From Decline to Discipleship: A Roadmap for the LCMS

Why shrinking birthrates, not failing congregations, explain our numbers. Rev. Bryan Stecker interviews Rev. Heath Curtis about guiding the The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) to renewal.

Pastor Bryan Stecker had an incredible interview with Pastor Heath Curtis that is worth every minute to digest. Because the discussion was so wide-ranging, the full transcript is provided along with an AI-generated consolidation and summary of the key topics. If you are at all interested in the future of the LCMS, please take it all in.

1. Demographics & the Second Demographic Transition

1.1 The Fertility Collapse in the West

Across the developed world, the more comfortable, healthy, and prosperous people become, the fewer children they tend to have. This pattern is not anecdotal—it is a measurable, universal shift that sociologists call the second demographic transition. The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), like every other Western Christian body, sits downstream from this reality. As families shrink, so do baptismal numbers. What once seemed like a local spiritual failure is increasingly understood as a structural demographic transformation. The decline in church membership does not begin at the church door but in the maternity ward.

1.2 The First Demographic Transition (Industrial Revolution)

To understand the present, Curtis looks backward. The first demographic transition occurred during the Industrial Revolution, when advances such as smallpox inoculation and agricultural innovations dramatically reduced infant mortality. Families that once expected to lose several children now saw nearly all of them reach adulthood. The result was a social crisis: far more people surviving and living longer than any prior society had planned for. Britain’s response—exporting its surplus population around the world and fueling a global empire—shows how societies reinvent themselves under demographic pressure. Demographic revolutions are, historically, world-shaping events.

1.3 The Second Demographic Transition (Modern Comfort)

Today’s demographic revolution is the opposite problem: rather than too many children surviving, too few are being born. Modern luxury, healthcare, longevity, and personal autonomy correlate strongly with lower fertility. Total Fertility Rates (TFR) in nearly all Western nations fall well below replacement levels. Even if birth rates were to rise tomorrow, demographic momentum ensures that population decline would continue for generations. The shape of a nation’s population—wide at the top, narrow at the bottom—tells the story: societies are aging rapidly and shrinking from below. The church feels this pressure directly.

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2. LCMS and American Christianity in the Demographic Storm

2.1 LCMS Baptisms & Membership Decline

The LCMS once experienced approximately four baptisms per hundred members each year—a normal rate for a high-fertility mid-century America. By Curtis’s generation, that number had fallen to two, and by the mid-1990s it reached one, where it remains. This decline mirrors the national fall in fertility rather than doctrinal crisis. As birth rates collapsed, congregations naturally shrank. Since 1980, the LCMS has lost roughly a third of its membership, not due to mass apostasy or scandal but because the pipeline of new children has simply narrowed.

2.2 American Denominations Under the Same Pressure

What the LCMS experiences is not unique. Southern Baptists, Methodists, and Roman Catholics all show the same downward slope. Roman Catholics in America have shed millions of members—equivalent to multiple Missouri Synods—within a few decades. When two independent scholars analyzed LCMS data, both concluded that the pattern was not indicative of theological fragmentation or internal dysfunction. It was, instead, the unmistakable signature of the second demographic transition: a large-scale collapse in fertility and subsequent shrinkage across all institutional structures that depend on stable population replacement.

2.3 COVID-19 as a Negative Shock

If demographic decline was a slow-moving tide, COVID-19 was a sudden storm surge. Adult conversions dropped by more than forty percent, and the number of LCMS congregations worshiping more than six hundred people on a Sunday was cut roughly in half. Baptisms eventually rebounded, but adult catechesis has not fully recovered. Curtis gives congregations a “mulligan” for the confusion and fear of the early pandemic but insists that the church must never again abdicate its essential functions to secular authorities. The pandemic exposed how fragile institutional religious habits can be when disrupted.

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3. LCMS Strengths: Identity, Families, and Evangelism

3.1 Strong Retention & Unusually Large Families

In contrast to the general decline, Lutherans possess strengths that position them better than many peers. LCMS members retain their children at higher rates than most Protestant traditions. Even more notable, LCMS families are among the largest in America—surpassed only by Mormons and the Assemblies of God. Contrary to stereotypes, Lutherans actually have more large families, proportionally, than Roman Catholics. This means the LCMS enters the demographic winter with more generative potential than many other Christian bodies.

3.2 Adult Converts & Lutheran Evangelism Niche

About a third of LCMS adults were not raised in the Synod. Lutherans excel at bringing in people from other Christian backgrounds—especially those who feel their previous churches lacked clarity or depth. The LCMS’s historical identity as a reform movement within Christianity shapes this: Lutherans are exceptionally good at explaining the Gospel to lapsed, confused, or doctrinally dissatisfied Christians. We do not primarily grow by converting atheists but by giving theological solidity to wandering believers.

3.3 Evangelical Nondenominational Weakness

Meanwhile, evangelical nondenominational churches—often seen as the future of American Christianity—retain fewer than half their young. Their implicit message that “denominations don’t matter” leads young adults to drift easily into the traditions of spouses or peers. Identity-light churches create identity-light Christians. Curtis argues the LCMS must resist the temptation to imitate them. In an age of fragmentation, distinctiveness is strength.

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4. Discipleship, Retention, and the “Pipeline” Problem

4.1 Lost Generations Inside the Church

Curtis argues that the LCMS’s greatest opportunity lies not in mass outreach but in retaining the children it already baptizes. If every child baptized in the last forty years had continued through confirmation, remained in worship as an adult, and raised their own children in the church, the LCMS would not be shrinking—it would be growing. The data is unmistakable: the biggest leak is not at the front door but inside the house.

4.2 Critical Age: Youth and Adolescence

Studies consistently show that people who leave the Christian faith often made the decision emotionally or intellectually around age thirteen or fourteen—long before adulthood. This makes junior-high and high-school discipleship the most vulnerable and decisive period in the entire Christian life. A congregation may have beautiful liturgy and solid preaching, yet if it neglects the formation of its adolescents, it will suffer long-term decline.

4.3 Mapping the Discipleship Journey (“Larry & Lucy Lutheran”)

To confront this, Curtis recommends that congregations literally draft a timeline of a typical Lutheran’s life—from the moment parents announce a coming baptism to the day of their funeral. This timeline reveals where the church forms its people well, and where it does not. Typical weak points include the years after baptism, the transition after confirmation, and especially the handoff when young adults leave home for college, the military, or the workforce. Without intentional planning at these moments, congregations lose people not from rebellion, but drift.

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5. Lutheran Identity, Culture, and Ceremonies

5.1 Cultural Markers as Agents of Catechesis

Lutheran identity is not merely doctrinal; it is embodied in habits, aesthetics, and domestic rituals. The sound of the organ, the pastor’s vestments, the Lutheran Service Book, the banner with the Luther Rose, the LWML mite box, the table prayer “Come, Lord Jesus”—these shape a believer’s imagination long before formal teaching takes root. Identity is transmitted as much through the eyes and hands as through the intellect.

