A Conversation With Pastor Zach Zehnder, Red Letter Living

Data, doctrine, and a future we can’t ignore. An unflinching look at the numbers and the Scriptural and Confessional fidelity that will determine whether we drift into extinction.

A portion of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s (LCMS)future depends on whether we are willing to have unflinching conversations. For too long, our discussions have been ships passing in the night. One boat talks metrics; the other talks theology. One side waves spreadsheets and business plans; the other waves the hymnal and chasubles. A church body that ignores its data drifts into denial, and a church that ignores its doctrine drifts into false witness.

So, let’s have a discussion!

Transcript

Well, hey, Red Letter disciples! Another podcast to challenge you to be a greater disciple of Jesus. We are centered in on some conversations about being greater disciples in our church body, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Happy to bring today’s guest on, Tim Wood.

Tim and his wife, Wanita, came from South Africa many years ago, converted to Lutheranism, and have gone all in on the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. In fact, they started a church supply and gift store called Ad Crucem—you can check the show links for the spelling on that. It opened its doors in 2014 and serves churches around our world.

They’re members of Trinity Lutheran Church in Denver, Colorado. Tim serves as the president there, and he also serves on the Board of Regents at Concordia Seminary. Tim is a really amazing data guy and he’s really passionate about helping our denomination move forward, being both faithful and fruitful, and really trying to help people assess the times that we’re living in.

And that’s actually how we got connected. I came up with a survey—if you’re used to my channel, you know it had 1054 Lutheran leaders respond. I’ve been using that survey and talking about the data on different videos and podcasts to inform conversations. Tim saw it and had some issues and saw some shortcomings that came out of the survey, and so he wrote an article.

I thought, rather than arguing over comments, what would it look like for Tim to join me on our podcast? So I hope you enjoy our conversation. I think that again, as Lutherans, we agree on far more than we disagree, and it’s really important when we disagree that we talk about it. We talk about it publicly, we talk about it privately, and hopefully this conversation is that and stirs things in the right direction.

I would honor and hope that you would have some feedback or thoughts or comments. If you want to, go ahead and post those—if you’re watching on YouTube, you can do that—or email us at hello@redletterchallenge.com around what other conversations you’d like us to have.

Today is sponsored by Red Letter Living. We create 40-day challenges to help your churches become greater and filled with greater disciples. Our latest is on giving and generosity, and we just had the first wave of churches that finished it and saw some amazing results. Churches grew in their generosity like crazy and individuals, many of them, started taking up the generous life.

I heard one story of a woman who, after she went through this, actually decided to give a $20,000 gift to a charity that she really loves and is passionate about—something she otherwise wasn’t thinking about. And so, praise God that generosity moves the world forward in big ways. I also got to hear another awesome story of a family that decided, after reading The Giving Challenge, that they were going to change their will and learn to be more generous.

So, really cool things. If you want individuals stepping up and being more generous—which is only going to help your God-sized vision at your church—check out redlettergiving.com. We’d love to launch a 40-day challenge in the new year or in Lent.

Having said all of that, if you haven’t followed or subscribed, please do that on whatever watching or listening platform is your favorite. Give us a review if you’re able to on that platform. And without further ado, let’s get to today’s conversation with Tim Wood.

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All right. We are excited for another really, I hope, helpful episode of Red Letter Disciple. I’ve got a guest, Tim Wood, joining me today, and I just want to get right to Tim because Tim’s got a South African accent and I just want his accent to start the podcast.

So, Tim, tell me a little bit of your story, man. How did you get from South Africa to America?

Hey, thanks, Pastor. I appreciate the invite and it’s great to chat to you. The South African accent really depends on who you ask, right? The Brits absolutely hate it, and the North Island Kiwis are not so keen on it either, but Americans seem pretty fetched with it.

My wife and I grew up in South Africa, born and raised, many, many generations there, very close to when the original settlers arrived. Our first daughter was born there in 1999, and we won green cards in the lottery in 2000. So that’s how we ended up being able to immigrate here, because it’s very difficult to get into the States legally unless you’ve got the connections or you step across the Rio Grande. It’s very unlikely to happen.

We finally got that done. We’d been trying to get to Australia, but that’s very difficult if you don’t have a professional degree, and we’re just lowly BAs.

Are you a rugby or cricket guy?

Definitely rugby. Cricket is nice, but I avoided it at all costs at school because it took the whole Saturday. For my summer sport, I did basketball and that was a very minor time commitment, and I could do the things I liked pretty quickly.

That’s awesome. I got to do ministry with someone from South Africa who went through our SMP program when I was in ministry in Florida. What percentage of time do people mistake your accent for Australian?

I mean, pretty often. I think it’s just because they’re more familiar with the Australian accent, and that’s the only reason. Most people ask if we’re English or Australian.

The reality is the accent closest to ours in the world is South Island, New Zealand. And then there’s a little pocket in Natal between Durban and Pietermaritzburg where they will say things like “feesh [fish] and meer [mayor],” and that’s even more New Zealand. Just the strange quirks.

And y’all don’t want to be associated with New Zealand when it comes to rugby, I know that—the All Blacks, right?

Well, we feel sorry for them. I mean, we just keep beating them like donkeys. They’ll eventually have their day. We’re back-to-back world champions, so maybe they’ll get it figured out.

Nice. One more quick question about South Africa, on the spiritual side, then I want to dive into some LCMS-focused conversation. Mark, the guy that I was working with, was always mentioning that in South Africa, certainly where he was, there was a material poverty, whereas when he came to America it was a different type of poverty, which he called a spiritual poverty.

In a land of excess where we have so much, he said it’s actually a lot harder for us to share the gospel and for people to even listen because of all the comfort and conveniences we have in America. It’s a real challenge. I’d love to know: have you seen that to be true from your time both in South Africa and in America?

Yeah, you know, I think that’s a fairly common thing to hear. We’ve got to be careful about elevating poverty into some sort of noble thing. Poverty is terrible, and it causes terrible social dynamics, which you see with alcohol and drug abuse in those poorest communities, especially where they’re highly urbanized.

Parents are away from their children for a long time because they migrate to work in the cities and the children live with the grandparents in the rural areas—essentially, like tribal reservations in a way. So that is partially true.

But at the same time, we have also seen how the German missionaries to KwaZulu-Natal had very little impact on the Zulu population, which you could argue was in dire poverty and dire condition. They had no material wealth and they have basically been completely resistant to the gospel.

Interesting. Yeah. Well, we all need more of the gospel no matter what type of poverty exists in the world.

Thank you again for spending some time with me today. You recently wrote an analysis responding to my State of the LCMS survey and Voices of the LCMS videos, so we’ll get into what prompted you to write that piece and clarifications or stuff that hopefully together we can address.

We heard a little bit of how you came to America. I had no idea there was a lottery and that green cards came out of that. That’s interesting. But go further with that, because I don’t believe you were LCMS in South Africa. I know the Rhema movement is big over there. How did you become a part of the LCMS? Talk to me a little bit about your faith background.

Sure. We grew up Baptist—well, I did. There’s a fairly long Baptist tradition in the family, but it’s more of the Spurgeon side. When we came to the United States, it was pretty horrifying because we thought Baptist meant Baptist.

