Discipline and Doctrine in the LCMS

Tim Wood · ACELC Conference · 2026 Helpful Reform Toward Church Discipline and a Judiciary in the LCMS

Walking Together: Next Steps, 2026

Association of Confessing Evangelical Lutheran Congregations
Annual Conference

June 16-17, 2026
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Lincoln, Nebraska

Transcript

Thank you for the warm welcome and for the invitation to speak. I should say at the outset, for the benefit of Truth and Light Media: what follows is my opinion alone. I represent no third party and speak for no one except myself. The passport I carry is issued by Trinity Lutheran Church in Denver, Colorado, and the saints there send their greetings. I will carry yours back to them. That particular passport, you will note, grants a kind of diplomatic immunity that Synod credentials do not, because it preserves me from getting the hook from St. Louis.

Now, you may not agree with everything I am about to say, and that is entirely fine. There are wide reports of my exceeding winsomeness, and if that does not persuade you, then my accent will at least hold your attention.

The Argument

The Missouri Synod still disciplines, and it disciplines hard. But we have to be honest about who is receiving that discipline. The full weight of synodical law is dropping on the layman who reports the offense, while the officer who commits it is handled with deference, patience, and special counsel. We have moved away from the repentance of the sinner and toward the comfort and the good name of the institution. Discipline, in plain words, has been severed from doctrine.

What I intend to show is that these are not random occurrences, not a string of unrelated incidents, but the output of a single structure whose weaknesses have been building and intensifying for several generations. So let us be plainspoken about it and consider what can be done, as adults, in a country that gives us the First Amendment and the first article gifts that go with it.

Here is where we are going. First, the preconditions that have brought us to this point. Then, the disciplinary mechanisms, or rather the absence of them. Then, three recent cases that are almost certainly in your memory. And finally, a remedy that I believe this body is well positioned to advance.

I. A Shrinking Church and a Shrinking Bench

They say one should never recite statistics during a presentation, and I am never one to learn. So here it goes, and please stop me if anything is unclear.

In 1970, at the numerical peak of the Synod, we had roughly 2.75 million baptized souls. As of the 2024 annual report, that figure stands at 1.6 million. That is a loss of nearly 40 percent in half a century. Weekly worship attendance fell right alongside it, from around 900,000 worshipers in 1970 to approximately 400,000 in 2024. Barely a third of our reported members are actually in a pew on any given Sunday, and we have to be generous about even that figure, because we all know how much inertia the system carries and how poorly we tend to our census duties. A parishioner arrives at a new congregation and is never formally transferred, so he gets counted four or five or six times across the rolls. The actual numbers, if we were honest about them, are probably considerably lower.

Now, beyond the souls themselves, a church is also a reservoir of talent, the first article gifts we are always talking about. When the body shrinks by forty percent, that reservoir shrinks with it. I mean the men who can sit on a board, read a contract with a lawyer’s eye, and look a district president in the face and tell him he is wrong. In a healthy church, that kind of service gets done almost without notice. In a shrinking one, it gets done by whoever is left and whoever is easiest to capture.

Let me make the numbers concrete. Say the ordinary work of a parish — the elder, the treasurer, the man who can read a balance sheet and a financial statement — calls for an intelligence quotient of roughly 110. Below that threshold, people are going to struggle with those responsibilities. Say that leading our institutions — the senior synod offices, the district presidencies, the seminary faculties, the boards of regents, the auxiliary bodies — calls for men of roughly 130. Now restrict the count to the men who are actually attending worship, since those are the ones available to serve, and of those, assume that perhaps three in four are available at any given time. Do that arithmetic, and here is what you find.

In 1970, the parish-capable pool of men — those at the 110 threshold — was roughly 58,000. Today it is closer to 35,000. The pool capable of leading our institutions — those at the 130 threshold — was about 5,000. Today it is roughly 3,000.