5.2 “Everything Is a Ceremony”

Curtis insists that it is impossible to “avoid ceremony.” Every choice a church makes—from architecture to clothing to mannerisms—functions as a teaching moment. Even a child notices who sits where, who leads prayer, and what seems weighty or casual. These patterns shape the intuition of faith. Ceremonies are the last things to die even when doctrine decays; therefore, they are anchors of generational continuity.

5.3 Looking Lutheran vs. Looking Generic

Curtis offers a provocative test: mute the sound on two church services. A black stage with a praise band and a casually dressed pastor communicates nothing distinctively Lutheran. A vested pastor at a lectern, an altar at the center, a processional cross, and an organ immediately signal a recognizable tradition. The point is not nostalgia but clarity: if a church obscures its own identity, it inadvertently undermines the catechesis it hopes to build.

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6. Preaching, Law–Gospel, and the Collapse of “Cliché Culture”

6.1 Theology by Cliché

American Lutheranism has developed a habit of relying on theological shorthand. Phrases like “word and sacrament ministry” or “six chief parts” often become ways to avoid hands-on discipleship. Luther’s own explanations of sacraments illustrate how easily a crisp phrase can obscure deeper truth. Curtis argues that slogans cannot bear the weight of pastoral theology; they too often replace the real work of forming disciples.

6.2 Fear of Legalism and the Weakening of Discipleship

After World War II, many Lutherans internalized a fear of being mistaken for moralistic evangelicals. This produced generations of pastors reluctant to give practical moral instruction. The result was a church proficient at forgiving sin but hesitant to guide the actual Christian life. Sanctification shrank to a footnote. Curtis believes this fear has robbed the church of its confidence in teaching Christians how to pray, live, work, and grow.

6.3 Pastoral Preaching as Shepherding

Curtis proposes a return to a more paternal model of preaching. Pastors, like fathers of grown children, cannot coerce but must persuade with authority and love. This means being specific: advising people to read Scripture before checking their phone, warning against destructive habits, or urging concrete practices of prayer. Such instruction is not legalism but shepherding. Pastors already do this instinctively in private counseling; Curtis urges them to do it boldly from the pulpit as well.

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7. Leadership, Circuits, and “Islands of Lutheranism”

7.1 The Role of Leadership Parishes

Certain LCMS congregations—those with strong schools, high attendance, or dense Lutheran populations—serve as natural “islands of strength.” These parishes possess resources that others do not. Therefore, Curtis calls them to take responsibility for their circuits by modeling healthy practices, offering space, and building programs that smaller congregations can join without losing their identity.

7.2 Circuit-Level Cooperation

In the LCMS system, pastors regularly gather in circuit winkles. Curtis urges large-parish pastors not to skip these meetings, but to lead them. Real cooperation happens when congregations pool strengths—shared youth ministry, joint catechesis opportunities, or coordinated pastoral care. Such regional collaboration strengthens everyone.

7.3 Intentional Community & Seeds for the Future

Curtis and other demographers foresee the LCMS’s future vitality emerging from intentional, identity-rich communities—congregations that resemble strong parishes in places like Hamel, Fort Wayne, Plano, or Jonesboro. These communities are not new inventions; they echo the early Lutheran immigrant settlements where church, school, and home formed an integrated Christian life. In an isolating, atomized age, such community is not nostalgic but countercultural and spiritually compelling.

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8. Future Outlook: Cautious Optimism and Strategic Focus

8.1 What Demographers Predict

The long-term forecast blends realism with hope. Decline will likely continue for a time simply because demographics change slowly. However, the LCMS possesses distinctive strengths—strong retention, large families, quality schools, and clear doctrine—that could allow it to stabilize sooner than other denominations. If it leans into these strengths, growth is not only possible but plausible.

8.2 Strategy: Discipleship Above All

Curtis’s core message is simple: the answer to demographic decline is discipleship, not programmatic gimmicks. Churches should begin with those God has already given them—baptized members—and form them well. Healthy inreach leads to healthy outreach. A congregation that shapes strong disciples becomes magnetic to outsiders.

8.3 Encouragement for Ordinary Congregations

Many congregations feel discouraged when they compare their present state to their memories of the 1950s or 1970s. Curtis reframes this: if your congregation is merely holding steady while Christianity declines nationally, you are outperforming the national trend by a significant margin. Do not compare yourself to nostalgia; compare yourself to reality. Attend to the disciples in front of you, strengthen your identity, build relationships in your circuit, and trust God to work through faithfulness rather than frenetic activism.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

What do people want to do as they become healthier, live longer, become wealthier, and have more luxurious lives? It turns out what they want to do is have fewer and fewer and fewer children.

In 1959, if your Missouri Synod congregation had 100 members, you could expect to see four baptisms a year. By the time you get to my generation, your Missouri Synod church has got 100 people, you can expect to see two baptisms a year. And then by the time you get to the mid-90s, the Missouri Synod congregation’s got 100 members, you expect to see one baptism a year. And that’s where we’re at today.

Why are there red and blue counties? Why isn’t every neighborhood in America “Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican”? It’s about the affordability of single-family housing where a working couple can afford three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a fenced-in backyard. That’s where demographically you end up with married white women. And where you find married white women, you find the GOP.

Before we get started on today’s episode, I want to tell you about something that I am very excited about, and that is Memento. Memento isn’t just a devotional. It’s a movement—a call for men to recover discipline, devotion, and strength in Christ. It brings back the ancient disciplines of the Church: fasting, prayer, Scripture, and brotherhood, all rooted in the liturgical calendar, with daily devotions for every day of the year.

It’s powered by state-of-the-art technology, so you can join in anywhere, right from your phone or computer. Leaders across confessional Lutheranism—people like Ben Ball, Heath Curtis, Dr. Gifford Grobien, Dr. David Peterson, Adam Koontz, Willie Grills, and many others—are rallying behind it. Our goal is for 5,000 men to join together in strength and faith. Commit now before the one-time-only founder’s discount ends on Christmas.

You can also give this as a gift to a loved one. You can join now and learn more at memento70.com—that’s memento70.com. Reclaim the man.

All right. And Bennett says we’re back. So here we are with Pastor Heath Curtis. And you’re now the district president of…

Southern Illinois.

There’s a way of naming each one of them. Don’t mess it up.

Okay, so it’s “Illinois or Iowa District West,” not “Iowa West District.” Iowa District East. But it’s Southern Illinois, Central Illinois, Northern Illinois. So don’t mess it up.

And you’ve been there for, what, six months?

