Looking Ahead to Day Three at the LCMS Convention

Two floor days have produced forty-five decisions and no defeats. Tuesday brings the theology docket, four amendments already filed in print, and a forty-five-minute window to hear them.

Tuesday at the LCMS Convention belongs to Floor Committee 5 (Theology and Church Relations), Floor Committee 10 (Ecclesiastical Supervision and Dispute Resolution), and the remainder of Floor Committee 6’s pastoral-formation docket. What to look out for

The shape of the day

• Morning: the consent calendar at 8:35, balloting at 8:45 (boards, Commission on Theology and Church Relations, boards of regents, and synodwide entities), the convention essay from Concordia University Irvine President Dr. Michael A. Thomas (“Christ Conquers Death,” with Rev. C. Bryan Wolfmueller responding), then Committee 10 at 10:30 and Committee 6 at 11:00.

• Afternoon: Committee 5 at 2:10, further balloting at 3:15 and 5:05, Committee 10 again at 4:00, and Committee 6 again at 4:40. The Silver Medal of St. Martin of Tours goes to Rear Admiral Gregory N. Todd, the retired Chief of Navy Chaplains, in the morning’s military-chaplaincy recognition.

• The time arithmetic deserves attention. Committee 6’s six remaining items get roughly 85 minutes across two slots and Committee 10’s seven get about 70, while Committee 5, carrying twelve live resolutions and three of the four filed amendments, is scheduled for the forty-five minutes between 2:10 and 2:55. Monday reached orders of the day with Committee 1’s docket unfinished, and a forty-five-minute window for the week’s heaviest theology suggests either aggressive cloture or a spillover into Wednesday.

Filed in advance: the four amendments

• Res. 5-08A, men and women in the church, with the Snyder amendment. The committee text reaffirms the Synod’s positions and commends the service of women in “scripturally appropriate ways.” Rick Snyder, a lay delegate from the Indiana District, would add a whereas asserting that Paul’s restrictions “are broader than simply not serving as a pastor” (1 Tim. 2:12-15; 1 Cor. 14:33b) and a resolve directing both seminary presidents to form faculty committees evaluating the service of women “as elders and as president/chair or vice president/vice-chair,” reporting to the 2029 convention. The amendment converts a commendation into an examination, and it reopens the very territory the floor declined to pull out of Omnibus B on Sunday. This is the likeliest photo finish of the day.

• Res. 5-11A, in vitro fertilization, with the Folks amendment. The committee text urges members to uphold procreation as “a sacred act within the marital union” and refers the doctrine to the CTCR for study toward a future doctrinal resolution. Hayden Folks, a pastoral delegate from the Ohio District, would replace the referral posture with a resolve “that the Synod condemn the practice of IVF especially because of the freezing and destruction of human beings and the introduction of gametes from persons outside the marital union.” The distance between deferral and condemnation is the battle line and could be contentious because there are so many IVF families in the LCMS.

• Res. 10-03A, sexual misconduct response, with the Neuendorf amendment. The committee text builds spiritual-care provisions and a task force reporting to 2029. Christopher Neuendorf, a pastoral delegate from the North Dakota District, would add two resolves: that district presidents carry misconduct investigations “to completion regardless of resignation status,” and that the Synod maintain “a publicly accessible classification or designation” for rostered workers who resign mid-investigation, with public reporting where clergy sexual abuse is substantiated. Survivor-protection sentiment will meet due-process and liability anxiety head-on, and the public-list resolution will probably stimulate concentrated institutional resistance, mostly because of the impracticality of investigation without meaningful police and prosecutorial power, never mind the lack of a judicial system in the LCMS that could handle it.

• Res. 5-09A, the public reading of Scripture, with the Kachelmeier amendment. The committee text already directs the Council of Presidents and the seminary faculties to take up the question of who may read Scripture in the divine service, and report six months before 2029. Brian Kachelmeier, a pastoral delegate from the Texas District, would add the words “and make recommendations for action at the next Synod convention,” converting a report into an obligation. The smallest of the four on its face, though the underlying question is another proxy in the woman’s suffrage debate.

