Takeaways from the LCMS Southeastern District Scandal

What comes next?

The crisis at Our Savior Lutheran Church and School in Arlington, Virginia, is not just a congregational crisis, but a mushrooming district-level scandal that is also engulfing Synod, Inc. Ultimately, it exposes profound structural weaknesses in the governance architecture of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) (which we will write about next week with concrete reform proposals).

The underlying evidence underscores a system struggling to adhere to its constitutional and confessional commitments: a truncated investigation, the absence of complainant interviews, the short-circuiting of meaningful outcomes, conflicting doctrinal signals, and reliance on calcifying therapeutic reconciliation over clarifying adjudication.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. What started as a local congregational scandal has morphed into a Southeastern District crisis because of District President Harmon’s maladroit handling, if not dereliction of duty. It is now engulfing Synod, Inc. as well because of systemic inertia.

2. The complainants have been treated abominably by every level of ecclesiastical authority. In any other sphere, the complainants would be treated as whistleblowers entitled to protection from retaliation and intimidation, and the supervisors would be in serious legal jeopardy for their actions. The conduct toward the complainants is a terrible indictment of everyone in authority and bespeaks a shocking, wicked level of arrogance and indifference. Not only was the response thoroughly un-Christian, but it also could not even bear to rise to a secular level of institutional respect and due process. It is the definition of tyranny, which Scripture says renders a man ineligible for the preaching office.

3. It is clear that a single combined executive and theological authority is not merely impractical, but impossible for the LCMS. C.F.W. Walther knew the Synod’s congregations intimately, but the entity has grown into an international empire where very few District Presidents and mission executives know much about what is going on at any one point of accountability.

4. Functionally, the districts have become independent micro-Synods.

   1. If you travel around the Wyoming District, you encounter something closer to what was surely the original vision of our churches sharing a common confession. You can attend church in Cheyenne or Chugwater and be confident that the pastors are orthodox men. Those kneeling at the rail with you have received the same catechetical instruction and hear the same whole-counsel-of-God preaching and pastoral care, and the Synod hymnals have not been replaced with screens. There is strength because there is unity (concordia res parvae crescunt). Then you travel around Colorado or California and witness a confederation of congregations with tenuous Lutheran identities and milquetoast confessions, doing what is good in their own eyes even as some try to hold the line.

   2. The Council of Presidents can only function when its members share:

      1. Doctrinal clarity and alignment,

      2. Inelastic Confessional boundaries, and

      3. A standard definition of and process for discipline. Without that, the COP is merely a buffering mechanism instead of a trusted unifying theological and administrative authority.

   3. The Regional Vice Presidents need to have actual rather than symbolic authority and accountability. They should be accountable for their DPs.

   4. The heterogeneity explodes the core assumption of LCMS polity: that a shared confession rather than bureaucratic chicanery binds the Synod in fellowship.

      

      Knight, Death, and the Devil by Albrecht Dürer, 1513

5. Actual discipline is exceedingly rare, which extends to the hens’ teeth examples of excommunication at the parish level. Reconciliation without fact-finding is not friendship but conflict avoidance, and two streams have emerged as a result:

   1. Short-circuiting (“we are in full compliance”, “this matter is dispositioned”, “considered resolved”, “recant and apologize”, “I have confidence”, etc.)

   2. Psychotherapy. Every conflict now has an ersatz “reconciliation” demand supplanting the absolute need for absolute truth. Adjudication has to come before reconciliation can even be an option. Consequently, every LCMS conflict is drowned in the schmaltzy language of hurt feelings, which has more affinity with head-shrinking than with Biblical fidelity and Christian accountability.

6. We must return to a system where adjudication is the ‘prime directive’. Reconciliation is certainly desirable and worthy, but entirely secondary and pointless if the truth of a thing remains unknown or hidden.

   1. Reconciliation models disproportionately benefit the party with institutional authority, not the party seeking due process.

   2. We are Lutherans, not Freudians. Consequently, we need truth before peace, the objective before the subjective, and law before gospel.

7. Secrecy has become pervasive, resulting in a lot of rug sweeping and deteriorating pew-level confidence that problems are dealt with swiftly, fairly, and decisively. Reputations and careers can be protected, but not at the expense of truth.

   1. The whole system needs to be sped up. There is no need to pretend we are executing a Murder One suspect and need twenty years of appeals and new trials to get a just outcome.

8. There is evidence of a two-tier system of canon law in the LCMS, and it is subdivided into:

   1. Clergy get special treatment, as seen with the Arlington, VA case. The clergy old boys’ club is quick to circle the wagons (obvious exceptions apply) without knowing all the facts because truth is not the objective.

   2. Some sins, like adultery, homosexuality, pastor divorce, and transgenderism, are soft-pedaled with constant demands to extend “extra grace and mercy”. In the case of OSLCS, the DP didn’t even bother to address the sexual deviancy with the resolute theological authority it required and deserved. He has failed his office and his ordination vows, and consequences are necessary.

   3. Inconsistency is the enemy of credibility. The laity that pays attention is seething, and a fracture is developing with the clergy. Synod, Inc. owns that due to the process problems, and it is now accountable for getting it fixed as soon as possible.

9. Healthy governance depends on clarity, accountability, transparency, and timely resolution.

   1. The LCMS currently struggles on all four fronts: delayed timelines, private assurances, backroom deals, and opaque communications.

10. The net compounding result is confusion and frustration among the laity, amplifying distrust and skepticism about ecclesial authority and competence.

11. There are serious problems at other LCMS schools, just as there were widespread problems at nearly every Concordia, which required the imposition of Lutheran Identity and Mission Outcome Standards (LIMOS).¹

    1. We have started to receive a trickle of reports about hidden or overlooked scandals at other LCMS parochial schools.

    2. A uniform doctrinal-baseline audit for all LCMS schools (K–12 LIMOS analogue) is no longer optional, but urgently needed. Concordia University System can surely help thanks to its LIMOS experience, and Synod, Inc. needs to send an unambiguous message that audits are coming - with consequences.

       1. We strongly recommend that every District President urgently form a task force to scrutinize the schools they oversee, because it is only a matter of time before other cases come to light if they are left to fester. Do you really know who is teaching, what they are teaching, what the school’s catechetical focus is, who the guidance counsellors are, who’s choosing the library books, what the curriculum is actually teaching, whether the school is a babysitting operation or an educational institution, and so on?

       2. Ditto congregations that are doing all manner of heterodox and heretical things. Laissez-faire attitudes are coming home to roost with a violent swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. It was inevitable.

       3. Ditto Synod, Inc. with Recognized Service Organizations (RSOs). The lazy, fat days are ending, RSOs.

       4. Ditto church bodies (supposedly) in fellowship.

       5. Ditto international missions. Every foreign mission supported by the LCMS needs to be audited in the most granular detail and to the deepest, oldest roots. We will soon be reporting on some problems in those far fields.

There is not a single reason for all LCMS entities in name and fellowship not to meet basic Scriptural and confessional standards to belong to the Synod. We have nibbled selectively at our Confessions and used the Bible for kirigami for the sake of keeping up appearances and holding together a fragile caucus to prop up the corporation. That has to change and leadership should bother to engage with Gen-Z if it wants to understand the depth of feeling about the current state of affairs in our church body. They are the near future, and you are losing them hand over fist to cynicism and other denominations.

1. Standards for ecclesiastical visitation and affirmation of institutions and of programs leading to candidacy for commissioned ministry or to preparedness for seminary study (Bylaw 3.6.6.4).