Three thousand men. For the entire Synod. That is the complete bench from which every seminary professor, every university president, every district president, and every senior institutional officer must come — all at the same time, with no junior varsity to warm up behind them. You may win state this year. You might have a shot next year with whoever is left. In three years, you are staying home.

There is another layer on top of this, and it is a tremendous problem. The average age of this church body is 57. That is, incidentally, my age. So when you look at an old codger and try to think about where we are in the life cycle of the Synod, think of me. We are closer to the end of our contribution than to the beginning. And we are the dominant cohort. Where is the younger cohort that will fill the gaps as we age out?

Carry it forward twenty years, and that is the generous projection, not the gloomy one, because a body whose average member is 57 buries more than it baptizes. By the middle 2040s, on a plain statistical trajectory based on everything we currently know, the pool of men capable of leading our institutions falls to roughly 1,500 individuals. The implications of that number are astonishing, and people should not underestimate what it is going to mean for the Synod. The decisions it demands are decisions that need to be made today. You already know this from your own congregations, where it is increasingly difficult to recruit capable men to your board of elders or your council, and where burnout is an ever-present danger precisely because the depth is so thin.

II. The World That Is Gone

The older members of our church find all of this difficult to credit, and we ought to be charitable about that difficulty. They are not simply boomers with their eyes closed. They lived in an entirely different world, one in which the Synod sat inside a country that was still nominally Christian, where the culture around the church was holding it up rather than pressing it down. There was a kind of benign peer pressure on your parishioners and your pastors to conform. The rules could stay thin and the procedures informal because the world outside supplied, for free, much of the formation and discipline we never had to write down. In 1970, the average LCMS congregation probably had a couple of accountants, a couple of lawyers, doctors, engineers, capable people in abundance. That is simply no longer the case, and everyone in this room knows it.

So we came from an era of extremely high trust, undergirded by large volumes of highly capable individuals who could hold things together without rigid structures or carefully elaborated rules. That world is gone, and it has not been replaced by a neutral one. The culture that now reaches our people catechizes them in exactly the opposite direction, every day, irrespective of the church’s efforts. The assault from the media, the loss of the surrounding culture: these have a tremendous and ongoing impact on our institutional capacity. A church still leaning on unwritten rules wakes up one morning in a crisis and finds it has nothing written down to handle it.

III. How the Failure Actually Happens

So how do these failures actually occur? The problem is that we have taken things Scripture and the Confessions treat as clear and called them complex. We require a great deal of nuance, a great deal of pastoral wisdom and diligence, we say. And then, when a layman comes forward and names a plain and clear sin plainly, he is told that he is unkind and unloving. The man who committed the sin becomes a delicate situation requiring great patience. Two different standards — and the men applying those standards are usually not heretics. They are not evil. They are simply misapplying the article of faith, treating what must be judged as if it were merely a problem to be managed.

Once the sin has been renamed, the case gets handed to a different logic: the logic of the corporation. The questions stop being theological and become reputational. How do we keep this quiet? How do we close this out with the least amount of public attention? How do we prevent damage to the offering plate? And under that logic, the faithful man who complained is no longer an asset but a problem that must be dealt with. So, unfortunately, we see the church, the synod, or the district turning its energy on that individual rather than on the offense. He is asked to be patient. Then he is told to be quiet. Then he is told to take his membership elsewhere, under threat of excommunication. And meanwhile, in the background, the offense simply fades from view.

Brothers and sisters, you know that this is the exact reverse of the Office of the Keys. The Keys were never given to bind the conscience that troubles the institution.

IV. The Pretend Version of Accountability

It is not that the church does nothing. Rather than real discipline, we get a facsimile of discipline: procedures that are designed to resemble discipline without performing it. The chief of these is our drift toward what we call reconciliation. Hear me carefully here, because reconciliation between two repentant sinners is at the very heart of the Gospel, and I would not say one word against it. But when we reach for reconciliation first, before actually adjudicating the facts and reaching a determination, it stops being the Gospel and becomes a cover. Reconciliation necessarily assumes that the facts are already settled. So the man who says, wait, let us establish the facts first and then reach an adjudication, gets cast as the enemy of peace. The process pushes for a handshake instead of a verdict, and the next generation cannot learn anything because there is no record from which to learn, only the habit of sweeping as much as possible under the rug to protect the institution at all costs.

