Why I’m Still LCMS (Even When It Frustrates Me)

I’ve spent the last several months writing about what’s wrong with the Missouri Synod.

Declining membership. Concordia Ann Arbor’s campus, sold. A convention floor where “brother” and “opponent” get used almost interchangeably. I’ve named some of this in public, on this blog, with data and dates attached. I don’t regret any of it. Love doesn’t require silence.

But I keep getting a version of the same question, usually from someone who’s read that stuff and is wrestling with their own frustration: so why are you still here?

Fair question. Here’s my honest answer.

I’m not still LCMS because it’s easy

Let’s start there, because I don’t want this to read as a defense of an institution that doesn’t need defending from me. It’s not easy. Synods are slow, political, occasionally petty, and capable of spending enormous energy on things that won’t matter in ten years while the mission field outside the front door goes unattended.

I’ve sat in meetings that made me want to plant an independent congregation and never fill out another form again. If you’ve felt that, I’m not going to tell you it’s illegitimate. It isn’t.

So if it’s not ease, and it’s not blind loyalty, what is it?

The theology is actually true

I mean that plainly. Not “true for us” or “a helpful tradition.” I believe the Book of Concord accurately describes what Scripture says about who God is, what sin actually costs, and what Christ actually did about it.

Law and Gospel, rightly distinguished, is the difference between a faith that eventually collapses under its own performance and one that can hold a person together on their worst day. I have watched that distinction save people. Not metaphorically, actually keep them from despair, or from a self-righteousness that would have hardened into something worse.

I don’t stay in the LCMS because I inherited it either. I stay because I keep testing it against Scripture and it keeps holding.

The sacraments are not optional extras

I need a font I can point to and say this happened, on this day, and it was God’s act, not the baby’s decision.

I need a table where the words “given and shed for you” are a promise attached to bread and wine, not a metaphor I’m supposed to feel my way into. I need absolution spoken out loud, by another human being, in the stead of Christ not just implied, not just assumed, but said.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s a pastor telling you what he needs on the days his own faith is thin, which is more days than I’d prefer to admit. The sacramental life of this tradition has carried me on weeks when my own devotion couldn’t have.

The liturgy keeps me honest

Left to myself, I would build a worship service that flattered my preferences and called it authenticity. The formula of the liturgy won’t let me. It hands me confession every week whether I feel like confessing or not. It puts the same words in my mouth that were in the mouths of Christians centuries before I was a thought, which is a strange and steadying kind of company.

It’s also just good. Formed by people who thought carefully about how the Gospel should shape an hour. It anchors me into something solid, true, and lasting. I don’t experience that as restriction. I experience it as being handed something sturdier than what I could have built. And when I say liturgy, I don’t just mean the printed stuff in the front of our hymnals. I mean the story the liturgy draws me into. The calling on God’s name. The confession and forgiveness. The powerful words of the songs. The focus on God’s Word. All of these things are present in the hymnals for sure, but there are other expressions of worship that can and do communicate the same powerful realities. I love this about being a LCMS follower of Jesus.

The people are actually my family

This is the one that surprises me most, honestly, because it’s the one I’d have named least a decade ago.

I have brothers in this synod I disagree with sharply on polity, on practice, on some things that matter. I’ve written recently about what it costs to keep calling those people family instead of opponents. That post wasn’t theoretical. Those are real names in my head when I write it.

And I keep choosing them. Not because disagreement stopped mattering, but because I’ve watched what happens when Christians decide disagreement is sufficient grounds to stop being family. It isn’t. Family gets to be exasperating. That’s actually part of the definition, not an exception to it.

I’m not still LCMS because leaving would be hard. I’m still LCMS because everything I actually need – a true confession, a real sacrament, an honest liturgy, a family I didn’t choose but wouldn’t trade all of it is here, underneath the parts that frustrate me.

What staying is not

Staying isn’t the same as pretending the problems aren’t real. I’ll probably keep writing about the membership numbers, because a synod that won’t look honestly at its own decline isn’t being faithful, it’s being comfortable. I’ll keep pushing on the things that need pushing.

But I’ve come to think staying and critiquing aren’t in tension. A marriage where you never named what was hard wouldn’t be a healthy marriage. It’d be an avoidant one. The people who love this synod best are usually the ones honest enough to tell it the truth and patient enough to still be standing there afterward.

That’s the posture I’m aiming for. Not a defender with his eyes closed. Not a critic with one foot out the door. Someone who stayed, said the hard thing, and stayed anyway because what’s underneath the frustration is worth staying for.

Before the LCMS is an institution with problems, it’s a family with a confession. I’m still here because I still believe that confession is true, and because a family, even a frustrating one, is still where I belong.