Fatal Errors of LCMS Ecclesiology: How are the Keys Exercised?

The Office of the Keys should not be shared with one-person, one-vote mobs.

One of the most damaging errors in contemporary Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) ecclesiology is a category error regarding the Office of the Keys; Christ’s mandate to rightly called and ordained men to forgive and retain sins:

“Jesus breathed on His disciples and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; and if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” John 20:22-23,

This error occurs when the Keys are separated from the preaching office instituted by Christ and turned over to a congregational vote. A majority of LCMS congregations have embedded this critical error into their constitutions and bylaws, and it is a root cause of all manner of dysfunction.

Once the category error shift occurs, the Church has significantly altered the substance and meaning of “Word and Sacrament Ministry,” so that the binding and loosing of sins becomes a matter of congregational governance (jury conviction) rather than pastoral care. Excommunication devolves to a function of the membership bylaws, and the pastor is shackled to the outcome of a congregational vote rather than Scripture. Consequently, the pastor is reduced to a vassal executing the will of the congregation, surrendering his God-given authority to forgive or retain sins.

Relatedly, a member facing excommunication can avoid having sins retained simply by resigning from a congregation. If a pastor or congregation rejects and disputes that swerve, they can expect the District President to send a reconciler who will put the constitution and bylaws under a jots-and-tittles microscope first and foremost, and the Bible last and hindmost.

Example A: Congregational Veto over the Keys

In Example A, the congregation’s bylaws require that the Voting Assembly judge excommunication. Only if the assembly “shows no scriptural cause” to halt the action may the pastor proceed. If the assembly does judge that such a cause exists, “the action is ended.”

Delegation of authority to congregational vote is not how the Keys are described in Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions. They are the sole preserve of the man called to the congregation, who is the steward of the mysteries of Christ. No congregation should have a bylaw right to veto its pastor’s authority in these matters. If the pastor has falsely or unjustly bound sins, then he should be charged with false doctrine.

Example B: Congregational Excercise of the Keys

In Example B, the bylaw language seems more circumspect, but it is actually worse because the congregation, not the pastor, is the final determinant of excommunication. The pastor and elders are said to “initiate” discipline starting with following Matthew 18. The member may be heard, and there is some fact and appearance of due process, fairness, and orderliness.

However, the actual excommunication that terminates membership and excludes someone from the Lord’s Supper ultimately belongs to the Voters’ Assembly instead of the pastor. The Keys are further tarnished by making a decision dependent on a supermajority of eligible voters; i.e., a congregational rather than pastoral function. This is simply usurpation.

In this specific example, the excommunication clauses cancel each other out. The constitution correctly assigns excommunication to “a specific function of the pastoral office” only to rescind it with other clauses delegating the final decision to a supermajority of voting members.

Example A and Example B are procedurally different, but ultimately identical in contradicting Scripture either by subordinating or transferring the Keys to the voters’ assembly (cloaked with Roberts’ Rules of Order!). In both cases, the authorization to bind and retain sins is detached from the pastoral office, which renders any congregational voting outcome illegitimate.

Who Possesses The Keys?

The error seems to have its origins in a misapplication of C. F. W. Walther’s Church & Office.

The preaching office [Predigtamt] is conferred [über-tragen] by God through the congregation [Gemeinde] as the possessor [Inhaberin] of all ecclesiastical authority [Kirchengewalt] or the Keys, and through the call that is prescribed by God. The ordination of those who are called with the laying on of hands [Handauflegung] is not a divine institution but an apostolic, churchly order and only a solemn public confirmation [Bestätigung] of the call.
Thesis VI, The Church & The Office of Holy Ministry ¹

Walther was concerned that the LCMS balance the extremes of Rome’s assertion that the Church has the keys only through the Ministry versus congregationalist contentions that the preaching office exists at the whim of the congregation.

Walther’s correction (via Luther) was that no single man possesses the Keys, but he comes to command them when attached to an altar through a divine call.² Every congregation has stewardship of the Keys, granted to it by Christ. That arrangement affords the church the right and duty to call a man to the preaching office, but never to exercise the Keys if a valid call is not in place. Once a pastor is in place, the congregation relinquishes its stewardship of the Keys, and the pastor is accountable to God for opening and closing the gates of heaven with them. The congregation has simply loaned the Keys to its pastor for his exclusive application for as long as the call endures. When the divine call ends, the church’s property is returned to the vault, and the pastor relinquishes everything that came with it.