We did once have a real system of adjudication. We had built it by 1971, a system in which laymen and clergy judged together. Then in 1992, under President Bohlmann, with the Preus case hanging over the convention, we traded it away for what we now call dispute resolution. And that new system blurred the one line that matters most: the line between a quarrel that can be reconciled and a sin that has to be judged. When I ask us to return to fact-finding, I am not asking for something new. I am asking us to restore something that worked, something we dismantled within living memory, and anyone who has been through the current dispute resolution process knows what a gigantic mess it is. The reconcilers begin by behaving like lawyers, demanding your constitution and bylaws, then attempt to reconcile through what amounts to adjudication anyway. It is total chaos, and I do not recommend anyone subject themselves to it if they can possibly avoid it.

And behind all of it sits a certain kind of man, whom I will name without apology. The synodocrat. He has climbed the ladder far enough to conclude that the climbing itself has proved his integrity, and that he now stands above scrutiny. He expects us to transfer the respect we owe to the office over to the man who holds it. But that transfer is not automatic. The respect is lodged in the office. The man must live up to the standard of the office. And yet the higher some of these men climb, the stronger that assumption grows, until the structure built to hold us accountable to Scripture is being used to hold the Confessions hostage to their preferences and their agendas.

V. Three Cases, Laid on the Table

I will not litigate these fully, but let me put three cases before you, because I am sure they are in your memory, and because together they prove a point that each one alone cannot quite make.

The first is King of Kings in Omaha — a large contemporary-worship congregation not far from here. In the fall of 2023, the editors of Gottesdienst brought attention to their communion practice. The people sat in their seats holding little prepackaged cups, bread and wine together in one container, and a singer on the stage performed a paraphrase of the Words of Institution over soft background music while the lights were kept low to manage the mood. If you want to understand what American Christianity looks like when it is written large across the world, this is it: an achievement of production, planning, and logistics. But it is not what we confess, and it is not what we practice. And it had been going on for a long time. A practice that far from our confession of the Sacrament had been allowed to metastasize, and the men whose job it is to guard our unity had done nothing visible about it.

The second is Our Savior Lutheran Church in Arlington, Virginia, in the Southeastern District, under District President Bill Harmon — keep that name in mind. The parishioners were, to use the plain phrase, being eaten alive. Their complaint was that the church school — not a high school, but a school for young children — was shot through with homosexual and transgender affinity. The tiniest children had been escorted by the school to a queer musical in Washington, D.C. The matter was taken to the district president, who found nothing to see. He did not even interview the whistleblowers. It was taken to President Harrison, who also found nothing to see. That is when it arrived on our doorstep at Ad Crucem News. We asked — we begged — for this not to become public. We said, here is what we are going to report in one week’s time; please give us cause not to report it by simply telling us that action is being taken. No answer came. So we reported it. Then we were told everything was in hand, which was untrue. So we had to report further, and eventually action was taken. I do not credit ourselves for that; I only say it was necessary. But what resulted was a resignation, not a defrocking. I do not know how a man ends up merely resigning from the roster when he has modeled a transgender stole in the chancel of a Missouri Lutheran church.

The third is Immanuel Lutheran in Easton, Maryland. Same district. Same district president. This is a real governance crisis. For the better part of three years, parishioners, some of them serving in church leadership, raised documented concerns through every available channel. The concerns involved serious legal exposure: questions of federal harboring liability, tax compliance, and congregational finances. They went all the way to President Harrison. Nothing. Then their concern was folded into a Corporate Confession and Absolution service rather than investigated. The district president, by the accounts we have, ruled on the harboring question without examining the facts. When things finally became public, the district moved quickly — not against the conduct that had been reported, but against the people who had reported it. They were banned from the property. They were threatened with a county peace order. Their offense, apparently, was speaking to a journalist.