If you go to a Baptist church in South Africa—at least when we were still there—you were going to get the same thing. The guys all came out of one Bible college and it was very structured and very similar. We came to the States: complete culture shock, because you have Baptist churches that read the Apostles’ Creed and you have others that are handling snakes.

My wife came to faith later than I did, in a Word of Faith church—Rhema, which was transplanted to Johannesburg from Oklahoma. They did a startup there. It was just an absolute horror show in some ways, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. She actually has one of the best Bible knowledges that you will come across, and a lot of that was catechized, instilled, reinforced, and scaffolded at Rhema.

So you know, it’s easy to dunk on them, but at the end of the day they gave her this incredible biblical grounding which she relies on to this day.

As we struggled in the States—we actually lived in St. Louis for about five years—to be honest, it felt like a prison sentence. It was tough stuff.

To all our St. Louis brothers and sisters, there you go!

Well, the counties don’t mix, right? West County only goes downtown to watch baseball and throw turkeys out the window on Thanksgiving. It’s a lot of fun to deal with St. Louis and their social hierarchy, which fits around which Jesuit high school you went to; that determines your status.

But we never encountered the LCMS in a meaningful way in St. Louis. Our son was at an early learning center. We attended a service and it was a train wreck. We had girls giving their testimony about being at the Youth Gathering. That wasn’t church. So that switched us off.

We were at a fundamentalist Bible church in North County in Florissant, and I was in charge of Sunday school for the kids. I kept encountering this problem where the kids and even the adults could not properly articulate why Jesus died for them—what the cross actually meant.

I started to research materials and it was Concordia Publishing House stuff that started to surface. But this was a problem because we rejected infant baptism. It so happened that just before we left St. Louis for Denver, our daughter wanted to get baptized—she’d reached the “age of accountability.” The pastor said to her, “Well, give your testimony.” And I said, “Well, she has no testimony. She’s 11 years old. How about she just reads from the Bible?”

To their credit, they let her do that. But in that process of looking at what baptism is, suddenly Lutheran doctrine started to surface in my research. Unfortunately, we got trained into the whole White Horse Inn thing, which has this false idea that there is a generic “Reformation theology.” There is not a Reformation theology that blends Calvinism and Lutheranism. There is just one theology, and it took us a while to get off that.

Ultimately, our neighbors were LCMS. They invited us to Holy Cross in Highlands Ranch. Pastor Bruce Skelton spent about eight weeks, every Thursday, catechizing us in the home, putting up with the dog and the kids running around. That’s how we formally got into the LCMS.

That’s really awesome. I love that there’s a journey behind it and understanding then of how other faith traditions work. I think that’s a really powerful story. I just love taking God’s sacraments, and things like baptism, seriously and recognizing and seeing that there is something more happening in the waters of baptism than most people in our nation think. God is at work. Really cool.

You are bivocational, right? I’ve always kind of been bivocational as well—always serving in the church, but having some sort of business or entrepreneurial venture running. Before we dive into some more of this, can church leaders learn something from business leaders and the business community? Since you’ve kind of dabbled in both, what are your thoughts on that?

You know, we’ve got to be careful because businessmen can be very arrogant. When they’re successful, especially if it generates a lot of wealth, this becomes seen as them having unlocked the key to the universe. So, yes, business guys can be helpful to tell us about operations, systems, processes, accounting.

I don’t want them anywhere near the pulpit. I don’t want them anywhere near evangelism. They’ve got skills and gifts. The primary skill and gift of a successful businessman is to be a generous giver to his local congregation. That’s the real call.

Honestly, I’ve been through business school. There’s a library full of cringe books about Who Moved My Cheese and so on. It’s really bad. It is just hokey psychotherapy when you boil it down. There are things we can take about how to run an organization and how to do it properly and responsibly, with great stewardship. But I think that’s where it should stop.

If you want a great “business book,” go and look at the Table of Duties in the back of the Small Catechism. It kind of outlines everything you need to know, and you can structure a church around it.

Yeah, that’s good.

Let’s look at, then, how you use data. You use data a lot with what you’re doing with Ad Crucem and some of the blogs and articles and videos that you create. I want to look at that data, because I want to look at the data from my study.

Before we get into specifics from that, I’d love to hear from you: what’s the point of gathering data? How do we use it? Why do we gather data to begin with?

If you don’t have data—and you don’t have high-quality data, I mean this is the point, right?—anyone can have data, and a lot of it is junk. Junk in, junk out. But if you have high-quality data that is trustworthy and reliable, then you can start to assess what is happening across long timelines or in particular regions or particular types of congregations.

This is what makes me mad. If you scrape through the LCMS’s church data—the per-congregation analytics—it is shocking how many congregations have not filed reports for over a decade. And it’s telling us something. I think that primarily points to competency and a capacity problem in those congregations.

They literally do not have the ability to count noses and then to report into the system. That is telling us a great deal. But the overall state of the LCMS’s data, if you just go through that church database, is poor.

In my own experience, having been in several churches, I believe that the reported weekly attendance and membership is 20% overstated because the record-keeping is so poor. I’ve seen instances where people are on the rolls of four or five churches.

First, there’s no discipline amongst the pastors. They’ve got no respect for each other to say, “Brother, I’ve got this family here. They’ve been attending for three weeks. Let’s talk about whether they’re going to transfer or not, and what are we going to do about this?” It’s just a courtesy. It’s part of the normal job.

But these things will go on and they’ll drag on. These folks are attending another church. They’ve quit long ago or they’ve just moved, but they’re still on the congregation’s rolls in Arizona. They’re still in the congregation in Colorado and they’re still in the congregation in Omaha.

So we’ve just got this huge lag, this inertia in the system, which makes me depreciate everything that gets reported. I just take 20% off the top—and maybe it should be more.

Yeah. I think there’s something there. We have a lot of listeners that are leading in churches and I would say this ought to be one thing we should be unified on: let’s spend the time that it takes to report that data. Let’s get it in so that we’re working with, like you said, high-quality data that’s trustworthy and reliable.

If we don’t have that, we’re kind of guessing at things. So let’s say you do have high-quality, trustworthy, reliable numbers or data. Awesome. What do you do with it? How do you steward it? What does that look like?

Yeah, Pastor, before we go there, let me get on my hobby horse.

I have asked, begged, and pleaded through my channels that the LCMS would centralize critical services like congregational record keeping and accounting. We’ve got this capacity problem in our congregations where folks are aging out or there’s a loss of resource and skill. It is time for the LCMS to centralize those services and offer them on an optional basis.

That is the start of how you standardize that data collection and make it easier. But if we continue to allow these churches to decide, “Well, I’m just going to count it on the back of an envelope every Sunday,” while another one has a highly sophisticated system and someone else is using CTS—that’s not helpful.

Once we get that high-quality data, you can start slicing and dicing it to look for obvious issues. One of the things that intrigues me most is I want to know what is actually happening in our rural and urban congregations with a split by age and sex, to determine where we really are.

I would like to see very detailed giving data that helps us understand what is going on. Again, you look through some of the church data and you’ll see a church has annual income of $200,000 but it spent $600,000. Well, did they take on debt? Did they run through an endowment? Was this a bequest that came in?

There’s this opacity in the data that is unhelpful and doesn’t really tell us what is going on. What is the aggregate endowment of restricted and unrestricted assets within our congregations? How many congregations have got ten people on a Sunday in a magnificent building with a $10 million endowment that they can’t touch because it was specifically designated to “fixing the lead in the stained glass on the third Sunday in November”?