Yeah, just about. I was elected at the end of February—elected on a Thursday, installed on a Saturday—learned the job on the job. It’s been very rewarding. I love Southern Illinois. My wife and I and our family have been down there for almost 20 years. We’re just about ready to celebrate 20 years at the congregations I was serving when I was elected, and yeah, we love it. Love the area, and now it’s really neat to be able to serve those congregations in this new capacity.

And you’re right there with…

Right by Ben Ball, exactly.

And you guys kind of work together on the classical school there. Is that correct?

Well, I mean, I’m not going to take any credit for it. St. Paul, Hamel is the mother church of northern Madison County, Illinois, 1856. My congregation, Trinity in Worden, and my other congregation, Zion in Carpenter, are both daughter congregations of Hamel. So: Hamel, 1856; Worden, 1877; Carpenter, 1902. So the congregations have a lot of interconnection. We know each other really well. We can hear each other’s church bells on Sunday morning.

And in the winter, if you climb the steps, you can see each other. So it’s a densely populated, very Lutheran area. There are several different “geographic LutherANisms,” right? I grew up in Plains-state Lutheranism, which is very different from this kind of dense, Illinois Lutheranism, which is different from Southern Michigan Lutheranism. All those are very interesting.

It was a great place to serve as a pastor. I’m really enjoying these first months of serving now in this district capacity, and there are good brothers all around. So yeah, my kids go to his school, and St. Paul’s is doing great work in that regard.

Lutheran education is really big. Our district is 91 churches, but we have 21 grade schools, two high schools, and we don’t really know exactly how many standalone preschools—9, 10, 11—it seems to shift every year. Education is very important.

We might be the first or second geographically smallest district. It’s a lot of Lutheran packed into Illinois. Illinois is the only state that’s cut into three districts because, since day one in 1847, Illinois has always had more Missouri Synod Lutherans than any other state. So it’s kind of a sore point that it’s not the “Illinois Synod,” but yeah, we’ll let that go.

So, one of the areas we want to focus on here is demographics, right? How did you get into demographics? Why is it important for us to look at demographics?

I got into it because the congregations I was serving—specifically Trinity—had a financial crisis which then led us into trying to figure out stewardship. And when we got to the end of that process, I wrote a little book called Stewardship Under the Cross. I really just wrote it for my buddies, because all through that process I felt like I was encountering problems that, at least as far as I knew, didn’t have really good Lutheran solutions.

Here we are in a financial crisis. We need to hear what the Bible says about finances, giving, generosity. There’s a lot of stewardship stuff out there, but I didn’t feel like much of it was coming from a robustly confessional, liturgical, Lutheran perspective.

So I found good brothers and fathers in the ministry, got really good ideas from them, and at the end of that I felt like I’d been reinventing the wheel, or at least putting together pieces from other guys’ wheels. So I wrote that up—and that caught the attention of the Office of National Mission.

This would have been 2013. I officially started working for the Synod part-time, while I was still a parish pastor, as the Coordinator for Stewardship. I traveled all over the country, talked to congregations like ours and said, “Hey, I’m a real pastor from a real church just like yours. We had a real financial crisis. Here’s what happened.” I just did that all over the country.

In those early days, I kept having the same experience over and over. In these workshops, I’m meeting with pastors and lay leaders together. We’d aim to get a circuit together—5, 10, 15 churches, send your pastor, send a few lay leaders—and I’d do my workshop.

At the end of a workshop, the pastor or an elder or whoever would come up and say, “Hey man, good stuff, really liked it, I’m sure we’re going to put some of this together. But let me ask you another question.” And the question was always some version of:

“Okay, you’ve shown us what to do with stewardship. I get it, that’s going to be helpful. But here’s what I’m really worried about as I think about the future of our church. I see a lot more gray hair in the pews. Even since I’ve been here, my confirmation classes are smaller. I’ve been in this church 20 years. I love it here, but I used to have six baptisms a year—we’re lucky to see one baptism a year these days. As I look forward, I’m worried.”

I was hearing this over and over again. So I went to my boss at the time, the Rev. Bart Day—he’s now head of LCEF, but at that time he was the Director of the Office of National Mission—and I said, “You know, I know we keep records. The Missouri Synod keeps detailed records of membership and trends. But is anybody studying them? Is anybody telling us what these numbers mean?”

He said, “I don’t really think so.”

I said, “Would it be okay if I took some stewardship budget and hired some guys to look at this?” He said yes.

I wanted guys outside the Missouri Synod—people who didn’t have a dog in the fight. At the time, I asked two guys to do these studies for us. One was Dr. Ryan MacPherson, who at the time was not Missouri Synod. He was ELS, teaching history at Bethany, and he had done a demographic report for his denomination. I’d seen that and thought, “Okay, this guy knows something about it.” I called him, and he was very willing to jump in.

The other was Professor George Hawley at the University of Alabama, a political scientist. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I’d been reading his dissertation, which is super interesting. His dissertation looks at a really interesting demographic question: why are there red and blue counties? Why do politics separate out geographically in that way? Why isn’t every neighborhood in America Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican?

In his dissertation, he explores the theory that it’s about the affordability of single-family housing—where a working couple can afford three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a fenced-in backyard. That’s where, demographically, you end up with married white women. And where you find married white women, you find the GOP. It’s really interesting.

Now a lot of that work has become well-known in the wider political culture. It’s well known that urban areas tend toward a certain political ideal because the people who live there are atomized; unmarried people live in apartments, etc.

So I just call him up in his office in Tuscaloosa and say, “Hey man, you don’t know me from Adam. I work for this church. Would you look at our numbers?”

He says, “Well, no. I’m trying to get tenure at a real university. I don’t have time for your side project.”

I said, “Well, hey, we are going to pay you.”

He said, “All right.”

This guy is amazing. He’s cranking out a real book every 18 months, just like clockwork. So he takes a little detour, does our report, and gets so interested in it that he detours from his political science stuff and doesn’t write a book about the Missouri Synod—he writes a book about all of American Christianity, inspired by our work together.

The book, which gives you the flavor of what he found, is called Culture, Demography, and the Decline of American Christian Denominations. Hawley—H-A-W-L-E-Y. He’s since gained tenure and made a career of studying the right side of the U.S. political spectrum. Super interesting guy, wonderful friendship for me. He came and used some of my parishioners as a sounding board for one of his books. Cool guy, Presbyterian, faithful family man, but not—on the surface—at all “Missouri Synod.”

I kept MacPherson and Hawley separate from each other. They didn’t know the other existed. I gave them each the same data set from the Synod and just said, “Tell me what it means. What’s going on?”

They both agreed that the shape of the curve of the Missouri Synod’s decline—and I’ll talk about some particulars in a minute—tells you something. To a demographer or political scientist, you can just look at the shape of that curve and say, “Oh, I know what’s going on.”