When I wrote to everyone concerned at the senior level and put roughly twenty specific questions to each of them, the response was to instruct everyone to stop talking to the press. That is their right; this is America. But it cannot stop us from reporting, because the situation is that egregious. Eventually common sense prevailed and some form of reconciliation is under way, but only because Ad Crucem News had to apply sufficient pressure to prevent the district president from demanding excommunication of the parishioners as the price of even reaching mediation. Excommunication, apparently, was to precede any right of appeal. This is like telling someone sentenced to the electric chair that he may file his appeal once his corpse is room temperature. Is this the business of a church? Is this what a Synod that confesses what we confess does with the Office of the Keys?

These three are not random incidents. They are the product of one system, doing what that system is built to do. The purpose of a system is what it does. When a system generates the same kind of outcome repeatedly, that outcome is not an inadvertent mistake. It is the point.

VI. A Remedy

A diagnosis without a cure is only complaining, and I am a solutions-driven person. The Synod is going to come apart in the air before it even gets a chance to put its wheels down, if we do not change course. Twenty, thirty years out, we are done as a recognizable confessional Lutheran body that is the dominant voice worldwide. So what do we do?

What I have proposed, and argued for in Ad Crucem News, is what I call a duty to prevent doctrinal dissolution. The principle is borrowed from the corporate and legal world, and it is not a gimmick. In the United Kingdom, they have written into law a fiduciary duty on corporate officers not merely to report fraud, but to prevent it. You can be held responsible if fraud occurs in your organization and you failed to take the obvious steps to stop it. Not everything can be perfectly prevented, but there are common-sense measures. If you did not tell your treasury to verify that a wire payment was actually going to your vendor in Kansas rather than to an account in Nigeria, then it is on you that the million dollars went to Nigeria — and now you have a two-million-dollar problem, because the vendor in Kansas still must be paid. The NACHA regulations governing the American banking system have now imported this same principle. And our own Lutheran fathers built it centuries ago, when they sent visitors into the parishes and the schools to examine their doctrine.

The heart of the duty is extremely simple. Stop taking people’s word for what is happening in their jurisdictions. Document it. Ask for evidence. File the evidence. Categorize it. And protect the whistleblowers. In secular life, whistleblowers have tremendous legal protections. In the Lutheran Church, if you are a whistleblower, you put a target on your back and it is open season on you. Is that how things should run in a Christian organization, never mind a church body?

This principle requires that responsibility be placed where the power actually is. The pastor answers for his parishioners. The circuit visitor answers for his pastors. The district president answers for his circuit visitors. The synod president answers for everyone. And here I want to name what I think is a critical structural change: we need to bifurcate the office of the synod president. We need a chief executive officer and a chief theological officer. The logic of the corporation causes theology to be subordinated to the balance sheet every single time, because the lawyer is in this ear and the accountant is in that ear, and the president cannot make a theological determination without calculating whether it is going to sink the institution. We need a theological officer who can make determinations about pure doctrine without having to worry about what it will cost.

And when that concern is raised, I have a fairly simple answer for it. Is the Synod going to heaven? Are the financial statements going to heaven? Are the buildings going to heaven, no matter how impressive their grounds? They are not going to heaven. The people in the pews and the pulpits are ensouled. The objects are not. I think we have lost sight of this. There is a strange drift underway in which the Synod has attempted to ensoul the institutions rather than the people, and the focus has consequently gone completely wrong.