You’ve seen some of those.

That Sunday just passed.

Hopefully it got fixed, right? Otherwise we’ve got to wait another year, man.

Well, there are only two stained glass vendors in the country, so good luck!

I think that’s really good, because if you don’t have something standardized and/or centralized, there’s also this thing called survey bias—or I’m sure there’s other terms for it—where people generally report things more optimistic than they tend to actually be.

If we’re just pulling from different things and not the same thing, it’s challenging to know what’s really going on.

So let’s press into my survey a little bit. I wanted to start having some more LCMS-focused conversations because I believe that having conversations around our future and discussing hard things and challenging topics is the right thing to do, privately and publicly.

Anecdotally, I was hearing a lot of voices that, I’ll just be honest with you, were saying things a lot like how I felt. But subjective stuff is helpful only to a point. I was trying to get: how do I get objectivity?

So I wanted to have LCMS conversations. I wanted to turn the podcast to really produce disciples in the LCMS for a season at least, and maybe longer. As a part of that, I threw together what I’ve always called an informal survey called The State of the LCMS. I sent it out to my channels and to people that I know, and of course some people sent it on to others.

A couple district presidents got to see it as well and sent it to some people. My hope was: I want to collect a number of voices that hopefully I can use to have good conversations and dig a little deeper.

It ended up that I got far more response than I was anticipating—1054 responses. About half of those were pastors. From the beginning, I’ve said that this is not a representative, statistical “speak-for-the-entire-Synod” survey. But what it is is 1054 voices, many that are like-minded, but some that are clearly not based on what came through.

Many of them are, if you look at the data, from some of our larger and growing churches. I’ve said it’s definitely disproportionate to those folks.

Having said all of that, I’d love to hear from you. You got a good look at it. You wrote an article on it—on what may be helpful or not helpful with it. I’m curious: when you see something like that, let’s talk about what’s helpful in it and what’s hurtful in it. The last thing I want to do is steward something that shouldn’t be stewarded—or steward it poorly. But I also believe there’s something here.

So I’ll turn it over to you for a little bit and let me know your thoughts based on what you just heard.

Yeah. I don’t think there could ever be anything “hurtful” in a survey. There’s nothing—

Well, let me show you some of the comments that came through…

Yeah, and you know what? The LCMS needs to grow up. If you want to hear controversial, I like to say—which I heard from another pastor—that the missionals don’t like to talk about theology and the confessionals don’t like to talk about numbers.

Get over it, guys. We’ve got a humongous problem that we’ve got to get sorted out.

So I think your survey was not unhelpful. It wasn’t sinful and it wasn’t hurtful. It just reflected—if I read through all your questions, I can hear your voice, which is a voice of frustration with the current state.

If I were to classify it, your survey was a type of push polling. It was signaling to people the answer that you really wanted to hear. So there was a confession-through-projection bias in a sense that was then mirrored back to you.

That’s my only real primary criticism: that, combined with the circles that you move in—your primary audience, the peer group that you’re most connected with—you were going to get a specific outcome.

Whereas if we designed a survey, for example, let’s say we do the Wyoming District and compare it with the Southeastern District. We are talking black and white, 180 degrees out of phase—two districts that, I think it’s reasonable to say, represent the polar opposites of where we are in the Synod. You can plant a flag in each of the signals about how that becomes true.

I think there’s a way to do that where you get not confirmation of what you’re asking, but representation. You’re getting a real extraction of what people believe.

Ultimately, I think I can walk into almost any district or church and I can tell you more or less what is going on in that congregation just by observing how they handle the Lutheran Service Book, how they greet people, what the pastors do before and after the service. Those are very clear signals.

How the pastors behave on social media are very clear signals about what they perceive as the way to grow their ministries. Ultimately, that’s what everyone is trying to do: they want to ensure that their pews are full. That’s the whole point of doing this, as well as making sure that the faithful are being correctly catechized, are having their sins forgiven, and continue to advance in the faith—and their children as well.

So if it’s a criticism from me, it is just that you were going to get the results you got because of the way the survey was structured: the types of questions you asked and the people it went to.

What is helpful out of that is that for me, as the consumer of that survey, I got a very clear picture of where—let me use the phrase “your team”—is on the board.

Let’s talk about that in just a moment. But just for my own clarity, and to kind of nerd out for a second—you’re a data guy—when you say “push polling,” what do you mean by that? If you’ve got it in front of you, or an example of how I did that in the survey, I’d just love to know what that looks like or what that means.

I don’t have the survey in front of me, but you could run through particular questions. The one that comes to mind is something like “the role of women.” What does that mean—”the role of women in the church”? That is such an open-ended question.

I think I know what you were driving at, but if you had been very specific—”the role of women in the congregation vis-à-vis leadership of Council, Board of Elders, readings on Sunday, serving in the altar guild, serving communion”—then we’re starting to look at very specific things. Now we’re starting to address the age-old thing of wine, women, and song, which remains the core dispute between the two groups.

Yeah, and I think in your article you said something too about, along those same lines, one of the phrases was “too much power concentrated in top leadership”—that even that is assuming something. Is that kind of what you’re talking about, like the push poll: you’re kind of already assuming that people already agree with you?

Yeah, and it’s very—if we just take one of the worst publications out there, Truth and Light, and you scroll through their defamatory headlines, there’s a very clear bias, which is always: there’s a concentration of power; power needs to go to the congregations.

Where is this concentration of power? Is it in the office of the Synod President? Is it in the district offices? Is it in the most wealthy congregations that ultimately call the shots in each district?

So to say there’s a concentration of power is a huge statement. It would have been helpful just to narrow it down and ask them: where do you see this concentration of power? Is it in the structure? Is it in the functions? Is it in the activities? Where are those things coming out of? And how would you reform them?

Yeah, there were some questions leading into it that did get to sort of synodical president and district/regional leadership. That may give a little more clarity on that.

To be fair, I was trying—I’m not a professional survey writer. As I was saying, I’m an informal survey guy trying to gather some things for helpful conversations. I’ve done a couple surveys in the past that aren’t about this type of stuff—assessments, working with Lifeway Research on one—so I’d say I’m pretty green.

Even as I was doing it, I was like, “Oh, what’s the top word you’re feeling right now?” And I listed six words but I put a positive one at the top, so I’m trying to not just, you know what I mean, intentionally steer. There was some of that, but I can also totally understand and get how there were assumptions and biases from the survey-giver, which was myself.

So I can own up to those and hope to, if I ever do something like that again, do better and maybe pass it through a few people that are really professional at this, to help me get away from the push poll. Is that good wisdom if I were to do one in the future?

Yeah. I think it would be really helpful to do this collaboratively, and even synodically. I don’t know that Synod would ever do it, but it could be helpful.

As part of this, Ad Crucem is currently developing a church vitality and sustainability project that, if we can get broad buy-in, is going to provide a tremendous amount of helpful data at an extremely granular level about the health of our churches. If we get sufficient congregations to participate, I think it’s going to tell us more about what’s going on in those very finely cut areas than we’ve seen ever before. We’re hoping to have that launched early in the new year.

I love that. Come on, listeners, if you can do that, let’s do that. I think that’s what I’m really calling for: really great, representative data for everybody.

