Has American Lutheranism Failed?

**Please do not read this if you are easily offended**. Lutherans must confront the fact that the theology and doctrines we boast in were set aside during the COVID-19 "pandemic response".

Lutherans love to extoll Martin Luther’s defiance against church and state, such as when he proclaimed, “Here I stand,” or burned the Papal bull. When the COVID-19 “pandemic response” rolled out, our Synod and congregations had the opportunity to live up to Luther’s Godly benchmark of courage and defiance. Instead, we saw 99% of the Synod fold, nonchalantly discarding half a millennium’s theological struggle and development. At least we were spared the postmodern cri de coeur by some incredible miracle: “The virus just needs the gospel!”

The pandemic-induced collapse in the LC—MS has been especially shocking for Lutheran converts. Many converts crossed the Missouri because the theology is strikingly true and exceptionally beautiful, finally making the Lord’s yoke easy and light¹. Also attractive was the Synod being a remnant holding out against the relentless cultural and civic degeneracy. However, the theology’s eternal elegance and power to bring the Lord Jesus down to serve us in our misery is made worthless when it is just a costume worn for character role-playing.

COVID-19 revealed much larping in Lutheran circles. Version 2020 American Lutheranism was suitable for rank advancement, selling books, notching higher education credits, filling conference seats, and eating potlucks. It was no match for moderately hard times, and we turned “Witness, Mercy, Life Together” into a punchline.

So, taking the lead from Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller's book, we must ask, “Has American Lutheranism failed?”

The Changing Room

The reality of COVID-19 theological dress-up hit home during a meeting with a Synod official who had attained one of the highest ranks. He insisted that everyone in the meeting wear a mask “because I know the science,” even as he soft-pedaled a heinous adultery problem. At that moment, I realized this bishop was terrorized by something that could kill the body but was indifferent to the one who kills the body and soul in hell.² He believed our ludicrous fabric masks added days to our lives that the Father in Heaven had forgotten to count.³

Masking and social distancing became the most trusted sacraments commanded by another Jesus (2 Corinthians 11:4).

Coming out of that meeting and surveying what was going on in the shuttered churches of the Rocky Mountain District and all over the Synod, it dawned on me that the unhesitating retreat on nearly every front boiled down to an open and unblushing fear of bodily death. It is a staggering mission failure! Christ’s Holy Church and its shepherds exist only to make the living unafraid of physical death — to prepare us for when our souls will be separated from our bodies for a little while.

COVID-19 showed that many exchanged the truth for a lie. We jilted God’s irrevocable and never-changing promises for the shifting sand assurances of unelected and moronic health bureaucrats and their politicians, self-anointed “experts,” and tone policemen in the congregations. Our haughty declarations about the Two Kingdoms and Three Estates melted away in a winter sunshine.

The failures have not been addressed meaningfully, and, as seems to be Missouri's way, we prefer to pretend that nothing happened from 2020 to 2022 that affected the Church beyond a few whoopsies and inconveniences.

Unholy Communion

The Lord’s Supper is our most holy sacrament, marking the pinnacle of the Divine Service. However, a veil was lifted during COVID-19 to reveal a surprising percentage of clergy and laity with little to no respect for the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s be plain-spoken: The LC—MS witnessed and tolerated rank heresy with Holy Communion, but nobody was placed under the minor or major ban or faced any serious reproach. Our Synod issued a gentle written rebuke and nothing more to congregations and bodies in fellowship practicing remote consecration and related abominations.

The pastors and church leadership who treated the Lord’s body and blood as the ordinary means of contagion are still in place and exercising authority “because, you know, grace.”

For example, a Denver area pastor conducted ding-dong-ditch communion⁴ for people too afraid to go to church, and he was doing it for congregants who were not his parishioners. Several local churches had people handling the elements with medical gloves and doing ridiculous things like placing wafers between Post-It notes. Several churches went full Fundamentalist with pre-packaged wafer-grape juice combo cups, then piled on with distribution regulations to keep everyone widely separated. Many churches made a great show of applying hand sanitizer to the point that it looked like a consecration ceremony. More care has been invested in COVID-19 proofing the Lord’s Supper than in communicating its attributes before and since the pandemic.

We witnessed literal witchcraft spread through our body with wholly inadequate pushback and no discipline from leadership. In other words, this is a worse crisis than Seminex, but you would never know it from all the sweeping under the rug.

The pious reverence for hygiene will be the perfect and enduring symbol of churches willing to make profane what is holy.

Our congregation maintained the common cup from the start to the end of the pandemic. Not a single member, including the vast majority of members who continued to take refuge in the common cup, died from COVID-19.

The Scattering of the Saints

By Easter 2020, it was clear that the “pandemic” and its response were synthetic affairs. Despite the compounding evidence, most churches stayed shut “out of love.”

The lightest critical thinking about wildly fluctuating infection, hospitalization, and mortality statistics in any jurisdiction was sufficient evidence of an artificial event. If that wasn’t enough, there were TikTok nurses (so burdened with caring…), infected patients placed in nursing homes (to reduce the Medicare/Medicaid contingent liabilities?), and the instructions to wear masks made from tee-shirts and staying six feet apart for an airborne respiratory virus that killed less than a fraction of a percent of its hosts (if any of the death stats can be believed). Then, there is evidence that it originated from shoddy work at a Chinese lab contracted to do gain-of-function research by the American government. Remember the political correctness about calling it the Wuhan Flu because that was “racist?”

As a rule of thumb, the more permissive a congregation was with open communion before the pandemic, the stricter it was in forsaking meeting together for the longest time. Is that ironic or evil? The very thing the people needed in the shadow of the valley of death was denied to them.