This is not what a church’s decline looks like when they’re having a theological fight. This is not what a church looks like when it’s had a big scandal. This is not what a church looks like when it’s had bad financial troubles. This is the shape of a demographic change—a very predictable demographic change—that all of American Christianity is going through. In fact, all of the Western world, really all of the world, is going through what’s called the Second Demographic Transition.

So there had to be a first. The first demographic transition is basically the Industrial Revolution and the conquering of infant mortality through, among other things, the smallpox inoculation.

Think of one long human lifetime—from, say, 1725 to 1800. Holy cow. You go from a situation where families have six, eight, ten kids and everybody just expects that four, six, eight of them are not going to make it to adulthood—then you change that so that almost all of them do. Instead of 20% reaching adulthood, maybe 75 or 80% reach adulthood. That has huge consequences for society.

It’s not just smallpox inoculation. Another huge part of the first demographic transition is Bennett’s favorite prog-rock band: Jethro Tull. Do you know who it’s named after? The guy who invented the seed drill.

You’ve read the Bible. How do you plant wheat? Like this—throwing your hands out. Not very efficient. You want to drill it into the ground in rows so you don’t have to save as much seed, and your crops grow better. Jethro Tull should be on the wall of every farmer and every politician. He’s one of the true heroes of humanity.

So, this is a huge thing, and it’s a huge problem for society, because the question becomes: what do I do with all these people? Where will they live? What will they do with themselves? The whole story of the English Industrial Revolution is about this. We could talk about the Enclosure Acts, we could talk about many things, but basically the countries of Western Europe all began going through this at the same time. Somebody figures out the best way to solve the problem—somebody “wins” the first demographic transition—and it’s Britain that wins because they figure out what to do with all these extra people: put them on boats and conquer the world.

By the time you get to, say, 1860, when Britain officially took over India, you’ve got 25% of the world’s population and 25% of the land mass as part of the British Empire. So when demographers name something “the Second Demographic Transition,” they’re naming it after something really big. This is not going to be a small deal.

What is this huge thing? It turns out that as we’ve gotten lives that are super comfortable, super healthy, and into old age—think of just your life and my life in terms of comfort and health—it’s something Henry VIII could not dream of. David and Solomon in all their glory could not imagine living like we do. It’s crazy.

On top of that, we have really strong, healthy lives late into life. So what’s the trade-off? It’s interesting. What do people want to do as they become healthier, live longer, become wealthier, and have more luxurious lives? Turns out what they want to do is have fewer and fewer and fewer children.

Does that start right away? So if you’re looking at, like, the late 1800s—is that there already?

Sure. Let’s say the first demographic transition is roughly complete by 1850. It’s super interesting to look at the birth rate in the United States, and the fabled baby boom. This is a thing in all data science: how wide is the chart? Where do you start the data point?

If you start in 1930—birth rates in America from 1930 to 2025—what you see is a baby boom: it’s down here, it goes up, and then it comes down. But if you pull that chart back to 1830, you see that the baby boom wasn’t a “boom.” It was a return to normality. The chart is flat, then goes down, then comes back up to the baby boom, then starts to fall again.

So into World War I and into the Depression, you have a baby bust. Then the baby boom is a return to historical normality. I’m talking about normal for America and, broadly, normal for the West.

But now, in the second demographic transition, the TFR—Total Fertility Rate, which measures how many live births the average woman has over her lifetime at the national level—has fallen. To keep your society steady, it needs to be 2.1. We now have TFRs all over the Western world that are well below replacement rate, and they’re persistently staying that way.

All nations that have entered this “funnel” of modern Western convenience, luxury, and health have had this experience. There has yet to be a nation that’s entered that funnel and hasn’t had this experience.

In the presentation I do, I show a chart—those population pyramids with pink bars on one side, blue bars on the other, each bar being a cohort: 0–4, 5–9, 10–14, etc. If you’re a basically pre-industrial society, your chart tends to look like a pyramid: lots of infants, very few old people, pretty steady.

I have a chart of Uganda in about 1992—they’re just entering the second demographic transition, getting vaccines, digging wells, entering the industrial world. Then I have a chart of Italy in 1998, and it’s shaped like this [inverted-ish]: the same number of infants and 80-year-olds, with lots of people in the middle. People are having fewer and fewer children, with lots of old people. You can see where it’s going—you can see what the graph will look like.

This leads to a key insight for understanding demographics in general, called “demographic momentum.” If you could wave a magic wand and convince everybody in Uganda, “Hey, instead of having 6.1 kids per family, let’s go with 1.9”—and you could actually do that—and then also wave a wand and say to Italy, “Hey guys, this isn’t healthy for your society, having only 1.1 kids per woman—let’s make it 3,” Uganda would still continue to grow in population for three generations, and Italy would still continue to shrink for three generations.

So once you’re headed in a direction, that’s where it’s headed. Demographic momentum.

Now you’ll never be able to unsee it, because this is a huge factor in geopolitics today. What’s going on with Europe? Why the migrant crisis? Why such differences of opinion about it? We’ve made promises to people. There’s nothing wrong with a pyramid scheme as long as you can keep the base of the pyramid sufficiently wider than the top. Those cohort charts—Uganda: no problem. Italy: big problem.

So that’s the national-level, geopolitical stuff. What does it mean for the church?

Here we are in the Missouri Synod, in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the Roman Catholic Church in America. Our society is going through the second demographic transition. You’ll notice I’ve injected zero theology so far. We’re just getting the lay of the land—what is reality?

Reality is: in 1959, if your Missouri Synod congregation had 100 members, you could expect to see four baptisms a year. By the time you get to my parents’ generation, by the time you get to my generation, your Missouri Synod church has 100 people, you can expect to see two baptisms a year. By the time you get to the mid-90s, the Missouri Synod congregation’s got 100 members, you expect to see one baptism a year. That’s where we’re at today.

This maps. I have all these other statistics memorized for fun and profit. The Southern Baptist Convention lost 1.1 million members in just three years—2018 to 2021. During the Obama administration, the Roman Catholic Church in America lost two Missouri Synods’ worth of members. The Methodists are down basically the same percentage as we are.

If you look at us: the Missouri Synod peaked in membership in 1972. Then we have the walkout and Seminex and all that jazz. I like to take 1980 as “year one” for the new Missouri Synod. Since 1980, we’ve lost 35% of our membership—more than a third. In the past 20 years, the average size of a Missouri Synod congregation has declined 28%.

At this point in the presentation, I always say: I’m going to give you a pep talk, but for about 20 minutes it’s not going to sound like a pep talk. I go through all these statistics and then the pep talk starts:

Compare what’s happening in your church against these realities. Maybe your church is like, “Wait a minute—our school’s thriving. We…”

I loved your talk with Ben Ball, loved your talk with my buddy David Peterson. Peterson’s church, Ben’s church, Plano, Jonesboro—these places, in one version of my speech, I call “islands of strength.”