The other change this requires is in how we select our leaders. When the pool of capable men is small and shrinking, you cannot afford to select by seniority and patronage, which is, if we are honest about it, precisely how the current system has operated. You got on the right man’s gravy train and rode it as long as the patronage lasted, or it was simply so-and-so pastor’s turn for the position with the extra benefits because he had served thirty-five years since ordination. That is no way to choose leaders in a crisis. The world has known this for a long time, which is why it replaced the spoils system with examination. We already do this with our pastors and our teachers. We examine them before we trust them with a pulpit or a classroom. We need to apply the same standard to our senior officers, examining them in front of people who did not appoint them: for their knowledge of the Confessions, for the practical competencies the office demands, for their fitness to oversee other men. A seminary professor or seminary chair should not be appointable without at least seven years of parish experience. A seminary professor who does not know one of the languages has no business in that chair. These things are basic, and the fact that they require saying is itself a testimony to how far the post-Seminex scramble for available faculty has spread into the habits of the Synod.

None of this can be accomplished by one faithful congregation acting alone. It requires the national convention. And it could begin there with a handful of plain decisions. Write the duty to prevent doctrinal dissolution into our governing documents as a real obligation with real consequences, not a wish. Require doctrinal reviews of every parish and school on a fixed schedule. Put every dispute on a clock that no official can run to the statute of limitations. Hold each level of supervision accountable, in writing, for everyone to see when that is appropriate. Open the institutional windows and let the people see what is happening. And shift the governing question from how do we contain this before it reaches the press, to how should we have prevented it, and who is responsible for having failed to do so.

Conclusion

Look at all three cases together. Omaha. Arlington. Easton. Two of them in the same district, under the same leadership. These are not three accidents that happened to land in the same season. They are the output of one system built to do what it does.

That system is hollowed out by demographic decline. It was cut off from the culture that once held it up from the outside. It is running on rules written for a world that no longer exists. And it has become so reductionist in its theology that it can call a sin a complexity, hand that complexity to a corporate risk-management logic, and then manage the men who refuse to accept that framing as problems to be contained.

The machinery still runs. The offices are still filled. The soothing words still get spoken. And the one thing the Keys were given to do — to bind the impenitent and to free the troubled conscience — quietly does not get done. When a district will not find out what its pastor actually did, it cannot call him to repent. And when a congregation is kept in the dark about its own case, it cannot receive the forgiveness of a sin that no one in authority will even name.

The recovery will not come from a new program. We love our programs. It will not come from a better-worded resolution. It will come on the day we are willing to ask the old question again, and to mean it. What does the record show? The people in the pews already have the stomach for that honesty. We all know this, because we hear them ask hard questions in Bible study and we watch them handle the truth. The pastor does not need to coat it with saccharine to make it go down. People love honesty, and the less honest you are, the faster your pews will empty. The people want to know that their sincere, authentic faith is held also by their teachers and their administrators.

That should not be too much to ask.

Thank you for your attention, and I apologize for not coming with an accomplished, formally trained pastoral delivery. You have all been very patient.

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Discussion

Pastor Lonnie Jacobson (former Southeastern District Mission Executive):

Parish pastors trying to carry out discipline are bound by confidentiality obligations as they work toward a verdict and a correction. One of the great challenges is dealing with gossip and other things that get in the way of that confidentiality in the age of social media, where everything is multiplied. How do you speak to that tension between the appropriate confidentiality of an active discipline process and the pressure toward wider public disclosure?

The first point is that we at Ad Crucem News will not deal in gossip. We are not a trash rag here to recycle rumors into people’s ears. In the case of Arlington, Virginia, we anonymized everything, and we gave all the parties the opportunity to stop the reporting dead in its tracks before any name was published. We did the same in Easton. So in those cases, the issue was not that the matters were confidential pending resolution. They had been declared resolved, which was false. That is where a press outlet can play a proper role.

Now, there are certainly situations where a pastor or a district president faces genuine problems because gossip is circulating and interfering with a legitimate process. The answer to that is: deal with it. Discipline the gossiper. That is a real and proper use of church discipline, applied in parallel with the matter at hand. I recognize the difficult dynamics involved. You do not want to blow up a congregation. But sometimes you may have to, because you have sheep and you have goats, and sometimes you have to lead the goats out. What you must not do is place the goats on the altar and tell the sheep to accept it. That is where the real problems originate.