The rest of the theology docket

• Res. 5-05, closed communion. The resolves run toward discipline rather than latitude: pastors are encouraged to “receive with joy the guidance and admonition” of their ecclesiastical supervisors where communion practice has been indiscriminate, while the CTCR is asked for a study document on “extraordinary circumstances and pastoral exceptions.” Expect some heated argument from both flanks, from those who read “pastoral exceptions” as a crack in the door and from those who read the admonition resolve as supervision with teeth.

• Res. 5-15, the AALC. The floor committee’s new resolution directs the President of the Synod to continue formal dialogue with The American Association of Lutheran Churches over its reception of former LCMS pastors and congregations, and to report to 2029 “whether there is unity in doctrine and practice with the AALC” or whether the basis for fellowship still exists. A fellowship ultimatum with a three-year fuse; the confessional floor will probably carry it, though delegates afraid of making the tent smaller will surely complain.

• Res. 5-04, partner churches. The CTCR is urged to assist the President in studying “controversial theological matters in partner church relations,” and the President is to address them “directly and urgently.” The names go unspoken in the printed text, which is itself the story; watch the microphones to learn which partner churches the delegates have in mind. Germany’s SELK is the poster problem child.

• Res. 5-12, the Created Male and Female task force, concludes the task force and receives recommendations, including continued retreats for families navigating sexual-orientation and gender-identity questions. Likely a strong pass, with debate possible over particular recommendations.

• Res. 5-10, organ donation, is the sleeper. A CTCR report on the theology of organ donation and transplantation sounds procedural until the debate reaches brain-death criteria, at which point a routine study request becomes a bioethics argument.

• Res. 5-01 and 5-02, new fellowship, recognize altar and pulpit fellowship with the Evangelical Lutheran Christian Church of Bolivia and encourage the path toward it with Lutheran Mission—Australia. Doxology moments, adopted rising and singing if the day goes to script.

Committees 10 and 6: supervision and the formation remainder

• Res. 10-01A asks the CTCR whether Matthew 18:15-20 governs ecclesiastical order and polity at all, which is the live question beneath a decade of arguments about public rebuke of public teaching.

• Res. 10-02A creates a task force on the relationship between Bylaw 1.10 dispute resolution and Bylaw 2.14 expulsion, the machinery that produced the last triennium’s hardest feelings.

• Res. 10-04A directs the CTCR to prepare a practical statement on the “God-pleasing use of digital communications,” the Eighth Commandment in the digital age included. A synodical statement on online conduct will be read by some delegates as pastoral guidance and by others as a speech code in embryo. The debate will be conducted, fittingly, by people who will be quoted online before they sit down.

• The Committee 6 remainder runs from 6-09A (imploring the Council of Presidents to complete the SMP supervision plan of 2019 Res. 6-03A) through 6-10 (adjunct-faculty bylaws), 6-11 (embedding church-work recruitment in Synod culture), 6-12B (returning the pastoral-colloquy rules from the policy manual to the bylaws, male-only eligibility codified), and 6-13 (accommodating bi-vocational pastors whose congregations cannot pay a full living). After Monday’s three-to-one formation verdicts, these should run at Committee 6’s established margins, with 6-12B the only candidate for an echo of the 5-08A debate.

The machinery: consent, ballots, and the decline lists

• The consent calendar proposes eight adoptions en bloc: 4-10, 5-03, 5-06A, 5-07, 5-13A, 9-01B, 10-05A, and 10-06. The one to watch is 9-01B, pulled from Monday’s calendar by ten percent of the delegates and returned twice revised; a second extraction would signal that the objections were not editorial.

• Three balloting rounds (8:45, 3:15, 5:05) fill the CTCR, the boards of regents, and the remaining boards and synodwide entities. The down-ballot slate is set out in its own section below.

• The decline lists (5-14, 6-14, 10-07) are where committees bury the overtures they chose not to advance, and the floor’s only recourse is a motion to rescue a specific overture from burial. Any such motion is a signal worth recording, because it names the cause a delegate thought worth the parliamentary trouble.