In particular, mine—you know, again, I’m in a lot of circles with larger and growing congregations that are saying things. This was a way to collect a lot of what they’re saying in somewhat of an objective fashion. Again, it’s not fully representative of the full Synod; I’ve never said that it was.

I’d love to hear from you: as you look at what I gathered, what are the helpful parts of, like, “Cool, it’s helpful that now I can get a pretty good lens into”—you said “what your team” or let’s just call it “like-minded people similar to me”—what that team thinks. What did you see loud and clear from those 154 voices?

Yeah, and again, let’s just step back. I think you did a great job. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.

Feels good, actually.

You know, there’s nothing wrong with doing things and learning from them. There’s no perfect thing; everyone is going to learn and do better the next time.

What I saw out of your survey was—and again, I’m just going to be frank because I don’t come from the Saddam Hussein school of truth, which is, “Please tell me I’ve got an atom bomb even though I don’t,” right? I always, when I’m in group settings, especially in business, tell subordinates: I want to hear the truth, no matter how bad it is. When I deal with boards of directors, it’s identical. Just tell us what is true.

Because if we’re going to fight the “Great Satan” and we don’t have a nuke, we’re going to lose. So in that spirit, what I saw was a cry for help from those respondents. They are afraid that they’ve lost access to the levers of power.

The missional side—again, just to use the label only because it’s helpful where we are—has progressively lost access to the core levers of power since President Kieschnick lost. The longer President Harrison’s term has gone on, the more that side has lost access to those key institutions and key levers of power.

I don’t believe that’s because Matt Harrison has got a hit list on the back of his door and says, “Okay, this year we’re going to snipe these three congregations, people, districts.” It’s a function of things like Portland. How did the Synod get to a point where Portland was allowed to happen? How did we get to a point where Concordia University Texas declares a unilateral declaration of independence and runs off with assets that belong to other people?

There’s been a ratcheting against those things, which is just a normal, consequential tightening of the status quo. You cannot have those things happening in the Synod. In order to fix them, it’s not “Team Harrison” with this master strategy—they’ve actually been very reactive. But the consequences of those things, and some of the loosey-goosey stuff that was going on in the ‘90s and early 2000s, has been to cause a swing to a more conservative approach on everything.

CUS is a classic example. Some of the Concordias were getting out of control and losing their Lutheran identity. Well, they have to be recovered, because the Concordias are not free academic zones. They have an obligation to uphold what the Synod requires them to uphold, which is Scripture and the Confessions. Because they were not doing that, there’s had to be a crackdown. Those are just the simple facts.

You can go through institution after institution. I will have my differences with the Synod President and with district presidents, but ultimately there has been a recovery—as slow as it is—towards getting us back on track to what we actually believe, as opposed to being absorbed by the culture and mirroring what the culture believes, teaches, and confesses.

Thanks for that. I think that’s totally what I see in it and, you know, if you want to get my bias from the beginning, that’s kind of what I was thinking I was going to see because it’s what I was hearing from dozens, if not well over hundreds, of people in my ear that are in our Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

They’ve gone through this system and feel like, for whatever reason—because we grow, because we’re large, because yada yada yada, or because we bend missional, or who knows what—but these people don’t feel like they’re being heard.

When Synod puts out surveys, they just don’t respond. And I’m not saying that’s good. I think if we’re going to walk together, part of this is calling my large, growing-church friends back to the table and saying: you’ve got to stay engaged, you’ve got to be in conversation, you’ve got to be in circuits, you’ve got to be in districts.

So to me it’s a both/and. We’ve both got to get to the table. I’m finding—that’s why I’m so honestly, genuinely grateful for you—because I would say that, honestly, a lot of the stuff you and I talk about, we agree on some things but not on everything, even within our denomination. But you’re here talking.

This is what we need more of, to understand one another and where you’re coming from and where I’m coming from. I think it came out as one big cry for help: we are in worse shape than people think we are. If we’re going to walk together, we’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to get back to the table where we’re listening.

And not just listening, but actually— it can’t just be listening and nothing changes. Something’s got to change. It feels like nothing’s changing on behalf of, again, the missional/larger/growing church—that ministry is getting harder to get accomplished by the institution itself. That, to me, is where things are at right now, and it’s kind of steamrolling there.

So I’d love to get your input on that. What do we do when we’re in an institution, an organization? What do we do when there are a number of us that have really strong opinions and feel like we talked and weren’t listened to, and we’ve taken our ball and run somewhere else?

How do we come back in and truly bring healing to this so that everybody gets understood, heard, and feels better about what’s happening?

Yeah. What I’m hearing is partially a category error. This came out in the survey: the frustration is that they believe the crisis as it’s perceived—whatever that is—is a result of institutional alienation.

The fact of the matter is: you lost at the ballot box. For 20-odd years, 15 years, the votes at the conventions, at every level, have been going more confessional and less missional, to use those labels.

I think before we keep caveating both those “confessional” and “missional” labels—our audience knows what those mean. I’m for both of them; I think we need to be both/and. But keep going.

Yeah. So when you say that you need to come back in, what I’m hearing is: you guys want affirmative action to get a seat back at the table because you’ve lost your ability to compete on a level playing field.

I understand that. It’s very hard to go from having control of so many institutions. The way you have control of institutions is people get nominated and elected to the boards of those critical institutions and associated institutions, and you can just go through and do a checklist—Concordia Historical Institute, the seminaries, what has happened there.

The missional side has lost ground, and that’s where they’re feeling the effect. I think there’s terror that they’re never going to be able to get back in power.

So there has to be a recognition that the majority of the congregations have turned more conservative. That’s where you guys have to address this. It’s not to say “our way is the best way.” It’s to recognize that there has been a tremendous cultural shift within the Synod to the conservative side.

It’s not because of some gigantic program. It’s just happened organically. If someone has got information that it’s not organic, I would be interested to hear it. But there are more congregations that want to use the hymnal. There are more congregations that want to have a traditional liturgy, and that’s reflected in those elections and in how the Synod overall is shifting.

It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but that is the shift from the year 2000 to 2025. That is the dominant shift in the politics and policy of the LCMS. There has been a ratcheting towards the conservative/confessional side and away from the loosey-goosey stuff that was going on.

I can certainly see that. At the same time, what would you say to the missional types—the churches that then look at numbers? That’s where, again, I’m grateful for your survey and all the things you’ve done. They say: as we’ve moved more confessional as a whole, at the same time in that same quarter-century—you can correct me on my numbers because it’s your study—we’ve gone from an average worship attendance of 1.1 million people to roughly 450,000 over that quarter of a century.

How do we rectify that? As we’re moving more confessional—and please hear me, we are not the only denomination in decline; many mainline denominations are in decline. This is not just an LCMS problem. Yet we’re in the LCMS. I want to refuse to accept that this is the reality that we have to continue to live in.

So: as we’ve been moving confessional, we’re losing people, and very quickly. How do we rectify that?

Yeah. The old saw: correlation is not causation. Matt Harrison’s election did not cause this decline. This decline was baked in a long time ago.

Even in the 19th century, you could start to see some issues. The cause of this decline is primarily spiritual. It’s not organizational. It is spiritual. The truth is the majority of people who used to be in the LCMS stopped believing the Bible.

If you don’t believe the Bible, there’s no reason to go to church. Now, people accuse me of being a “church growther” whatever-that-is, because when I read the Bible and I see God’s Word proclaimed in public by believers, it causes growth, not contraction.