If you’re listening to this, you know the easy statistic: for every 100 members of your church, the average Missouri Synod church sees one baptism per 100 members per year. What’s it like at your church?

If you’re seeing a lot more than that, thanks be to God. That tells you something about the area you’re living in, the demographics of your area, the demographics of your church. What are you doing for those families? You must be doing something that’s working. How can you double down on what’s working?

It’s very important to understand that national averages are not local realities. You need to compare your local reality to the national average. Maybe that will tell you something about what you’re doing well and what you’re not doing well.

We then begin to slowly tell churches: I think there’s a real self-confidence problem in many of our congregations. If you’re just Larry and Lucy Lutheran, you’ve been sitting in the pews for 30 years, you’ve watched this happen, and you don’t really know why—but it’s undeniable. You remember what Walther League dances used to be like, and now you’re lucky if you can scrape together three or four kids to go to the district youth gathering.

You remember, “My confirmation class had 15 kids; now my grandkids’ confirmation class has four.” You remember when you had to bring in folding chairs and set them in the aisle for Christmas services. People have experienced this in slow motion; they feel a malaise.

So part of leading with the realities of the numbers and societal trends is to reframe your experience at, you know, Wrath of God Lutheran Church in Podunk, Iowa. If you’re basically flat in membership over the past 10 years, and Christianity in America over the past 10 years is way down—you guys are doing great. You’re basically up 28%. Reframe that experience. Look at all the good things you’re doing.

Then I move into specifics. The low-hanging fruit is: what do we do to address this? Is there anything to address it? Specifically, what should I do at my church? You’ve told me about huge trends that are beyond my power to change. I can’t change something as world-shattering as the Second Demographic Transition. What do we do?

Then we pull it back and say: all right, we’ve been talking statistics and sociology; we need to remember our theology. The first thing is: be faithful. Do not start chasing your tail. Do not chase trends. It’s self-defeating.

But “be faithful” is generic. What faithful things should I do? Should I build a preschool or close down our school? Should we do a food pantry, or something else? There are many faithful things to do. What’s the “bang for the buck”?

Then I pull up a chart: among all religions in America, who does the best job of retaining their members? Number one is Mormonism. But number one overall is actually Hinduism. Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists—they have very strong retention.

That chart says a lot about how much of your identity is tied up in your faith. Watch Vivek Ramaswamy’s talk on being a Hindu in America. He’s a very persuasive advocate for a version of American civil religion that would be very tempting for our people: “Hindus believe there’s one God, of course we do…”—it sounds like something that could easily blend.

But my point is: even though he’d love to be President of the United States, he’s not going to do a “Barack Obama” and suddenly say, “I guess I’m going to a Christian church now.” For him, Paris is not worth a Mass. Their identity is too strong. It’s unimaginable for him to be anything but Hindu.

When you get to Christian denominations, you see Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptists—fairly strong retention. Down at the bottom are Episcopalians, UCC, etc.

The message is: if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. We have a good retention rate. Now let’s make it overtly theological: we have a good discipleship rate. But it’s been better in the past; we know it could be better.

Here’s my punchline: if everybody we baptized for the past 30 years had continued to go to church through confirmation, then stayed in the church after they got married, and kept going to church, we would not have shrunk by 35% over those 30–40 years. We’d be a growing denomination today.

You can’t separate retaining membership from attracting members from the outside. Internal discipleship mirrors a congregation’s strength in evangelism and outreach; they go together. Two sides of the same coin. Our Lord sent us out to make disciples. You make disciples with the children the Lord gives you, and you make disciples out of whoever you can get to listen to you. Same thing.

Out of these two studies for the Synod came “Making Disciples for Life,” which is one of the themes for the Synod—it focuses on discipleship. The new Office of National Mission director, Rev. Dan Galchutt, has added another slogan: “God’s Mission Here.” It’s meant to get people thinking that the mission of the church is your congregation, what you’re doing right here. We have this folk notion that “missionary” means Kenya or Kazakhstan. That’s true, but the primary mission of every congregation is right here: God’s mission here.

Those two studies informed that work: discipleship is low-hanging fruit, and discipleship is something every congregation does.

So the homework I give is: pastor and elders, sit down with a roll of butcher paper, roll it out over an 8-foot table in the church basement, and make a timeline for Larry and Lucy Lutheran—from the time Mom and Dad come to you and say, “Good news, pastor, we need to schedule a baptism for next October,” until their funeral service.

What do you do from the moment you hear that, all the way to the end of their life? What are you doing for Lucy Lutheran to make sure she’s a Lutheran—and what’s a Lutheran?

We put together, for our district, four marks of a Lutheran disciple:

1. They go to church every week.

2. They say their prayers and read their Bible daily.

3. They cherish the catechism and know it by heart.

4. They cherish Lutheran identity; it’s part of who they are.

That’s how you make a disciple for life: this is a person who can’t imagine being anything else. “How could I ever leave my church? That’s ridiculous.” Part of that is doctrinal—“If I or an angel from heaven preach another gospel…”—you stick with scriptural teaching. But there’s also a family, cultural aspect.

I have a little joke: try this challenge. After this Sunday’s presentation, go to Applebee’s or Texas Roadhouse or wherever. When your food comes, hold hands with everybody at your table and say, “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest and let Thy gifts to us be blessed.” Some old lady in a Thrivent shirt at the bar is going to come over and pay for your dinner.

These cultural markers are super important. When I think of my grandma and going to her house for lunch once a week in high school, I can see it: walk in the door, turn toward the kitchen table, and there’s a pink rotary phone, a Bible with Portals of Prayer rubber-banded to it, and behind the phone, the LWML mite box. That’s Lutheranism. That’s the Missouri Synod. Those cultural markers are more than cultural; they’re family traditions.

This is what it means to be an enfleshed human being. This is why our confessions talk about the importance of ceremonies. Everything we do in the church is a ceremony. You can’t choose not to have ceremonies—everything teaches.

The example I use: when my eldest daughter was pretty young, we’d been visiting friends for a while. The other mom was buckling Anastasia into the car seat, and she came back laughing. We asked why. She said, “Oh, I was chatting with Anastasia about your long road trip, and she mentioned that sometimes Mom drives us home and Dad sits in the woman’s seat.” Because the passenger seat is obviously the woman’s seat—Mom always sits there.

Our confessions say we value ceremonies and choose them wisely because they teach. Ceremonies teach whether you want them to or not, and they’re the last thing to die. Chesterton talks about people who stop believing in the Trinity but still go to Christmas Eve service or light candles on a particular day.

