Convention Elections: The Vice-Presidents, and Biermann’s Hard Day

The convention filled its officer corps today. Only the Central Region was close, where Benjamin Ball beat the man who had just lost the presidency by five votes.

The 2026 convention finished the other half of its business today and seated the officers who will serve beside the re-elected President Matthew Harrison through 2029. Peter Lange was elected First Vice-President on a single ballot with 60.4 percent, and five Regional Vice-Presidents were chosen beneath him, ranked second through sixth in the Synod’s order of succession.

Five of the six contests were barely contests. Lange, Alfonso Espinosa in the West-Southwest, Christopher Esget in the East-Southeast, Nabil Nour in the Great Plains, and Eric Skovgaard in the Great Lakes each carried a clear majority over the field, four of them on the first ballot and Skovgaard on the third. The Central Region alone produced a genuine fight, and it produced the day’s story.

One real fight

In the Central Region, the sitting Second Vice-President, Benjamin Ball, faced Joel Biermann, the seminary professor who had lost the presidency to Harrison by five votes three weeks earlier. Ball led the first ballot without a majority, then crossed the line on the second, 51.9 percent to Biermann’s 46.0, and kept both his seat and his rank.

The result closes a hard stretch for Biermann. He leaves Phoenix having lost two elections in a single cycle: the presidency, by the narrowest majority the contest could yield, and then the Central Region vice-presidency to the very colleague whose endorsement had helped hand Harrison that majority. This publication had marked the Central seat as the potential aftershock of the five-vote presidency and had thought Biermann the likelier to take it. The aftershock came; it simply broke the other way.

The underperformer

Read past the sympathy, though, and Biermann is the day’s underperformer. The presidential runner-up drew 47.9 percent of the congregations synod-wide and came within five votes of forcing a fourth ballot, yet he could not carry the delegates gathered in Phoenix: in his own Central Region, he took 46.0 percent and lost the vice-presidency outright to Ball. The man who nearly led the Synod leaves Phoenix with no synodical office at all, his support among the assembled delegates running a step behind the near-majority he had just posted among the congregations.

The outcome is a devastating result for the Synod’s missional faction, which was very energized by Biermann’s close tussle with Harrison. It now looks ahead to 2029 without a lock-in candidate to run against Ball, who has picked up a solid tailwind coming out of the Convention.

Conclusion

The officer corps is settled, then, and it is a familiar one. Harrison keeps his chair, Lange stands first behind him, and a succession line of five regional men falls in below. The floor still has its resolutions to finish. The hands that will carry them out are now known.

Method and source. The figures are the convention floor tallies for the First Vice-President and the five Regional Vice-Presidents, reported today. Shares are of the ballots cast on each deciding round, and every ballot’s votes reconcile to the reported total. Biermann’s 47.9 percent is his third-ballot presidential share of the congregational electorate; his 46.0 percent is his second-ballot share of the convention floor delegates in the Central Region, two different electorates. The succession ranks are from the vice-presidential ranking ballots that followed the regional elections. Full office-by-office detail, every ballot and every candidate, is on the Ad Crucem News convention microsite at lcms2026.adcrucem.news/2026/elections. Compiled by Ad Crucem News; editorial analysis, no Synod imprimatur.