Pastor Dan Freeman (Peace Lutheran Church, Chehalis, Washington):

I thought I heard you suggest we should simply return to the previous adjudication process. Did you mean to return to it as it was, or do you think we need a new and different process?

We do need a new and optimized process, because we simply do not have the institutional capacity to run the old one properly in the present conditions. In an ideal world, we would have something resembling a canon lawyer system: a national body of men who are thoroughly schooled in both theology and the bylaws and who can adjudicate matters quickly. I do not know that this will ever be achievable. But what I do know is that we have lost our nerve to put our fingers on the truth, to seek it, and to say it aloud, and that we have substituted for that nerve an endless preference for hiding things.

I have personally gone through an egregious reconciliation process in which a district president wanted adulterers returned to a congregation and used the technicality that you cannot excommunicate people who have already resigned from membership. Because excommunication, in his reading, had been converted from a spiritual act into an administrative rule. When a district president can say, with an apparently straight face, that we have fooled God because the person is already off the rolls and therefore beyond the reach of the Keys, we have a profound problem, and it is not an isolated one. We all have stories like this.

Joe Eric (Good Shepherd Lutheran, attorney):

I spend all day working with law, and I think what the Synod struggles with — in supervision broadly — is the inability to say, that is that, and this is not that. With respect to the gossip question, for instance: if something has been publicly put forth and others have seen it, it is not gossip. There are things that qualify as gossip and things that qualify as slander, and the Eighth Commandment and Matthew 18 and Luther’s admonition about public offenses give us fairly clear lines. My question is: how do we get back to a point where we are more process-focused, fact-focused, and rule-focused, because I think that focus is what will allow us to actually distinguish between what is and what is not?

I think the first step is something you would immediately recognize: rules of evidence. Both parties need to understand what counts as evidence and how it is to be weighed. I challenge anyone to articulate what the rules of evidence currently are in the LCMS, because even if they exist in some form, they operate wildly differently between the Southeastern District and the districts on the western seaboard and, say, Wyoming, which is probably one of the more conservative districts in the Synod. There is no uniform standard, and without one, fact-finding is inevitably captured by whoever controls the local process.

Rev. Richard Snow (Nebraska District President):

On the King of Kings situation: the female singer’s performance of what amounted to a version of the Words of Institution was corrected immediately once I learned about it. I went to the pastors, they recognized the failure on their part, and they repented. It has not happened since. My error, I will acknowledge, was that I did not produce a public document to show that the correction had been made and that repentance had occurred. That is part of the challenge I face. Not everything that is public in one sense is fully public in another. I am genuinely wrestling with when a public statement from me actually brings greater scandal to the church than silence does. I tend to approach these situations as a pastor rather than as a bylaw officer. Many situations are so different from one another that a single process cannot cover them all. And the integrity of the supervisor — whether a pastor in a congregation or a district president — really is the key variable. Not everyone needs to know everything, and not everyone should. Those are genuine complicating factors, and I wanted to name them honestly.

Thank you for dealing with it, and it is genuinely good to hear that repentance followed. That is the goal, and it is fabulous when it happens.

On the broader question of how to handle disclosure: I think the church could probably learn something from the aviation industry here. In aviation, the purpose of incident reporting is not primarily punitive. It is to prevent people from being killed on the next flight. So pilots are actually encouraged to self-report incidents where they may have been responsible or partially responsible, because the question the system is asking is: will this teach your district or your circuit something that keeps souls safe? That is a fairly simple line to draw and to understand. When there is a major incident, the relevant bulletin goes out to everyone so that the same mistake is not made again.