Arthur Carl Piepkorn dug up a great example: incense lasted longest in Leipzig because the big church was next to a cattle finishing yard. Sometimes there’s even a very practical reason ceremonies don’t go away.

So if you want to think about cultural markers of Lutheranism—even liturgy itself, liturgical worship, our hymnody—even if you looked at them as value-neutral (and they’re not neutral; they teach our doctrine very effectively), they’d still be worth using just as cultural markers.

I’m not the first guy to say this. If I’ve got a Lutheran church with no vestments, they’ve built a new building that’s not shaped like a basilica but like an American stage with a couple ferns; there’s no impressive altar, just a table off to the side; the music is a five-piece band—okay, let’s put that on the screen, turn off the volume, and show it to 100 Americans. “What church is that?” Nobody is going to say “Lutheran.”

But if you grew up in the Missouri Synod and I show you a middle-aged guy in a slightly crooked stole and an alb that doesn’t quite fit, an organ, CPH felt banners, a Luther seal on the wall—you turn down the volume, and a Lutheran will immediately say, “Yep, that’s Missouri Synod. I think I know that guy.” Others might say, “Is that Presbyterian? Methodist?” but they’ll be in the ballpark, and they’ll know it’s liturgical and not Roman Catholic.

With the volume up it’s even better, because our doctrine is there, attached to these markers. It all works together to drive discipleship. The mission of the church is to baptize and teach, to build membership.

At this point, if I have time, I bring in the May 2022 Pew numbers about what actual Lutherans believe. There’s been debate about how confident we can be in those numbers; I find they’re pretty accurate to my experience. We could be doing a lot better with discipleship.

If the average Lutheran’s prayer life is just “Come, Lord Jesus” before meals and “Now I lay me down to sleep” at bedtime—if they remember after doom-scrolling—that’s a problem. I know it’s true because when I say that to a crowd, nobody says, “What are you talking about?”

When I’m talking to pastors, I talk about “theology by cliché.” Every cliché starts as a convenient catchphrase. “Word and sacrament ministry”—it’s a good phrase, summarizes a lot of theology, but it can be used as an excuse.

At Trinity, Worden, if I had said, “I don’t set up tables and chairs because I do word-and-sacrament ministry,” and even pointed to Acts 6—well, tough. In Worden, it’s the pastor’s job to set up tables and chairs. He lives in the parsonage, he’s right there. He’d be the world’s biggest jerk if he didn’t bring the kids over and help set up for the sausage supper.

So clichés don’t always work. Even good ones. Augustine has the cliché about sacraments: “Let the Word be added to the element, and you have a sacrament.” Okay, but think about it.

If I hold a baby by the neck in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, and make the motion of pouring but obviously don’t pour, and say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” I’ve got Word and element—does that count? No. Oh, I guess we need the action.

How about this: I’ve got a kid by the ankle, I pour water and say the words—was it a baptism? Well, what if the kid was already baptized? Then it wasn’t. So you actually need five things: the element, the Word, the action, a valid recipient (can’t baptize dead people, already-baptized people, or non-human organisms), and a valid agent. The black mass is not mass. If a group of atheists mock the Lord’s Supper and follow TLH page 15 to the letter, they’re not actually doing the Lord’s Supper.

So theology by cliché is bad. Another cliché that needs to go is “the six chief parts.” If six of them are chief, what are the other three—not chief? So as a pastor trying to get kids through the catechism in nine months, what do I cut out? The Table of Duties, Daily Prayers, Christian Questions and Answers. I cut out the third of the catechism that’s discipleship.

We spend all this time on the Ten Commandments learning right from wrong; the Table of Duties tells us how to put that into practice—why wouldn’t we memorize it? We spend time on the Lord’s Supper—“not like the Roman Catholics, not transubstantiation; not like the Calvinists, not like the Baptists”—and then we don’t have the kids memorize how to get ready to take communion.

Luther, in the Small Catechism, becomes very expansive at the Lord’s Prayer—he loves prayer as a man of prayer. I have my kids memorize those explanations, but then I don’t have them memorize the simple daily prayers: “When you get up, make the sign of the holy cross and say…”

My diagnosis is: post-World War II American Lutheranism, heavily influenced by Werner Elert and the Erlangen School and a lot of historical theology, drifted into a kind of allergy to telling people exactly how to live as Christians—for fear we’d be called legalists or American evangelicals.

I used to really make fun of American evangelicals and their six-week sermon series on “how to be a good parent.” I still wouldn’t advise the Lutheran church to do it that way. But on the Second Sunday after Epiphany, when the Gospel is the Wedding at Cana and the Epistle is Ephesians 5, I talk a lot about being a good husband, wife, parent. We talk about marriage and family.

When you read the Apology of the Augsburg Confession and see what Melanchthon lists as topics of Lutheran preaching, it’s things like how to pray, marriage, and concrete doctrinal topics. Not every sermon is just “you’re a sinner, but Jesus died for you.” That’s Romans 1–3—super important. But there are 13 more chapters.

Acts 2 is an evangelistic sermon: Peter is preaching to unbelievers. The only thing he has to say to unbelievers is, “Jesus is the Messiah; you killed Him; repent and be forgiven.” Compare that to his First Epistle to the Church: he says that in chapters 1–2 and then has a whole lot more to say to Christians about very specific things to do, how to live this faith out.

We’ve been stronger on that in the past. We know how to do it. But in the time we’re living through the Second Demographic Transition, we’ve had a double whammy: huge demographic changes and a downplaying of discipleship—sometimes to the point of preachers bragging, “I’m weak on sanctification, and I’m proud of it.”

Thankfully I think we’ve turned a corner. Bill Weedon’s book on piety and discipleship—Thank, Praise, Serve, and Obey—is a wonderful antidote to our current climate of lack of discipleship or quietism.

What broke me out of my dogmatic slumber on this is that in my early ministry I did the Classics degree at seminary, I’d always done Greek and Latin, I started working for CPH doing Latin translation and editing. I started reading Luther’s sermons and Johann Gerhard’s theology and thought, “I’m not preaching like these guys. I wonder who’s wrong.” That was a big eye-opener.

All these things tie together. You started with, “How did you get into demographics?” Answer: because my church was out of money. Why was the church out of money? We weren’t doing discipleship. We were afraid to say, “Hey guys, this is what the Bible says about giving money.”

That’s not legalism; that’s just, “Here’s what Jesus said. This is the Christian life.” Everything I’ve ended up doing in my ministry is interconnected to real parish problems. Every problem in the church comes from some lack of heeding the Word, some lack of discipleship. So the solution to every problem in the church is to hear that Word and make a plan.

Specifically, if you’re a pastor or lay leader, make a plan to apply that Word at the points where you know you’re not doing a good job. That’s where the homework comes in: roll out the butcher paper, map out Larry and Lucy Lutheran. What are you doing for them to make them good disciples?