But across missional, confessional, micro-synods, we are seeing a radical drop. We have crashed. This is partly reflected in other congregations and other denominations, which speaks to an overall collapse in America’s societal and cultural trust. We do not believe the Bible.

There are dozens of spiritual roots to that. The importation of Barthianism, the gospel reductionism that is prevalent to this day at the highest levels in para-church organizations that are incredibly well-funded, has done damage.

The reason that kids leave the church—Lyman Stone has said it’s not birth issues that are the main problem, it’s youngsters quitting. Well, why would they quit the church unless they didn’t believe the Bible?

My criticism here is that I hear excuses like, “Oh, Luther said the gospel is a passing shower.” So now we’re fatalists. We’ve become Hindu. We’re just going to wait for the gospel shower to maybe pass over the Sonoran Desert, and we just hope that the cloud stays long enough that we can grow the seeds.

That’s not what you see in Scripture at all. Unfortunately, this collapse rests on the pastors. They’ve got to own this. You cannot have the same number—in fact, an increase in the number—of pastors in the LCMS and a 50% collapse in weekly attendance. There’s no other sector of life or industry or business where that would be tolerable.

But we’re very sanguine about it. “We’ve got our 5,700 guys and we have to make more of them,” but you’ve got half the number of people. So effectively, the workload per pastor has halved. As Pastor Evan Scamman says it in a great way: we don’t have a pastor shortage, we have a parishioner shortage.

The parishioner shortage is primarily a mirroring of problems in the pulpit. Unless we’re prepared to start having hard conversations about how that came to be—that we could have 5,700 rightly called and ordained men who are unable to hold the church together—that is a serious indictment.

We need ten blue-ribbon commissions to focus in on what has gone wrong; not in a bureaucratic sense.

And this is the other complaint that I have: there’s no sense of urgency about this collapse. There’s a sense of “Well, let’s just manage through it, and hopefully we can harvest enough cash to keep everything going for another couple hundred years.”

There’s a lot there. Talk to me about that urgency, because I’m with you. I’m looking at all of this and I’m like, gosh, on the grand scale this is crashing a lot quicker than anyone wants to admit. Again, the survey—we’re crying out for help. We’re seeing that the train’s coming to the end of the track.

So what can we do? What’s the sense of urgency? What are some things that, from your vantage point—which again is, I love the way you look at things because you’re in the church, you’re committed to your church, you’re on the Board at the seminary, but you’re also bivocational and you’ve got Ad Crucem, which does some really great things for our church body when it comes to art and other things, and writing all these articles—you’ve got a really interesting brain.

From your perspective, what are some of the things that we ought to be acting with more urgency about?

Yeah. It’s not just the doing. Through these channels that we have—AdCrucem.com, Ad Crucem News—we are in touch on an annual basis with, we’ve got, you know, 15,000 customers on AdCrucem.com and as of this morning about 62,000 unique readers. So we’re in touch with a large, representative sample, and we get a lot of feedback from customers when they are ordering products or emailing us and interacting through the site.

So this is not me being wise in my own eyes. I’m speaking a lot of what I’m hearing, especially from the laity. Our strength is that we are, I think it’s reasonable to say, a very representative voice for the laity, and the laity are incredibly frustrated.

There is a divide emerging that I fear could become irreconcilable between the clergy and the laity. We’re supposed to be equally yoked. We’re supposed to be walking together, and that’s not what is going on.

How we address this is not to “throw pastors into the system.” We’ve got 550, I think is the last number I heard—550 to 600 congregations that are vacant. Let’s go and find out: why are they vacant? In 80% of the cases it’s not for want of a man. It’s because they only want to pay 20% of district scale.

I should say: it’s not that they want to do that, it’s all that they can do. The congregations have shrunk so much that they don’t have the economic base to sustain a pastor. I am not in the business of expecting a pastor to be as poor as a church mouse. We are not those people.

A pastor needs to be able to look after his family, feed them, clothe them, put braces on the teeth, do all those good things for them. To say that we should send a man out to Moose Pasture, Saskatchewan, and he’s got to live on $20,000 a year and dig potatoes to feed the family—no. A pastor must make his living from the gospel. Scripture is very clear on that.

It doesn’t rule out bivocational pastors, but I think it limits it. The Bible is clear also that very few are called to be pastors and can actually succeed at being it.

I think the category error your side makes—another one—is to regard a pastor as a fungible thing, where you can just churn them out like a sausage factory and then you deploy these guys. You parachute someone in after a little bit of training and that fixes the problem.

My approach is actually to do a radical shrinking of the pastorate. We need to halve the number of pastors that we’ve got until we fix this problem that we’ve got with believing the Bible.

Part of that is consolidation and mergers. I would really like to see—there are a lot of congregations on welfare from well-meaning pastors. These are pastors who have retired and they believe that they’re doing a good thing by preaching for free on a Sunday and conducting services. You’re just propping up a congregation that has ceased to exist.

Those men: thank you for your service, we respect what you’ve done. But it is time to pull the plug on those congregations. You’re not helping anyone by keeping Auntie Jones’s special project alive in the middle of nowhere.

I know people will be furious to hear that. Because we’ve got this “great Lutheran theology.” What is that great theology?

I think the spiritual problem there is that, having come from an evangelical fundamentalist background, our people unfortunately—especially cradle LCMS Lutherans—are better at articulating justification than believing it.

So there’s this very mechanistic approach to doctrine, which is to say: as long as you can articulate justification, as long as you understand the basics of the Lord’s Supper, that you have a general understanding of the Ten Commandments—but you don’t live them—then that’s sufficient.

We like to mock Baptists for believing that they are once-saved-always-saved. I see that attitude more in the LCMS than I ever did in Baptist land or “fundy” land.

It’s interesting. I probably could have five podcasts on all the stuff you just said with you. But I do want to circle back to a couple things: the lay and pastoral frustration divide—I want to come back to that. But because we’re on the pastors:

I’ve been one that’s like, “Yeah, we do have a pastoral shortage and we need to form more pastors and find additional routes,” in a both/and model. I enjoy the routes that we currently have and I’d like to rethink new routes. Let’s think of some new church-planter routes since that seems to have gone by the wayside.

Where I agree with you—but this is where the challenging conversations come—is I’m in total agreement that there’s a number of churches that are small and can’t afford a pastor. So I either think we need to have the hard conversations and really talk about consolidation and mergers—and maybe the Synod can organize a really great merging plan and offer incentives to churches that can do this.

We are doing that now. We have done that with a congregation about a half hour outside of us. We completed the legal work last year and they’ve been a campus of ours at King of Kings. It’s in Fremont, Nebraska, and we’re 11 months in. It’s amazing to see what God has done through that and how there’s now vitality.

They had a church with one child this time a year ago. Last week there were 53 kids in our Sunday school. So there are opportunities for that.

So it’s either we’re short of pastors and we need more, or we’ve got to merge and maybe we have the right amount of pastors. I will say, though, a number of those 5,700—whatever that number is—we’re aging up and there’s going to be a ton of retirements. If we don’t merge, that number of 5,600, I think in 15 years, is going to be closer to 2,000.

How do you solve that? Do we need to have some sort of big church-merging, acquisition talk? How do you go about doing that?

