Jesus Cares About Performance and Results - Part II
Suppose most of an orchard has been chopped down, and discarded limbs are seen burning in several fires. We might reasonably infer that a widespread fruitfulness problem has overtaken the orchard.
Read Part I here:
Jesus Cares About Performance and Results
The First and Chief Article of doctrine on which our Christian identity pivots has produced an intended and unintended levelling effect. Positively, the intended effect is that the Christian knows he has contributed nothing to his eternal salvation. He receives an identical gift of saving faith that all other Christians obtain (
The burned-out district
Suppose you come across a massive orchard and notice that the owner is always cutting down more trees than are being planted, so that large bald patches are visible. The unproductive trees are sent through a woodchipper or burned, leaving more than half the original orchard fallow. The remaining fruit-bearing trees have yellowing spotted leaves, and yields keep declining, creating insufficient work for all the orchard workers employed.
An observer might reasonably infer that the orchard has been blighted, with the diseased trees no longer producing enough fruit to justify fertilizing and pruning them each season.
Might we dare to introspect and consider whether our Synod is such a blighted orchard?
Confessionals don’t like to talk about numbers, and
Missionals don’t like to talk about theology.
Anonymous.
As frightening as it can be to be mindful of our personal fruit-bearing in thankful response to the master gardener, it is more terrifying to contemplate an entire church having its lampstand removed (Revelation 2:4-6). What if we have abandoned our first love, and that is why our church body has surrendered 60% of its weekly worshippers in just half a century?
Nobody likes to hear such things. Surely, we are better than some crusty old church in modern-day Türkiye that didn’t even have the Lutheran Study Bible? After all, do we Missourians not simultaneously walk, chew gum, explain the nuances of subjective and objective justification, all while wearing high-visibility disaster response vests, organizing triennial conventions with elegant resolutions honed with punctilious respect for Robert’s Rules of Order, and having stacked $85 million in publishing-related net assets?
Something has gone wrong, badly wrong, yet our response continues to resemble this cartoon:
It’s easy to read and hear a thousand excuses for our denomination's parlous situation, exemplified by a recent X post that told youngsters they had no idea how bad it was when President Gerald Kieschnick was the boss. Alternatively, President Matt Harrison has ranks of choirs singing lamentations about the decline under his command.
We must look in the mirror (that mirror, the second one?) and admit that all the excuses amount to being content that the LCMS decline is less precipitous than that of the Methodist, Episcopal, or ELCA church bodies. “Be of good cheer, brother! The ELCA will go out of business faster than we! Have another potluck, we know the gospel is a passing rain shower, and that’s just how it goes, friend!”
It seems we have decided to go down without a fight. We will be good boys and girls, ensuring the lights are switched off and all the bills are paid. At all costs, we must have an orderly extinction:
That is why scanning the recent district convention inputs and outputs is dispiriting. Our Synod appears to be mainly concerned with things of little eternal significance. We’re good at displays of civil righteousness and procedural folderol rather than urgent reflection, analysis, and appealing to the Father in Heaven for relief. Have we even considered a national day of prayer to break the soul drought we’re suffering?
As an aggregate polity, we seem unable to be brutally or even sincerely honest with ourselves to ask why the LCMS cannot stop losing. The charts above are a story about losing bigly. Are we allowed to ask why the LCMS is terrible at making converts and doing mission things, especially nationally?
The overwhelming sense coming out of the district conventions is that the LCMS is mostly sifting and sorting institutional dross. We deflect or defer pragmatic and urgent realities, and can reasonably be accused of paying lip service to Scripture's fruit-bearing demands. Indeed, our superficiality was laid completely bare by the “pandemic”, when large swathes of the LCMS became openly pusillanimous and apostatized at the drop of a hat, which we wrote about here:
Ardor for Arda
Our trouble is deep, ancient, and fiendish—a Balrog settled in the LCMS's deepest places. It crept in and polluted our orchard’s aquifer long before anyone alive today can remember, stealing our first love and causing the orchard's yield to decline and its trees to be blighted.
We need our most accomplished and bravest teachers of the church to band together and probe the furthest reaches of LCMS history and lore to seek out The Thing, tell the truth about it, and arrange for its exorcism. It is adventurous, urgent, and dangerous work, but a handful of our most intrepid shepherds must start the journey before it is altogether too late.
A map marking some of the first nests already lies between the pages of Rev. Dr. David Scaer’s recent book, which recounts battles with dragons flying out of Valparaiso. However, they were mere spawns, and we need to go deeper to find the original queen that birthed them; we will write more about that in Part III, ‘Vamping in Valparaiso’, later this month.
May the Vinedresser grant the LCMS a renewed season of fruit bearing, starting with faithful pastors preaching you and me onto the true vine (John 15:1). May the Lord Jesus see fit to grant us his grace and mercy to be pruned so that we might be fully at peace along the banks of His rivers flowing with living water (John 4:14) until the day we see Him with our own eyes.
☩TW☩