Let me give you a concrete example. At Steamboat Springs, a very experienced crew with a very expensive aircraft decided to fly in, at night, in winter. They were relying on a Garmin GPS that carries a specific warning stating that it does not identify terrain obstructions — it only navigates to the destination. These pilots flew themselves and their passengers straight into the mountain on approach, because they made assumptions no reasonable pilot should make in those conditions. You do not fly to Steamboat Springs from Florida in the middle of the night in a snowstorm when you do not know the airport. The question the aviation system asks afterward is not primarily who is to blame, but what can we do to raise the fence, ensure the shepherd is closing the gate, and keep the next crew from making the same assumption.

That is the model. The goal is not personal criticism of district presidents as individuals. And I think there is a strange dynamic in the LCMS in which every legitimate institutional criticism becomes an intense personal affront that must be met with force. I understand that some people in this room may be held responsible for President Harrison failing to secure the first ballot of his sixth term at the upcoming convention. Gentlemen, relax. We are adults. We can discuss these things. The Synod is not going to heaven. I promise you it is not gathered under the altar. When you arrive at the throne, there will not be three blue crosses next to Jesus.

So my focus is not on making things rigid or perfectly uniform. There are genuine situations that do not need to be broadly known. My focus is on the situations that are already known — the ones in which the layman who dared to speak out is the one being demolished. If you complain through every proper channel about Islamic proselytization materials being distributed to your fifth graders, you deserve a serious ecclesiastical response, not hand-waving from a district president who is afraid of losing a key contributing congregation. If that is the price of pure doctrine, then we must let those congregations go wherever these things are not frowned upon. But if we are a serious church body, we cannot live in peace with people who are placing millstones around children’s necks. That is not what suffer the little children means.

So: document it, share the learning, and make sure the next accident does not happen because we were too embarrassed to say what the previous one showed us. We know not to fly to Steamboat Springs in the middle of the night in a snowstorm when all you know is Florida.

Pr. Snow (continuing):

What I have found genuinely helpful is when people come to me directly before things become public on Facebook or wherever. I do not monitor Facebook, so it is not going to help my job if I only learn about a situation from a social media post. To a man, the thirty-five other district presidents I serve alongside want to serve the church with integrity. We are not surfing the internet looking for problems. I have 230 congregations. I could not watch all of them even if I wanted to. So: if you see something, say something — whether you are in an airport or in a church office.

That is a simple and important point, and I agree with it as far as it goes. But here is the other simple fact: the districts are too large to be properly managed. That is a whole separate conversation, but I suspect we need closer to 80 districts. A district president ought to be attached to an active altar where he serves, and he ought to be able to drive three hours each way and visit every congregation in his circuit, because otherwise genuine oversight is simply impossible unless he happens to be a pilot with a plane at his disposal — and I do not know of a district president in that situation.

And I certainly do not encourage anyone to go directly to the internet and post everything they have heard straight after Sunday service. That is not helpful to anyone. What I am talking about is the situation where good-faith efforts to resolve things internally have been exhausted. In Easton, the parishioners were told to get excommunicated first and seek mediation afterward. I had to write the most laboriously constructed appeal on a Monday morning simply asking whether we could begin mediation before the excommunication, not after. It should not be that hard to get someone to act like a Christian. But the threatening of excommunication in situations like this is not a spiritual act. It is an administrative tool designed to drive troublesome people to the congregation down the road, after which the matter is considered closed. Done. Dealt with. And the congregation down the road, meanwhile, simply opens its doors and receives the parishioner in a situation that was never properly resolved, and too many district presidents accept that outcome in the interest of peace, peace, peace. Please do not rock the boat. Please do not complain about your fellow pastor for receiving someone who should be under discipline. These are internal matters, they say.

And then there is the deeper problem underneath all of this, which is that the shrinking of the Synod has placed pastors in quiet competition with one another. A man who is 35 years old and looking out twenty years begins to calculate that he may not have a congregation. And when his congregation goes, he cannot simply pick up and move to the next district because there are pastors there too. So men dig moats, defending their turf, competing for resources and for sheep, instead of being collegial and collaborative. And in doing so they lose sight of the purpose of what they were called to do.

Thank you.

End of discussion