Yeah. I put out a proposal for the Synod to spend $120 million creating a fund that sets up teaching congregations and trains men in a very specific way. The hydraulics of money have got to change.

The Synod has got a ton of money. We are overspending in international missions where we’re not getting a return. A word like “return” will drive people crazy, but I just want them to be honest.

We’re going to talk about a situation that’s coming up in a mission that the LCMS is running which is indicative of serious problems. It’s catnip for folks for fundraising. It’s very easy to raise foreign funds. We’ve got to raise funds for our local congregations.

We’ve got to stop drawing money from those congregations to Synod and District, and it’s got to go the other way. We need to identify the most viable congregations and give them incentives to merge.

The current policy is just impossible. You’re not going to get voluntary mergers. But if you create an incentive structure that says, “We are going to pay for your pastor for ten years, but these are the conditions…”

I use Boulder, Colorado as an example. There are three unviable congregations. Put the district office at University Lutheran Chapel, merge the other two congregations, create an endowment, have one viable congregation for Boulder. But it’ll never happen on a voluntary basis.

You’ve got to have that incentive, and the best incentive is for us to fund a pastor and give that church a ten-year runway with the best pastor available.

We’ve got to fix the training. I think the standards have declined at both seminaries, and that needs to be raised. I would love to do a national standardized test where every pastor has to exegete Hebrew and Greek live, in person, and let’s see how it goes. We make a big deal that our guys have got Hebrew and Greek. Do they really?

Right out of seminary maybe, but what about ten years later? I wouldn’t pass those, I’ll tell you that right now.

I’m not saying that… So I think that’s where we’ve got to get back to. If we say that our guys are well-trained, they are not well-trained if it’s summer Greek—jump in a pond—and by the end of their fourth year they’re back to using, you know, a concordance or an interlinear.

We need these guys to have that deep ability to preach from the original languages because of the translation problems. So that fidelity to what we have in hand, that’s one example of where the standards have fallen.

They’ve made concessions for the SMP program. The SMP program has been wildly abused. I’m not happy that it got stopped at age 40; I want it wiped out because it has been so abused. It has created second-class pastors who are supposed to be in impunious congregations that can’t afford a pastor or just cannot get a guy, for example, who wants to take a family to live in Barrow, Alaska.

That congregation raises up a man—he can be SMP. That would be an ideal case: to have an SMP. But wherever I look—I’ve done a survey of all the top churches—the top churches in the Synod by size, if you look at the top 20, have got the vast majority of SMPs. That’s not where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been through a process where an SMP application was heavily abused, so I’ve seen it firsthand. You have SMPs as sole senior pastors running LCMS congregations in wealthy urban areas. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The effect of that is to make it even harder for a conventionally trained pastor to compete. The bivocational guy, if he’s—let’s throw out he’s earning 100 grand a year at XYZ business. The congregation says, “Would you mind pastoring for us for $50,000 a year?” Well, he’s just increased his income tremendously. But the pastor who needed $100,000 is gone.

So Gresham’s Law is operating here, driving out those guys. Until we’ve addressed the spiritual reason why 5,700 pastors were unable to hold the Synod steady—never mind grow it—doesn’t matter how many pastors we cut, add, train, chop.

That’s the fundamental issue we’ve got to get back to: the LCMS has lost its love of the Bible. I would argue that a majority pay lip service even to our so-called “great theology.” It’s not being reflected.

Yeah, there’s a lot there. Certainly, any program should always be under a look of how can we make this better. I would have differing opinions on the value of SMP as a program. It’s never been meant to replace the residential program, and vice versa.

I think it’s challenging, though, for guys that have gone through that to hear some of that feedback, and to see more restrictions placed on it recently. I’d say it’s a challenge. I was scouring the original purpose of SMP which, yes, is for rural congregations or churches that do not have Word and Sacrament, but it was also very much for missional contexts.

From what I can tell in the report—I literally just read it this morning—I think it was 60% of the people that have gone through SMP are church planters. For me, that’s a beautiful use of it.

So I do hear that word tossed out a lot—”abuse.” Anytime humans are involved in anything, there will be some level of abuse. But I feel like we’ve got to be careful about throwing that out, because I think it’s unnecessarily been labeled upon us in the larger and growing churches who have utilized the program for mission and for church planting.

My strategy’s always been both/and. It’s not at the expense of rural congregations that need Word and Sacrament. I believe they need Word and Sacrament ministry too. But I don’t think we’ve got to cut the legs out from under the churches that are using it to plant new churches. Otherwise, where are the new churches going to come from?

That feels like a lot of the evangelism stuff. If we’re talking about how to grow those numbers from 450,000 and above, we can talk about birth rate, and I’m for having more babies. But if we’re losing them by the age of 20, we can’t just have babies. It’s got to be a both/and approach.

One of the things we’ve seen historically since the book of Acts is that corporately, the best way to grow the kingdom of God is through church planting. So we would have maybe differing opinions—or maybe I’d love to hear your opinion a little bit more on that, of how do we plant churches when we’re not raising up church planters, our seminaries aren’t designed for it.

When we’ve got churches that are willing and have the men—I was talking with one yesterday. They were going to be going through SMP. It was an SMP pastor that’s now leading his own church that he started from scratch through the SMP program with a congregation here in Omaha. They’ve raised up another young man that was going to plant another church.

Application was in for SMP. He’s been waiting for months to hear anything, and then all of a sudden news drops that he can’t do it anymore. Now I’m like, “Well, shoot.” Either they’re not going to play by the rules, or that guy’s going to take his ball and run somewhere else.

I’m just really passionate about SMP, and I think we’ve got to be careful with words that we use. Because I do feel like a lot of that “abuse” language has been put on us larger/growing churches, and I’m like, we’re planting churches. So anyway, go ahead.

Let me turn the interviewer. I hear you say, “We need SMPs because we have to plant churches.” My response to that is: why aren’t you using conventionally trained pastors?

Well, I’m happy to use conventionally trained pastors as well. There are moments and times, though, where local contexts come out. There are people that are already on mission, already connected to people around them, that are ready to continue to spread the gospel through the local church.

Again, I am a proponent—I want to be on record—I am a proponent for residential seminary. I think if people can go there, great. I don’t think that it’s meant for everybody. I do believe we need more. But I think there are local contexts sometimes that make that more fruitful. That’s how I’d push back a little bit.

Yeah. The primary problem with the SMPs is this notion of the local context. This guy gets formed in whatever this local context is, but hey presto— in three years he’s jumped to another state, urban congregation, senior pastor. So there’s not a “local context.”

I will just be harsh and say that the majority of reasons that guys are pursuing SMPs is because they don’t want to go through the inconvenience of residential training. I’m not necessarily wedded to residential training forever, but right now we have the means.

We’re not in a dire condition like, for example, in Kenya. Pastor James May is the LCMS’s best missionary. He has to train evangelists rather than full pastors. Now, that’s a really specific context. That is not the case in the United States.

If a guy wants to be a pastor, as you spoke about right at the beginning—is the reason really to not go to training and become a fully formed pastor who has the same approach as his cohort? Is it really because it’s just inconvenient and too expensive, and SMP offers the cheaper option?