It wasn’t just the casually faithless churches. In 2021 (i.e., well past any point of rational concern about COVID-19 being a 1918 replay), a friend asked for a church recommendation since he was moving to another city in Colorado. I directed him to a “Confessional” congregation with a well-regarded conservative pastor. He was denied the Divine Service for several months because the inn was full. The parish still had limited attendance, so current members received preferential seating—so much for love.

The clergy must shoulder most of the blame, but it is also clear that many pastors were relentlessly bullied, especially in congregations dominated by Feminist and Boomer leadership.

My Pastor, My Policeman

One of the most disturbing developments during COVID-19 was the number of people willing to break fellowship because the pastor refused to be the mask⁵, social distancing, and hand sanitizer cop.

The excuse for following the pandemic regimen was always, “we do it out of love”, but the love never went the other way. It was pure guilt-tripping that was part of the manufactured consent directed by the agents of the pandemic response. There was an insistence, without any recognition of the absurdity, that it was unloving to go to church and even more unloving to receive the Lord’s Supper from a common cup and ungloved hand.

It was the unforgiveable sin for a pastor to exhort his congregation that the best defense against COVID-19 was to avoid being fat, unfit, and indoors.

On the one hand, fear, rote obedience, and perpetual docility were demanded. When our congregation began to explore potential legal remedies to prevent infringement of our religious liberties, district leadership told us not to rock the boat. On the other hand, Stasi-style snitching proliferated. Our congregation had a former member taking photos of the parking lot on Sundays and sending them to the authorities. Another neighbor took photographs of a wedding reception, alternately wagging her finger and shaking her head as if incanting a spell over the celebration. Consequently, Denver Police rolled in a few times in packs of two and three but were wholly disarmed by our Pastor’s non-confrontational refusal to do anything but carry on with what Christ commanded and equipped him to do.

The harassment only stopped when Denver’s Mayor’s Office was informed that Trinity Lutheran would hold peaceful First Amendment demonstrations each Sunday at 9 AM. At that point, the BLM-led color revolution was underway with violent rebellion on the streets of our city, so even the mayor had to acknowledge it was a little inconsistent to clamp down on the church when the militias were going unmolested. There were no more police actions after that.

Courage Begets Courage

Our church hosted a pastor’s conference in late 2020 because nobody else would do so. Nearly all the pastors arrived with masks, some with double masks, and some with masks and face shields. By the end of the event, only one or two still wore some manner of face covering. Likewise, we did not require or hint at “social distancing” requirements, and the attendees sat closer by the hour, enjoying the everyday human interactions they had been denied for months. It was hard to find hand sanitizer, and nobody asked for it…

No coercion or persuasion was required either way - everyone was free to do as they chose in those matters. It was simply a case of our pastors and parishioners leading by example. It was very instructive but tragic that this example was not coming from senior leadership. The same masking, distancing, and sanitizing terrors were inflicted in our Seminaries, the Concordias, and the International Center.

It is impossible to fathom how we pretend to form young men for the Ministry and expect them to visit the sick and the dying without being deathly afraid or outfitted in full hazmat suits.

Luther served Bubonic plague victims, but we let our old folks be imprisoned alone for months and even die in solitary confinement because of a mild coronavirus. We talk about religious liberty - a lot - but we left Grandma in the fatal grip of a million Nurse Ratcheds and deprived babies of baptism out of fear of authority and death.

Experimental Gene Therapy

Our greatest failure was the institutional bias to compel employees and students to be injected with Frankenstein potions that were falsely marketed as “vaccines.” Even parishioners, especially the elderly, were given the hard sell through Synod mouthpieces to take the shots and via the overall willingness to accept whatever “health experts” were shilling. Indeed, some of those voices cheerily asked for our neighbors to be deprived of their income and possessions if they refused vax mandates.

The Synod could and should have publicly rebelled when the Biden administration tried to impose a vaccine mandate. Instead, our institutions preferred to expedite vax card uploads to human resource portals rather than join the court case or issue a public notice of refusal to comply. That was the moment for civil disobedience, but it passed us by.

Now the authorities know that any “health emergency” framed with the most outlandish propaganda, ridiculous mitigation measures, and quack cures will snap us into line. We will close our churches and our schools, bastardize the Lord’s Supper, and become televangelists at the next hint of a pathogen that is not as grossly absurd as Monkey Pox, sorry, “M-Pox.” We cannot count on our resistance to the COVID-19 tyranny because we had no resistance. We buried the Three Estates and the Two Kingdoms as quickly and as unceremoniously as possible in exchange for oodles of cash.

We have set no precedent for future generations to rely on to prevent the next round of provocative First Amendment infringements.

Quo Vadis

Brothers and Sisters, what use is Scripture or the Lutheran Confessions if we become like the unregenerate in a time of trouble? What is our witness if we fear imprisonment for refusing to wear a mask or daring to sing in church? What is our faith if a minor virus so easily deforms Holy Communion and stops a pastor from being with his parishioner at the moment of death?

We must confront what happened to the LC—MS during COVID-19 with honesty, courage, and repentance. We are responsible for American Lutheranism's failure, and it should never be allowed to happen again. It starts with disciplining the six synods; diversity is not our strength.

☩TW☩

1. Matthew 11: 28-30 NKJV
Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

2. Matthew 10: 28-31 NKJV
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

3. Ecclesiastes 8:8 ESV
No man has power to retain the spirit, or power over the day of death. There is no discharge from war, nor will wickedness deliver those who are given to it.

4. The “pastor” “consecrated” the elements at “church” and then left them on the doorstep of the recipient like any other food delivery service.

5. The most amusing example of the mask theatre was a strident nanny-state health warning about not relying on a surgical mask to keep out wildfire smoke particles, which are massively larger than a COVID-19 virion.