He [the pastor] is a servant [Knecht] of the Keys as are all other priests; the Keys belong only to the Church. An owner may permit his servant to bear his coat of arms if he does not presume” (to say) “that it is his own above all other servants and anyone else. So the Christian Church gives the Keys to the pope and mandates him to administer and use them in its name. But for that reason it does not suffer them to be his own.Martin Luther³

If we treat the Office of the Keys as a good governance charter to keep order in the visible church, then we are opposing God. The Keys are a mandate to a pastor to safeguard his flock from ravenous wolves and proudly impenitent people, with the goal and hope of bringing them to repentance. The Keys are a mystery that empowers a pastor to have some management of the church invisible. It is a tool of inexpressible power that touches the end of eternity, and we are far too cavalier about it with our constitutional formulations (1 Cor. 5:5).

By subordinating or transferring the exercise of the Keys to a congregation, we diminish excommunication to a class of administrative penalties. Consequently, we then become guilty of manufacturing doubts about other parts of the preaching office:

• Is the Sunday confession and absolution actually so corporately bound that it cannot be heard without thinking of the supermajority’s opinion?

• Is admittance to Holy Communion similarly obscured?

• Is baptism actually a function of corporate consensus?

• Is the preaching of the Word conditional upon a supermajority giving a thumbs up or down?

• Is the pastor just a hireling since one of his supernatural authorities is circumscribed in our polity?

We surely know the Keys are exclusive to the called and ordained man because Scripture and the Confessions say so over and over again. To reduce the keys to a voting decision is to set aside Christ in favor of early wisdom.

Matthew 18 is frequently invoked to justify congregational voting on matters of discipline, but it does not say, “put XYZ to a vote.” Again, this injects a category error that inverts the responsibility of the sheep to listen and obey, and the pastor to exercise his God-given and mandated authority.

Damage Below the Waterline

The Smalcald Articles define true Christian excommunication as exclusion from the Sacrament of the Altar until repentance occurs.

The greater excommunication, as the Pope calls it, we regard only as a civil penalty, and it does not concern us ministers of the Church. But the lesser, that is, the true Christian excommunication, consists in this, that manifest and obstinate sinners are not admitted to the Sacrament and other communion of the Church until they amend their lives and avoid sin. And ministers ought not to mingle secular punishments with this ecclesiastical punishment, or excommunication. SA III IX Of Excommunication

Consequently, excommunication belongs, irrevocably, to who controls admission to the Lord’s Supper. Only the pastor has that right, and the congregation has absolutely no involvement beyond bringing concerns about ‘levels of admission’ (too permissive, too strict, obvious errors, etc.) to the pastor so that they may be corrected if warranted. If he is guilty of false doctrine in managing his rail, there is a process for bringing charges.

Yet, most of our churches confess one thing about the Keys on Sunday morning and a very different thing at the voters’ assembly. We must recognize this incoherence and rebellion against what God has commanded.

When the Keys are made conditional on congregational governance, pastors are reduced to bureaucrats. The discipline they are responsible for is conditioned by procedure, which necessarily retards the opportunities for repentance and restoration. That makes discipline decisions intensely political with all the drama that inevitably follows.

It also gives pastors a convenient excuse to avoid doing hard things and may invite or inculcate an unintended laziness. Clergy can disclaim accountability by outsourcing the Keys to a congregation’s vote, and they can also be tempted to manipulate the procedures to achieve a result they prefer. Some of this was sown in the salted fields of Perry County⁴, resulting in too many pastors who are pleasers because that is what conforms to the polity’s logic. Where capable men do emerge, they are often countermanded by and subject to the incessant carping and judgment of people who are less capable, less knowledgeable, and less accomplished.

Constitutional examples A and B are currently in service at LCMS congregations. They are not outliers; they are probably representative of 99% of the Synod’s member church constitutions. How these contradictory positions on the Keys are kept in tension is a genuine mystery. “Our Great Theology™” is not supposed to be this easily subverted, yet here we stand.

1. C. F. W. Walther. The Church and the Office of the Ministry: The Voice of our Church on the Question of Church and Office. Edited by Matthew Harrison. St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2012, p. 209.

2. Herein lies another trap when we issue divine calls outside the authority of a congregation, but that’s for another day.

3. Walther, Church and Office, p. 43.

4. The Rise and Fall of Martin Stephan