The second major issue with SMPs is that local contextual formation is a recipe for chaos. The whole point of having our men trained in a specific way is that the laity need to have the same thing. We want to be able to travel from state to state, city to city, and not have to research a congregation to find out if they are mishandling the sacraments, if they’re preaching trash, if they’ve got ladies dishing out communion.

If you’ve got disperately trained guys who are really primarily being trained by their local pastor, it is chaos. You have got men who are doing a thousand things in their own sight that “work.” That’s not what is going on or needs to go on.

There’s a formation process that we’ve developed, in the same way that there is a hymnal that we’ve developed. It is a long cultural process. At some point, it is quite conceivable that four years of residential training are not going to work as the LCMS continues to shrink, and there are all sorts of permutations you can think about.

But if you want an example of the SMP recipe for chaos, just look at the vicarage programs for each seminary. Every church that those vicars are serving in is utterly unique. So these men come back from vicarage and each one has had an entirely different experience. That is not helpful.

That is kind of being replicated and cloned in the SMP program. We want men to have the same vicarage formation as each other. But some guys are doing hospital visits, old age home visits, lots of preaching, shut-in visits, and other guys are “skivvies” [South African slang for a servant] who are making coffee for the pastor, running his errands, getting his wife’s groceries. There’s just no consistency, and that’s a key area that has to be addressed.

So if a man has a very specific context, I’m happy for that to be a very specific context. To my mind, that is Barrow, Alaska, where they literally cannot draw a man because he just doesn’t want to live there with his family. That’s fine. We can be pragmatic about these things. We don’t have to be weird and pretend that the call is some mystery where angels draw lots and the pastor receives a special token that tells him whether to accept or return.

Let’s just be pragmatic, but let’s be honest about what is going on in the pulpit.

So I’m hearing from you: obviously consistency and quality production and all of that, of course, can more easily be measured when it is through a system, or a couple of systems. You talked about laity wanting to go to a church here and a church there and have it be the same thing.

Earlier, you talked about: there is a real frustration right now amongst the laity with the clergy. Can you explain—are those two things related? Or is there something else underneath that frustration that you feel like is obviously a big deal? It was when I asked you, “What can we do?” That was actually the first thing you talked about: the laity–clergy frustration. Tell me about that.

Yeah. The way our polity is structured is the laity have got roles up to a certain level, and then it’s just clergy calling the shots. I think there’s a tremendous conflict of interest when senior clergy are doing business things as well. They are there to be the theological supervisors.

I would much rather have every district president called the Chief Theological Officer of the district, and then you have a Chief Executive Officer who takes care of the business things. Because that conflict of interest causes us to choose the world over Scripture. When a man is in the same position and is forced to choose, he is going to end up defaulting to “save the institution.”

I’ll use an example locally. Rocky Mountain Lutheran Social Services, which even receives funds from some of our local congregations, was marketing adoption and foster care to sodomites at a Pride festival. That’s an RSO. In other words, they have pledged to uphold our confession.

That RSO is still in business, remains on the RSO list to this day. That is intensely frustrating to the laity because they will see laymen run out very quickly. But because there’s a contract, we now have to honor it even though Satan is inhabiting that institution.

We’ve got this situation with a pastor in the Southeastern District who was modeling a transgender stole in his chancel. Fourteen months later, we’re unable to discern whether this guy should still be rostered or not. The school was catechizing the kids with queer performative stuff, Islamic supremacy, and we’re tugging our chins saying, “Wow, is this a problem?” Yeah, it’s a problem.

These things need to be dealt with very quickly because they oppose God. They oppose everything we claim to believe. So when we say that people have stopped believing the Bible, some of the reasons are what they see the clergy do.

I had a situation locally where adultery was blessed at a senior level. These are not unique things. You can just talk with the laity. They’re intensely frustrated by this claim that we have this great theology, but we refuse to live up to it.

Part of this is, again, that Barthianism that says the Bible is only true insofar as it agrees with the gospel. So everything we hear is, “Oh, grace, grace. We need extra grace. The pastor who’s on his third or fourth wife—little extra grace, brother. It doesn’t matter that Paul said he must only have one wife. It’s fine. We’re a church of grace, grace, grace.”

That’s the frustration: the claims of what we believe are not matched by how we believe it and how it appears in our churches. The argument is not between the missionals and the confessionals. It is about: are we willing to be Saddam Hussein Lutherans, where we all just smile at each other and we want to avoid conflict and we’re just not going to deal with the hard things? Or are we going to actually be St. Paul Lutherans—”Okay, Barnabas, I hate your guts, but you’re a great guy. You go off that way with Mark and I’m going to go this way, and we’re going to accomplish these things”?

Can we do that still in one Synod? That’s kind of what my question to you would be. Along those lines: how much does the—I’ve made a few videos, and a lot of them are around us as pastors struggling with one another. I’ve gotten feedback from laity that were like, “Man, we had no idea this was going on.”

And yet what I’m hearing from you is actually, no, our laity are very much involved, interested, know what’s happening. So how much does the laity catch on to what’s going on in Synod stuff, if that makes sense?

The laity really do not want to know about Synod politics. Their desire is to be well-catechized, to receive the sacraments on Sunday, to live life together in the parish. That’s their desire.

Their awareness of what’s going on with these intramural fights and some of the childish stuff that we see is because they’ve been drawn into it. The idea that these things have to happen is very frustrating, very alienating for them.

A lot of it is because of this fracturing of what it means to be a Lutheran pastor. It’s a fundamental disagreement. A lot of it, honestly, stems from the missional supremacy that came out in the ‘90s—a lot of arrogance, a lot of self-conviction that was not warranted. That arrogance has come back to bite a lot of people.

Especially in the—it’s generational. So it’s going to go away. But if the pastors are not walking in fellowship together, then what are the laity to do? The laity mirror what their pastor teaches them, how their pastor treats them, and what their pastor believes about the Synod.

That’s how these conflicts become amplified. They’re really needless. They’re not necessary. We don’t need President Kieschnick talking about “Romanizing” or proportional representation determined by your dollar contributions. Those sorts of things come to the ears of the laity and are very annoying, as are these scandalous situations where the clergy get a pass and institutions get a pass, but the laity get hammered for any infraction.

So we’ve got a two-tier system which protects the good-ol’-boys club, which is why we still have 5,700 pastors but half the attendance.

We have to be fundamentally honest. If we cannot be honest about that situation—that reality—well, we are going to go out of existence by the end of this century.

Let’s kind of close on this idea: for you, what would it look like for us to have a healthier, more unified LCMS in the next 5–10 years? What things need to happen in order to see if that’s possible?

I’m just wondering along with many others: are we too far apart already if people won’t even talk to one another? I’d love to hear from your vantage point: what does it look like to be a more unified, healthy Synod moving forward? What are the things we’ve got to be doing right away?

I think both sides need to have more humility. It is not your array of rainbow-colored chasubles and special 16th-century liturgy that draws people, any more than it is the purple lights and the smoke machines and the great guitarist and vocalist up front.

What causes people to go to church, stay in church, and have babies is because they actually believe that when the Bible says God opens and closes the womb, they actually believe it. So they don’t use birth control.

But we’ve been taught for many decades that birth control is an adiaphoron. No, it is anti-scriptural. It’s those small incremental things in both sides of the Synod that need to be addressed. Do our people actually believe the Bible?

A fundamental problem that I experience, coming from the Baptist/fundamentalist side, is that evangelicals know their Bibles way better than Lutherans.