Every congregation will see some places where they’re not doing well. We can name obvious ones: after baptism, how do you get them into Sunday School three or four years later? How do you get them into the confirmation system? After confirmation, how do you keep them coming?

When they graduate high school, here’s an easy one every pastor can do. Make a simple plan for all your high-school graduates. Help the parents help that kid. If they’re going to college, get them connected to LCMS campus ministry, or if there isn’t one, to a local congregation. Don’t fumble the handoff.

If they’re going into the military, make sure they at least regularly receive communion from an LCMS chaplain, and know what to do when they don’t have one. If they’re going to trade school, same question: where are you going to live, where are you going to go to church?

These are points where we know we’re fumbling. Often the most important things in life are simple but hard. We know what to do, but it’s hard; still, actually having a plan and attempting to execute it is the first step. Pastors are shepherds. The call is: shepherd the sheep. Actually lead them.

My preaching has really changed. I used to believe all these clichés: “Don’t end a sermon on the law,” “Don’t tell people something specific to do for fear you’ll bypass the Gospel.” As if, if you tell someone to do a good work, they might think that work is good and forget Jesus. It’s nonsense. It’s not the New Testament and it’s certainly not Luther.

Now I get very specific. I’ll preach to people: “The first thing you need to do on your phone every day is read the Bible on it.” I’ll say, “This is pastoral advice; it’s not a Bible verse. But I guarantee I know why you don’t pray or read the Bible enough—you’re entertaining yourself to death.”

Okay, preacher, you’ve condemned it before, then said, “But don’t worry, Jesus died for that,” and wondered why nothing changes. That’s not how you raise your children. You don’t raise your kids with the bare Gospel. You raise them with law and Gospel, discipline and comfort.

We’re put into a kind of paternal relationship with our people. We can’t coerce anyone, but we persuade them by the Word of God: “Here’s what God says; here’s what you should do.”

It’s like grown children with their father. At 35 and 55, Dad doesn’t order you around, but in strong families you want his counsel and respect. If he wants to convince you, he has to persuade you. That’s a good metaphor for pastor and laity.

And like with my own kids: if my son isn’t cleaning his room, I don’t say, “You broke the Fourth Commandment, but thank goodness Jesus died for you.” I say, “You broke the Fourth Commandment. Repent, and go clean your room.” There’s no fear that he’ll think I hate him or will kick him out. That’s Hebrews 12: discipline—same word as discipleship.

Some of my hang-ups are generational. We’re at a conference with a good mix of pastors, many younger than me. I’m old enough now that for some of them I’m beating a dead horse—they get this, which is great. My cohort still struggles more. But we can all do better.

So: discipleship is the thing. Demographics is a huge issue; don’t get lost in it. At the end of Candide, “we must cultivate our garden.” Tend your own garden—your congregation. That is the work of discipleship. How do you want your kids to be as adults? How are you raising them? Do that with your congregation.

I want to go back to demographics. A couple quick questions. Where would the LCMS look in comparison to other denominations? I’ve heard the Roman Catholic Church in America has done pretty well; I’ve heard two different takes.

The news is really bad. It’s really bad for basically everybody. If you divide the American population by every demographic measure—sex, race, income, geography, generation—in every one of those, over the past 20 years, Christianity is down and “no religion” is up.

This is the rise of the “nones”—no religion. In 2018, America was roughly 23% evangelical Protestants (Missouri Synod, Southern Baptists, PCA, etc.), 23% Roman Catholic, 23% no religion. Seven years later, the number one “religion” is no religion.

Recently, I’ve really liked the work of Ryan Burge, a stats guy and Baptist pastor. He’s a great demographer. He’s dug in and suggests the rise of the nones may be flattening out—but flattening out is not revival. It just means it’s stopped accelerating.

Have the Roman Catholics done better than others? There’s been argument about that. Online, if you live very online, you might think from YouTube that there’s this amazing wave of young men becoming Eastern Orthodox and Latin-Mass Catholics. But when you dig into actual data, most of that melts away.

The Orthodox are less than 1% of the U.S. population. There was a report from 20 Orthodox parishes: 186 adult converts in a year. That’s the best hard data, and it’s meaningless. Maybe I could find 20 parishes with zero. How do you extrapolate?

Even if they’re “kicking butt,” they’re not making up for the Second Demographic Transition and the rise of the nones. I’m glad for every convert; the angels rejoice. But it’s not a great reversal of trends.

Roman Catholics: about one in 13 American adults is a former Roman Catholic. Is that “doing well”? Some Latin-Mass pockets are vibrant. Thanks be to God for wherever Christ’s Word is still taught. But we need to be honest about scale.

There’s also confirmation bias. If we examine “Lutheranism” by just looking at St. Paul, Hamel, or Redeemer, Fort Wayne, we’ll say, “Lutheranism is kicking butt.” And it is, in those places. That’s why in my speech I mention those congregations: I tell the church I’m visiting, “We need you to knock it out of the park because you have what it takes to be one of these islands of Lutheranism.”

I’m convinced a big part of Christianity’s future in America will be islands of intentional community. That’s a huge trend, but right now it’s embryonic. If we ever had to break into that seed bank in Norway to replant, that’s kind of where we’re at. It’s awesome, but small.

So for those “island” churches—our church has been blessed, population booming, etc.—what do we do to manage that?

“To whom much is given, much will be required.” In our district, I sat down with the circuit visitors. The Synod is divided into 35 districts; districts into circuits of 7–20 churches; each has a circuit visitor.

We went through every congregation in our district asking: which of these are leadership parishes? We identified them. I’ve got plans to have retreats where I bring those pastors together and talk about this question.

Leadership for them often means a delicate dance. They’re the ones with resources, facilities, numbers. What can you do at a big, thriving suburban Lutheran church for the other five congregations in your circuit? How can you help ensure there’s a Lutheran youth group their kids can go to—without swallowing them or threatening their identity?

Ben and I have a great relationship. My congregation is a quarter the size of Hamel. We’re not exploding in growth. But we knew we needed to do better with youth. St. Paul has numbers; we had space. So we made the youth-group space at Trinity. Now on some nights we have youth from five congregations. All the pastors take turns helping.

That’s a big one: having the relationship where I want your congregation to thrive, and we work together.

Another stat from the rise of the nones, and from our own LCMS Youth study: when you ask someone who’s 25–35, “When did you decide Christianity was not for you?” the answer is often 13 or 14. So strong discipleship in the tween and teen years is super important. That’s a universal weak point. If a leadership parish can be very intentional about how to help everyone around them with this, that’s huge.

Nuts and bolts: Pastor at big thriving Lutheran church, go to your circuit Winkel. Don’t skip it because you’re too busy. Be the most faithful guy there. Be a resource and a help. The main thing is a mindset shift: “I’m here to serve, not just enjoy my success.”