• Not scheduled today: Committee 1’s remainder (1-06A on urban ministry, 1-10 on cultural idolatry, 1-11A on God’s design for the family) and the balance of Committee 9’s structure docket, whose largest sleeping item is Res. 9-18, the late floor-committee resolution to elect the Synod President at the convention itself rather than by the pre-convention congregational ballot. A floor that has spent two days proving itself more confessional than the presidential electorate would, under that bylaw, become the presidential electorate. Committees 3, 7, and 8 also wait, with only Wednesday and Thursday remaining to hear them.

On the ballots: boards, commissions, and regents

The gavel offices are already filled: the President, the First Vice-President and the five regional vice-presidents, the Secretary of Synod, and the four seats on the Board of Directors, all settled Sunday and Monday. Tuesday is the down-ballot day, three rounds of convention-floor balloting for the commissions, the Synod-level boards, and the ten boards of regents, most seats carrying a six-year term and most contests a straightforward “elect one.”

• The Commission on Theology and Church Relations fills two seats: an ordained parish-pastor chair contested by Theodore Hopkins (Michigan), Andrew Kennell (Missouri), Martin Noland (California-Nevada-Hawaii), and Mark Surburg (Southern Illinois), and a lay chair contested by Keith Chuvala (Texas), Paul Edmon (Nebraska), and Joseph Olson (Southern Wisconsin). The CTCR is the doctrinal review body whose 1994 racism dissent the floor declined to admit on Monday, so who sits on it is not a small question.

• The two mission boards come next. The Board for National Mission and the Board for International Mission each fill five regional seats apiece, split between ministers of religion (ordained or commissioned) and lay members of member congregations, every one a six-year term. Daniel Preus stands for an International Mission seat from the Great Plains region.

• The Synod-level and corporate boards follow: the Concordia Publishing House Board of Directors, the Concordia University System Board of Directors, and the Concordia Historical Institute Board of Governors, whose ordained seats (elect two) draw David Ramirez of the Southwest District, the pastor whose generational-abandonment address this publication has covered before.

• Ten boards of regents round out the day: the two seminaries, Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne and Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, and the six universities still governed by elected regents, Chicago, Irvine, Nebraska, St. Paul, Texas, and Wisconsin. These carry three-year terms and split their seats among ordained, commissioned, and lay candidates.

The arithmetic to watch

• The pattern to date. Resolutions pass between 73 and 96 percent, and the losing coalition on every counted amendment has polled between 45 and 47 percent: 45.7 on Pr. Peter Preus’s Charlie Kirk amendment, 47.0 on Pr. Aaron Yeager’s 1994-dissent amendment, 45.7 on Rev. David Langewisch’s SMP age amendment. The floor has a stable working majority and a stable, sizeable minority, and they have not yet traded places on a counted vote.

• The Snyder and Folks amendments test the majority from the other side. Monday’s refused amendments came, broadly, from delegates who wanted the resolutions sharper, and they still failed. If either of today’s rightward amendments breaks fifty percent, the story of the convention changes from a floor that holds its committees’ lines to a floor willing to move them.

• Watch the clock as closely as the board. Forty-five minutes for Committee 5 means the chair controls which fights happen at all, and Monday proved the orders of the day are enforced. Whatever Committee 5 business survives to Wednesday will tell you what the chair judged safe to postpone.

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Method and source. Schedule, consent calendar, Resolution Action Report, and the four printed amendments from Today’s Business, Issue 4 (July 21, 2026), pages 369-400, with resolution texts from Issues 1 through 4 as revised. Vote figures from the official tallies and this publication’s running decisions log, which holds all forty-five decisions of the convention to date. Amendment texts quoted from the printed filings of Rick Snyder (lay, Indiana), Hayden Folks (pastoral, Ohio), Christopher Neuendorf (pastoral, North Dakota), and Brian Kachelmeier (pastoral, Texas).

Ad Crucem News is an independent publication. This analysis is editorial and carries no imprimatur of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod or its officers.

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Cover Photo by Matthew Hamilton on Unsplash