The average LCMS pastor or leader would think that this is what we’re nailing—if anything, we’re nailing this. But you’re saying, “No, not even that. We’re behind the Baptists.” Oh man, come on.

The average Billy Baptist in Tennessee has a well-worn Bible that he carries to church every Sunday. How many Lutherans actually have a Bible that they bring to church, even if they’re not necessarily using it during the week? Do they even know where the Bible is on the shelf, never mind bring it to church? How many congregations have got a Bible in the church?

It’s those fundamentals. Again, some people will say you don’t need to know all the “Bible trivia”—who this king was and who that king was. Well, actually, it really helps to go and read about Nehemiah and what happened when the people heard the Word of God after there had been a famine of the Word for such a long time. They begged for more of it, hour after hour.

I don’t get that sense. With the loss of Bible literacy, in a sense the lectionary has been entirely unhelpful because it has siloed these concepts. People can barely remember the sermon within ten minutes.

They’ve got their coffee and their donut, and you go to them and you say, “What was the main thing I preached on today?” “Uh…” Because they looked at you with the big hoot-owl eyes the whole service, not really processing what was going in.

So if they can’t remember the sermon, how are they putting together how the readings are structured and how they relate from week to week? And when a congregation abandons a liturgical calendar and just pays it lip service—so there’s more focus on the Christmas tree and the presents on stage behind the band than there really is about what was the Incarnation, what was Advent—

We don’t preach enough on sanctification. We’ve got an entire semester of the church year that is devoted to sanctification: personal growth, holy living. You would not think it, because we have become so allergic to the third use of the law, and everything is about “apply the healing balm of the gospel to any situation.”

There was a case very recently where a Baptist pastor was found to have committed adultery. He published an amazing confession demonstrating true remorse. I’ve never seen anything like that from one of the LCMS pastors who has fallen below reproach.

It’s always, “Oh man, don’t worry. We got you. The gospel fixes all of this.” Yet here’s a Baptist—supposedly a man who believes “once saved, always saved”—saying, “I am terrified that you have taken away the Holy Spirit from me.” So he unpublishes his books; he quits all his para-church activities and says, “Lord, let me sit in the pew with the people.”

There’s a fundamental problem with the way we have taken the gospel to be a golden ticket to heaven. So the kid gets catechized: “Hey, you’re done. At least you got baptized. Now you finished catechism, you got your certificate—go do you and live however you want.”

So it’s not surprising that they quit.

Yeah. I think where I’m hearing you land is: every single one of us has got to operate with a lot more humility. Where we can find that humility is the Bible—by believing it and actually doing what it says and living it out.

That’s what I’ve been a huge proponent of. I found—I’m just going to say it—I found a weakness in our, not in our head-knowledge Lutheran theology, but in our practice and action.

That’s what’s inspired my whole Red Letter ministry, where the first book we wrote was a 40-day challenge to not just let the words of Jesus sit on a page but do what He said. Literally just do what He said. I’m trying to get people to see that a true life of really understanding justification looks like sanctification.

As a part of that sanctification, it’s a process. We’re all bringing levels of pride that have to be met with humility. So, yeah, let’s get that Bible back into not just our ears, but how we practice it. Read it, open it.

My wife Allison and I just did a study with Lutheran Bible Translators—a 30-day challenge to get in your Bible. It’s called God Speaks. It’s available now. That was their main point: we’re going to continue to translate the Bible, and Bible translation is speeding up, and by 2033 it might be done. But we hit America—we own 4.2 Bibles per household, and are we using it?

So anyway, I’d encourage people to get in that Bible, use it. Pastors, let’s really dig deep into it—myself included—and really glean the beauty that comes out of it.

Let me ask you this question, Tim. We ask all our guests, as kind of a last question: if you could challenge our listeners to do one thing this week to be a greater disciple of Jesus, what would you challenge them to do?

Well, let me make it very specific, which is: the laity should challenge the pastors. For the next 25 years, not a single circuit meeting, district meeting, or national convention should be about anything else except what caused the collapse of the Synod, and to hone in on the spiritual issues.

If your circuit is not doing that, you actually don’t care. If all our men are working together to drill down on the very specific root causes of this spiritual malaise—which is not just an incidental thing—I think we need to view this as a judgment. A collapse of 50% in a quarter of a century is a judgment of God. How else should we look at it?

If we’re not prepared to look at it as a judgment, that’s the lack of urgency. That’s where we don’t care. So if your circuit meeting is just about beer, brats, and whatever the current political thing is, and whoever’s hobby horse, then just quit. Go somewhere else and find men who are actually serious and urgent about addressing these things.

This goes to almost every institutional board level. We have got to fix this because there’s not enough time left. If we don’t address this systematically, all day, every day, LCMS is done by the end of the century.

I wish you’d just share your opinion, Tim, you know, and just be honest.

I appreciate that. I want to be a part of: let’s look at how we got to where we are—both the positive and the negative—and what we can do moving forward.

I do hope that this conversation, if you were listening in, is helpful. I hope it brings up conversations that you can have at your circuit meetings, at your district conventions and conferences. There are real issues. Let’s continue to talk, no matter if you lean more “confessional,” “missional,” or squarely in the middle. Everybody needs to get in conversation to figure out what we’re going to do—for the sake of, yes, our church body, but far more than that, for the sake of our Son of God, Jesus, who has been way better than I know I deserve. Tim, I bet He’s been way better than you deserve, too.

Hey, if people want to connect with you, where can they find you these days?

Probably the best is through AdCrucem.com or Ad Crucem News. The contact information is all up there. You can email, call—we’re always happy to take calls, including from people who disagree with us.

We just ask: don’t snipe at us online or subtweet. Just call us. If you guys are so into the whole Matthew 18 thing, then let’s do that. It’s amazing how a conversation resolves things, as opposed to just tossing out accusations and innuendo.

Amen to that. That might be the chapter of the Bible we least believe in, sadly, based on what I’m seeing. But let’s believe in it.

Tim, thank you for this. Let’s reconnect, especially when—what did you call that survey?

It’s the Church Vitality and Sustainability Project.

Yeah, the Church Vitality and Sustainability survey. Keep me posted on when that goes out, and maybe even once it does, if we want to share results and look at some data and what questions might come up from it or observations, I’d love to plow through that with you. For the sake of others that might be listening, I think that would be helpful.

Thanks for doing what you’re doing and for being willing to come on and share insights. To God be the glory.

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Pastor. Appreciate your time.

Thanks, Tim.

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I am so grateful for Tim—you heard me talk about it in the middle of the podcast—coming on and being able to have a conversation. We do not see eye to eye on everything, but we are both hoping to give our Synod and the leaders of our Synod some really great, fresh survey data so that we can understand the times we’re living in and be more faithful and fruitful.

How we do that practically—we’ve got to have a lot more conversations around that. But I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. Feel free to rate or review on whatever platform you’re listening to. Feel free to throw comments if you’re watching on our YouTube channel, which is where we’re pushing a lot more things.

So if you haven’t subscribed to our YouTube Red Letter Living channel, please do that. We’ve got episodes coming out every week, so don’t miss next week’s episode of the Red Letter Disciple. One of the ways you don’t miss it is subscribing or following on whatever that platform might be.

We’ll see you back next week. God bless you. Go be a great disciple of Jesus this week.