Where do we see things going demographically in the future? Can we predict?

Here’s the thing: extrapolating demographic data is dangerous. In 1968, the Missouri Synod produced a document on planning for the year 2000. They said, “We need to plan because in 2000 the Synod will have 8 million members.” In reality, in 2000 we had about 2.1 million; now we’re at about 1.7.

They just extended their trend lines and didn’t think about the baby boom, or post-WWII immigration from Lutheran areas of Europe.

So what do our demographers say? Holly was very reluctant to predict. Demographers know, better than anyone, how fraught it is. But he did become somewhat famous for being one of the few who correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 victory, so he’s not terrible at this.

I hired him in 2015; reports came out 2016. We published them in the Journal of Lutheran Mission. After that, in 2017–2018, I pressed him, “All right, man, I need a prediction.”

He said: the Missouri Synod has strengths others don’t have. (Another whole part of my usual talk is about this.) I do a little parlor trick: I ask a room full of Lutherans, “Is the LCMS good at evangelism?” They all say, “No.” I have a routine about how Germans are self-hating and I hate self-hating Germans.

Because it turns out 35% of LCMS adults didn’t grow up LCMS. That percentage is as high as the number of adult Mormons who didn’t grow up Mormon. We are as good at evangelism as the Mormons—at least at a certain kind of evangelism.

We’re not particularly good, statistically, at taking someone from atheist to Christian. Where do our 35% come from? Marriage. Our people marry Christians from other denominations. We are really good at clearly explaining the Gospel to weak, misled, erring Christians.

If you think about it, that makes sense—that’s what Lutheranism is in its first form. Luther stands up and says, “My dear fellow Christians, we all love Jesus, but we got some things wrong. Let’s fix that.” We are really good at that.

We also have a high percentage of large families among people in their child-bearing years. Holly had to get creative to figure that out, because there’s no straightforward census category for “denomination vs. number of kids.” He used the American Community Survey, looked at women 30–49, how many children are still at home, and arbitrarily defined “large” as three or more kids at home at that stage.

Who’s number one? Mormonism. After them, Assemblies of God. After them, Missouri Synod Lutherans. We have more large families than Roman Catholics. Among “normal” Christians, we’re number one.

Catholics, by their own internal numbers, say about 4% of Catholic families follow the Church’s teaching on family planning. One in 25. Real Catholics have 1.5 kids like everybody else.

So we have strengths: high retention, lots of large families, strong evangelism to other Christians. But for every silver lining, there’s a cloud. If 35% of our members are already adult converts, what are the odds we’re going to get twice as good? If we already have the highest rate of large families apart from Mormons and Assemblies, what are the odds that will double? We’re bumping up against the law of diminishing returns.

Holly said: if you keep on keeping on and lean into your strengths, the decline will continue for decades, but it will flatten out and then you’ll have a real chance to grow.

So if he’s right, we should expect “green shoots” in our data—specific data points looking better. The overall Synod has lost members every year since 2000, but a district might have a year of growth, or growth in baptized membership, etc.

Through 2017–2019 I was able to point to different green shoots: this district gained overall members, that district gained baptized members. Not many, but some. A soft landing into growth.

Then COVID.

Here’s my COVID speech: everybody gets a mulligan. Nobody knew what they were doing. Everybody tried their best. If you happened to be right on day one, you were still “wrong” socially because everyone else was wrong. Everyone gets a mulligan—but never again.

Remember that big strength we had in adult converts? COVID cut it by 43%. I’m hopeful it will bounce back; our data always lags two years. As of December 31, 2023, we hadn’t bounced back. Baptisms bounced back—people just delayed. Adult converts haven’t.

Before COVID, the Missouri Synod had 106 parishes with more than 600 people in worship on a Sunday. After COVID, 55. Cut in half.

So my motto is: never again. Nobody tells the church what to do except the church. Full stop.

What does the future hold? I am cautiously optimistic. Another LCMS member who is a real data guy is Lyman Stone. We’ve only spoken a couple times, but his work is excellent. Without planning it, we fell into a pattern where I was professionally optimistic and he was professionally pessimistic. I attributed that partly to the fact that he was living outside the United States at the time, so the church was numbers on a spreadsheet for him; for me, it was faces in the pews.

He’s now back in the States, and his latest report is more optimistic. He sees a future where the Synod grows stronger around robust, proud-to-be-Lutheran identity. Discipleship is led by the full gamut of cultural, religious, and family markers—intentional discipleship works.

He suggests that parishes leaning into Lutheran distinctives—“I’m happy to be Lutheran; I’d be happy if you joined us, but I’m not changing who we are to make you happy”—are the ones poised to thrive.

The only kind of church people like to go to is a church where the people who already go there are happy to be there. It was foolish to try to run away from who we are—to drop “Lutheran” from the sign, to just be another generic evangelical church.

I mentioned earlier the retention rates. One of the worst retention rates—only 44%—belongs to evangelical non-denominational churches. They retain fewer than half the people raised there. No surprise: their message is “denominations don’t matter.” So when you fall in love with Kathy Catholic or Betty Baptist, you say, “I guess I’ll be Southern Baptist; denomination doesn’t matter.”

So they have a real back-door problem. They leave people in the hallway of Mere Christianity. Lutherans who ape their ceremonies lead people out of the Lutheran room and back into the hallway.

So, to synthesize: the LCMS is uniquely well-positioned for this moment. We are really good at explaining the Gospel to weak, misled, lapsed Christians. We are really good at family formation and helping families grow. We are really good at education. We are really good at self-identity.

Places like Hamel, Fort Wayne, Plano, Jonesboro—they’re like the Moscow, Idaho Presbyterians in another tradition: intentional communities with geographic density, real community, their own schools. In other words, trying to be more like the Missouri Synod. We have a 150-year head start on this model.

The “islands” or intentional-community version of Lutheranism is really just returning to our roots—being intentional about it today.

So I encourage our churches: lean into your strengths, stop beating yourselves up over your weaknesses. Backstop your weaknesses, but don’t build your strategy around them.

If you’re a Gold Glove shortstop who hits .228, you shouldn’t spend 90% of your time in the batting cage. You should make sure you’re turning double plays like clockwork. Don’t let your average fall to .204, but lean into what you’re really good at.

Focus on what’s good about your church. Focus on in-reach and discipleship. Those are the ingredients that make a good church—and good churches naturally become good at outreach.

I see it over and over in our district: the churches humming along internally are the ones bringing people in. The churches trying desperately to do outreach while saying, “We’re a horrible church, we don’t have enough people,” have their focus all wrong.

We build disciples here, starting with the disciples the Lord’s already given us. When we make those disciples strong, that’s when disciples start to come in from the outside.