry efforts
    • One strong, community-wide VBS instead of five struggling ones
    • Combined youth groups
    • Joint outreach events that actually reach critical mass
  • Adoptive relationships
    • A healthier church helping lead and support a smaller one
    • Multi-site or campus models where it makes sense

Let’s Be Blunt

There is no Kingdom reason for five churches in one town to each run a half-effective ministry when together they could create something far stronger.

Sometimes our desire to “have our piece” of ministry is less about mission and more about control.

But if the Gospel is the goal, then collaboration isn’t optional. It’s essential.

What Needs to Change

We don’t just need permission for partnership.

We need active encouragement and resourcing:

  • Clear frameworks for how to share staff legally and financially
  • Templates for partnership agreements
  • Coaching for leaders navigating shared ministry
  • Stories that normalize this as wise, not desperate

Because right now, too many churches think partnership means failure. In reality, it might be the most faithful step forward.

3. Build a Best Practices Playbook for Hard Conversations

Look. I get it. Most churches don’t avoid hard decisions because they don’t care. They avoid them because they don’t know how to navigate them.

So they stall.
Or they argue.
Or they pretend things are fine.

The Questions We’re Avoiding

  • When is it time to seriously consider merging or even closing?
  • What does faithfulness look like in decline?
  • How do we honor the past without being held hostage by it?
  • Who actually gets to make these decisions and how?
  • What happens to the building, the money, the legacy?

These are heavy questions. And without guidance, they can feel overwhelming.

What a Playbook Could and Maybe Should Include

First, it is not a theological essay. It should be a practical, step-by-step guide:

1. Discernment Phase

  • Key indicators that change is necessary
  • Assessment tools (attendance across more than just worship, ministry engagement, financial health, community reach)
  • Questions every leadership team must wrestle with

2. Conversation Phase

  • How to structure congregational meetings
  • How to handle conflict and emotional responses
  • How to communicate clearly without causing panic

3. Decision Pathways

  • What revitalization actually requires
  • What partnership looks like in practice
  • What a healthy merger process entails
  • What faithful closure looks like (yes, that too)

4. Practical Logistics

  • Legal and constitutional considerations
  • Financial processes
  • Property decisions
  • Denominational procedures

5. Pastoral Care

  • Caring for members through grief and change
  • Honoring the legacy of a congregation
  • Keeping the Gospel central through every step

Why This Matters

Right now, every church feels like they’re reinventing the wheel. They don’t have to. We already have the experience. We already have the stories. We just haven’t organized them into something usable.

And until we do, churches will keep defaulting to inaction because inaction feels safer than the unknown.

Final Thought

None of this requires a theological shift. Our very theological identity and synodical polity actually allow and even was built for this! It just requires a structural and cultural shift.

  • Deploy people we already have
  • Work together instead of apart (anyone know what synod actually means)
  • Equip churches to face reality with clarity and courage

This is what stewardship looks like.

Not just naming the problem. But building pathways forward that churches can actually walk.

Next week, we’ll tackle the final three:

  • Activating synod and district resources more effectively
  • Funding strategy instead of survival
  • And telling better stories that redefine what success really looks like

I firmly believe we’re not done. Not even close!

Changing Times

August 1, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The times we’re living right now are times many of us never thought we’d see. The speed of cultural shift is so drastic it’s almost dizzying! Look at how fast things have morphed in the past 3-5 years. Some blame the pandemic others blow the thing off like it never happened. I think a better assessment is that it happened, whether we like it or not, and that it accelerated our lives to a speed many of us are not comfortable with. It’s even been said that our society jumped forward about 10 years in the span of 2 years time.

Changing times are terrifying. We don’t like change often because we can’t control it. Something being out of control is not fun. I’m often branded a control freak. But that’s not totally accurate. I tend to embrace change pretty easily and change is out of control. I would say I have a need to be informed about what’s happening so I can be prepared to address challenges that arise. That’s not control it’s desiring information.

Recently the national version of the church body to which I belong made some pretty bold moves. And not bold in a good way necessarily. Honestly I think they’re bold in a way that shows some lack of faith and a bit of cowardice.

I know this is going to probably push someone’s buttons. While that is not the intent, if it does get people having a dialogue instead of unilaterally legislating how we handle change in the world then so be it. I’ll push away!

There are two matters that have really stood out to me as I’ve participated virtually in this conference: as a church body we really have a trust issue and control is pretty important.

There are a couple topics that make this super evident to me. One of which is the desire to focus on one method for raising up pastors in the church body. While I admittedly did not hear anyone say that only pastors going through a residential seminary training process are real and everyone else is fake or lesser, that sure seems to be the tenor of the conversation. I am willing to be wrong here.

The matter from my perspective is one of control. While I do believe it is important that anyone who is rightly called as a pastor within this church body know what we believe, teach and confess. And while I also know that it is important to have diligent study of the Bible and our confessional structure, I also believe wholeheartedly that there is more than one way to get that same result.

Just like I was able to participate in the conference virtually and virtual education methods are numerous and getting more user friendly, having a strong virtual element to the raising up of pastors would be fantastic. I have men in the congregation I serve who would make phenomenal pastors but they just can’t uproot their families or quit their jobs. So alas that’s one less pastoral candidate our church body has in circulation.

The unwillingness to release a little control over the structure of how things are taught (not what is taught but how and where) is really disheartening. I honestly am shocked when I see how the apostles led the churches in the book of Acts. They were uneducated men. They didn’t uproot their families to go off to an institution for a 4 year stint to learn something. They were able to learn while they lived their daily lives.

Are there some trade offs? Yes there are but doing the same thing the same way will not yield a higher result. It just won’t work that way. We should still cherish the traditional route to ministry that has served us well for many years! But releasing a little control back to the parish pastors and working alongside them to raise up and train men for works of ministry sounds kind of Book of Acts to me. Keep high standards. Work on curriculum or teaching points/methods. But leave the how and where to the local guys with regular checkins from the structures that already exist.

But then there’s the whole trust issue. Do we trust that the men in the field are going to steward their gifts properly? I think this is a huge struggle as well. I mean most of them were trained in the residential program that is being held up as the only way to do it. And yet we don’t seem to trust them to be able to teach other men to do the same job? Seems to show a lack of trust in our own teaching! One of the signs of a great teaching is that the student is able to teach the material to someone else.

Look I get it. None of this is going to be easy. But it doesn’t have to be impossible either. The tighter we hold to this method as the only method, the more we’re going to lose. But why is it so hard for us to let go a little?

Change is hard because it leaves things out of control for a period of time. I’m not one of those change everything just because we can kind of guys but we need to know what can change and what can’t change. Changing nothing is not an option. It just isn’t possible. If we can manage change well, we can better manage the chaos that’s so often associated with change.

I think a long and hard conversation needs to be had about where God wants his church to go. Not where we want it to stay. It’s time to make some bold moves for the sake of the kingdom. Repent where we’ve made mistakes. But keep moving and advancing the kingdom. It’s only then that we will see how weak hell’s gates truly are (as long as we’re sitting here those gates hold up pretty darn well).

The times are changing and while the message can’t change – the methods are going to have to change.

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