The Burgeoning Administrative and Cash Flow Crisis for LCMS Congregations

Many LCMS churches are being sucked into a death spiral that they are oblivious to and it could collapse the Synod without a pragmatic near term response.

The LCMS is far along the curve of its demographic winter, a relentless depletion of nearly every congregation’s active membership. The emptying and graying of our parishes have a corollary impact — financial and administrative turmoil that is sucking churches into a death spiral.

The situation is amply illustrated with the example of the Front Range Urban Corridor that stretches some 200 miles from Pueblo, CO, to Cheyenne, WY. The last LCMS church established on the Front Range was in 2002 (Grace Lutheran, Parker, CO - excluding renames, restarts, and retreads). Yet, since 2000, the Front Range population has exploded by 41% - nearly one million extra souls at home in the plains and foothills immediately east of the Rockies. In the same period, LCMS weekly worship attendance in the region crashed by more than 25%. It is probably closer to 35% if we are frank about poor record keeping. Several churches have closed in that time, and many are on the brink. The number of shuttered LCMS schools and early learning centers is numbing.

It is an astonishing capitulation for the Missouri Synod, and there are books to be written about the causes. They are ultimately rooted in decades-old permissive attitudes about doctrine and praxis, which spawned dissolute compromises on divorce and fecundity. Fortunately, our Millennial families have mostly not believed the Sexual Revolution’s lies about trading children for material abundance. Still, their large families cannot alone reverse the damage already inflicted and to come.

Involuntary Closure

The consequences of the decline are clear, though. Ebbing weekly attendance translates into overlapping cash flow and management crises, precipitating a death spiral that often ends with involuntary closure or a long period without a pastor.

Asset Rich, Cash Poor

Sadly, Synod’s aggregate balance sheet is asset-rich, but it is useless when so many congregations have monkey-pawed their buildings and bank balances. It is not unkind to observe that our congregations can sometimes prize their buildings and heritage over Word & Sacrament Ministry.

Indeed, the LCMS is plagued by over-capitalization at nearly every level at this stage of its life cycle. It is most apparent in individual congregations averaging less than fifty Divine Service attendees, significantly when the average age exceeds fifty-five. Consequently, there is an urgent need to rationalize and consolidate precarious parishes.

The congregational polity of the Synod is a blessing, but it does hinder common sense survival decisions that might facilitate asset and resource pooling. Consolidation could secure the future of at least one enlarged congregation until it can grow back to self-sustenance.

Obvious Problems

1. Many church facilities are heavily aged, and costs for maintenance, insurance, and essential asset replacement increasingly outpace giving.

2. Shrinking congregations are losing the skills base among the laity needed to manage and maintain a parish adequately.

3. The management and maintenance burden falls on our pastors, who are ill-equipped for the tasks and should not be expected to assume those roles.

4. Human resources and benefits management is generally abysmal at the congregational level.

5. Similarly, budgeting and accounting are woeful, and auditing is practically non-existent since only a tiny fraction of congregations have the enforced discipline of submitting a Form 990 each year.

6. Membership management is dire. At any time, the LCMS probably overstates gross membership by 15-20% because of inertia in transfer and roll management, resulting in double and triple counting members for long periods.

7. The risks for incompetence, waste, fraud, and abuse rise geometrically as congregations become more stressed, ultimately hastening an inglorious end.

8. Terminating insurance coverage is usually the final trigger that forces a congregation to close. By then, churches had deferred maintenance and cut corners on many items. Finances were so shambolic that buildings and land had to be hurriedly sold to secular interests to defray debt and liquidation costs.

9. The loss of each Synod entity undermines multiple foundations, especially the Concordia Plans.

Near-Term Solutions

1. Concordia Technology Solutions’s (CTS) 360Members is a reasonably good tool for church member management. Concordia Publishing House (CPH) and the LCMS should come to an arrangement to make the system free to every congregation in the Synod that wishes to use it.

2. CTS’s 360Ledger is inadequate to manage parish books, so:

   1. Fund the development of an API to connect 360Members to QuickBooks Online (QBO) to deal with membership offerings and related contribution tax statements, but gain all the advanced benefits of QBO where 360Ledger falls short.

3. The Synod should build supported centralized accounting and human resource services based on the 360Members-QBO platform.

   1. Synod acts as the core professional license holder, sub-letting and supporting QBO accounting functions to participating congregations for an annual fee based on gross revenue.

   2. The centralized service would support all the critical accounting functions for churches wishing to participate.

   3. ADP probably offers the best bulk pricing and support for a national-scale payroll service. Centralizing all payroll would give the LCMS leverage for even lower fees for savings to pass on at the congregational level.

   4. Employee benefits can easily be administered centrally using various tools like Gusto and in collaboration with existing Concordia Plans administrative capacity and reach.

4. Centralize insurance acquisition, planning, and administration in collaboration with the best church insurers.

5. Centralize bulletin preparation with simple one-year and three-year lectionary bulletins (plus Advent and Lent midweek options) that congregations can download and print in black and white on letter-size paper.

   1. Negotiate printer-copier leases at a national scale that congregations can take advantage of.

6. Radically subsidize The Lutheran Hymnal to encourage unity in Lutheran doctrine and practice.

Resistance

Many within the LCMS will be aghast at the centralization suggestions because they will interpret them as promoting a loss of congregational autonomy. It is a lazy straw man since everything should be offered as a voluntary subscription option without long-term contracts.

Eventually, the scales of economy and efficiency would make it an easy decision for congregations, especially as we are encouraged to establish new churches. Recently planted congregations are unlikely to be so well resourced that they can function independently from the start. Overall, our churches can do so much better when they are joined together in mission and vocation rather than separated.

Take heart, Missouri! Christ has given his bride the gifts and means necessary for life and salvation. Let us not squander the wealth of resources and skills available to us in the visible church.

Philippians 2:1-5

Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.

᛭TW᛭

P.S. if this caught your interest, you’d probably enjoy reading

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