Twenty Miles Doesn’t Change What We Lost

A few of you did the same thing I did. After reading “Ashes on the Prairie” you looked up how far the nearest LCMS congregations actually are from the two churches that closed in Iowa. I did that before writing and then again after it was pointed out to me that my data was incorrect. After 3 attempts, I received three different sets of answers. So I will backpedal the number of churches around comment.

Originally I’d assumed a distance of 30 to 60 miles. That’s not right. There are a few congregations within roughly 20 miles. I want to correct that plainly, because getting a fact wrong and not saying so out loud is its own small version of the exact problem I was writing about. Treating precision as optional when it’s inconvenient. So: I was wrong about the distance and for that I apologize. There’s the correction. However, I’m not sorry for the post, and here’s why the correction doesn’t touch what I actually think it cost us.

The members were not really who I was worried about

Twenty miles is a distance committed people close without much drama. If you already believe the proper preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments matter enough to organize a Sunday around, you drive 20 miles. You drive farther than that. I said as much in the original piece, and if anything the shorter number makes that point easier to make, not harder. The members of those two congregations will very likely find their way to a faithful LCMS church “nearby.” I trust that, and I’m glad the distance is shorter than I assumed.

That was never the group I was writing about.

The number that matters isn’t the mileage. It’s the conviction.

Here’s the distinction the correction actually sharpens: 20 miles is nothing to someone already convinced it matters. It’s plenty far to someone who isn’t convinced yet. That has almost nothing to do with whether the real number is 20 or 60. A neighbor who was three years from walking through those doors for the first time wasn’t measuring the drive in miles. They weren’t going to get in a car and drive anywhere, 20 minutes or 60, to visit a church they had no relationship to yet. They were going to walk down the street because a friend from their own small town finally invited them to the church five minutes from their porch.

That’s not how the overwhelming majority of unreached people come to faith, at 20 miles or 60. They come to faith close to home, through a relationship, in a building they can get to without it requiring a decision. The building that was five minutes away is now gone. The 20-mile option was never going to be the reason that specific neighbor met Jesus, and neither would a 60-mile one. The whole argument was about proximity to relationship, not proximity to a map pin, and I said the math wrong without changing the actual claim.

Twenty miles is not a hardship for the committed. It was never going to be crossed by the not-yet. That was the whole point, and it was true at 60 miles and it’s still true at 20.

One more thing worth naming while I’m being precise

I ran the LCMS congregation finder for that area three separate times while checking this. I got three different sets of results each time. That’s a small thing next to two closed churches, and I don’t want to overstate it. But it’s the same disease in miniature. A denomination that can’t reliably tell a family where the nearest faithful congregation actually is has a mission-infrastructure problem sitting quietly underneath the bigger one. If we’re serious about people finding their way to a church home, the tool that’s supposed to help them do that should actually work. All the time. Consistently.

Where I land

I got a number wrong and I’m glad to fix it in the open rather than quietly edit the original post and hope nobody noticed. But the correction doesn’t touch the thing I actually think happened in Iowa. Two Gospel outposts closed. The people already convinced will be fine, at 20 miles or well beyond it. The people who weren’t convinced yet lost their nearest door, and no distance I misquoted changes that. That’s still the whole point, and I still believe it’s worth being furious about.

What Doesn’t Change

The advancement of the Gospel still lost. I know the two churches haven’t had a full time pastor for many years, but that really isn’t the point. There are a lot of churches that don’t have full time pastors. Does that mean they should all close too? I certainly don’t think so. The way I read Scripture, which is our sole source and norm for faith and life, is that the New Testament church didn’t have full time clergy either. Another argument I’ve received was that this young man didn’t even have a college degree. Well I don’t know about that and honestly I don’t know how much that matters. Education is something that can be provided. Beef up the SMP program don’t restrict it.

I’m not saying we let everyone into this program. Not at all. But I am saying a semi arbitrary number, like an age requirement, even if tied to actual attrition data which to my knowledge has never been publicized, should be evaluated a little more closely. I also think there are holes in the process for both residential and online systems of training men for ministry. Don’t get me wrong, I value my residential education experience very much. But there is no requirement or even expectation for ongoing education once we’re out of seminary. We can literally graduate from our residential program and never crack a book again. If we’re going to have a robust system for training men for ministry, then perhaps we need to evaluate the whole system. How do we ensure that our men are continually being equipped for the ministry around us?

I don’t have all the answers. I do have a lot of questions. The intent of these posts is not to disparage the LCMS or its leadership. It’s to challenge the status quo. Challenge the thought process that got us to where we are. There’s an age old adage that says “what got you to where you are, won’t get you to where you’re going.” And that’s exactly what I see happening around me in this beloved LCMS. We’re clinging to the processes that got us here. And that process did well getting us here. But is that going to get us where we’re headed? We are at a place where churches are closing and we don’t have enough pastors to fill the ones we still have. Will the process we have before us get us to a place where we have enough pastors to fill the empty pulpits around us? I’ve heard in many circles, even from leadership at the synod level, that answer is no. So if we know that let’s get creative with systems while staying unapologetically unwavering on our adherence to sound biblical teaching.

Friends I’m sorry for getting a mile number wrong. That was my mistake. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. My heart still goes out to the communities that now don’t have a strong biblical and confessional presence in their midst.

This is a follow-up to Ashes on the Prairie: What We Just Let Die in Iowa.