Why Are So Many Specific Ministry Pastors In Affluent Urban Congregations?

The purpose and intent of the LCMS's Specific Ministry Pastor is subverted when candidates take up in rich urban congregations.

The Specific Ministry Program (SMP) conjures up an image of a church on Alaska’s North Slope that has gone without Holy Communion for a decade because it cannot afford to call a pastor or no man wants to drag his family from Lower 48 familiarities to the tundra. So, North Slope church identifies a man from the congregation who meets all the criteria to be a pastor but cannot do a four-year residential Seminary track. The congregation seeks the District’s support to ordain this man through the SMP so that it can enjoy unabridged and undiluted Word & Sacrament Ministry. This is precisely the emergency or hardship scenario the SMP was designed and appropriate for.

However, sampling SMP graduates via the LCMS Locator reveals general patterns that subvert the alternate track's clear purpose and intent.

1. A material percentage of the SMP men roost in urban congregations.

   1. Many of those congregations are wealthy, with large payrolls and lavish resources.

      1. Those churches tend to favor “contemporary worship” and disfavor the hymnal and liturgy (e.g., if there is a “traditional” service, it’s at 8 AM, and the contemporary service is at 10 AM. There are even churches that shunt the traditional service to Saturday!).

2. SMPs proliferate in the Synod’s liberal districts.

3. Many SMPs seem to be second-career men.

4. There are SMPs who “inherit” or move into senior/sole pastor positions without an M.Div and where there is no shortage of pulpit supply for the area or plenty of other congregations within a short distance.

Is There a Pastor Shortage?

Advocates of alternate pastoral tracks have a mantra: “We don’t have enough pastors! We have no choice! The harvest is large, and the workers are too few!” It’s a classic ends-justify-the-means approach

It is true superficially that we have a pastor shortage. Recent estimates are that the LCMS has around 550 congregations without a pastor. Fundamentally, the real problem is that the LCMS has a surplus of congregations that cannot afford a pastor. This is for many reasons, but again, we can generalize a pattern that has magnified the problem:

1. Many LCMS congregations were established before urban migration and industrial farming accelerated.

2. Rural congregation spacing was a function of the time it took to travel by horse-drawn wagon on unpaved roads.

3. The Synod came to accept and even teach that children are adiaphora.

   1. For decades, Synod leadership and our pastors have been silent or awkward about dealing with our families' fecundity.

4. Government urbanization and welfare policies dislocated and disrupted the concentrated Lutheran communities that established and built their churches within walking distance of their homes and who desired grandchildren to be within hailing distance of grandparents.

5. The deliberately engineered cost-of-living squeeze is a huge problem. Half a century ago, most pastors could afford to live in any major city and buy property there. It is almost impossible for a young seminarian to get started now unless the call comes with a parsonage. California is the most extreme example of the pastor shortage, driven by salaries falling well short of what is needed to live in many areas of the state. That pressure has spread nationally, even into rural areas.

6. When they slide into difficulty, congregations struggle to balance honoring their memories and stewarding the resources of their predecessors against the reality and urgency of necessary consolidation and rationalization. We detailed the consequences of inaction here.

The Synod’s priority has to be to address its collective fixed asset overcapitalization in the most Christian way before we discount the quality of pastoral formation. We need fewer but bigger congregations that can afford a pastor with a large family and still maintain overall viability.

On the other hand, we also need to address situations where we pretend proper pastoral care is possible in congregations with pastor-to-baptized member ratios of 1:3,000, 1:1,700, and 1:1,400, to name just the top three ranked by reported membership size. They have very low weekly attendance ratios, but that’s an indictment, not an excuse.

2024 Commencement at Concordia Seminary St. Louis.

Are SMP Requirements Adhered to?

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the SMP is that a District President essentially has unilateral power to approve candidates. There is no meaningful accountability for a decision, and the Seminaries are obliged to accept the individual regardless of whether the criteria really have been met. To be sure, the seminaries also appreciate the tuition dollars.

The Synod's SMP criteria are unambiguous. If the rules were followed to the letter, no SMP graduate would serve a congregation in a large city unless there were no other church options or a particular language and culture issue was in play.¹

1. The program is supposed to train men for the preaching office in limited settings, such as where a conventionally trained pastor might not be available or strictly necessary.

   1. The workaround seems to be to say a man has irreplaceable or irreproducible skills for a specific ministry. Outside language and culture, any urban SMP example seems a big stretch to justify.

   2. A second workaround is to say the requirement is for a “staff pastor,” which is a questionable category. If the man will be doing the things of the Preaching Office, then let him be a fully formed pastor. Let him be a businessman if he is doing business things (See bullet three below).

2. The SMP offers remote “flexible” pastoral education emphasizing practical skills and life experience over academic achievement.

   1. SMPs do not have the exact language requirements as residentially trained pastors, so they cannot possess a fully formed and well-rounded academic background to take into ministry. Likewise, they are not forged in an environment of iron sharpening iron.

   2. By contrast, the Synod bends over backward to bring men from abroad to our seminaries or send teachers of the church to their institutions. There is a recognition, obviously, that in-person training is much more valuable and effective than virtual school. Consequently, we don’t just plop everyone in front of a screen and pretend it’s the same as advancing with a cohort of fellow students to suffer and celebrate with. Only an experienced and engaged faculty in regular physical proximity to seminarians can confidently and honestly send them out to the harvest.

3. Overall, the SMP puts the cart before the horse. It assumes a man is qualified and must only be credentialed to absolve our consciences about the demands of AC V², XIV³, XXVIII⁴. However, pastoral formation is a process, not a destination!

   1. Nomination — Establishing the broad outlines of a man’s fitness for the preaching office. His pastor will be the most critical factor, along with the senior men of the congregation, who should offer guidance, advice, and recommendations well before any consideration of the ministry reaches a formal stage.

   2. Authority — we cannot and must not rely on the opinion of a limited number of people to form a man for the ministry. The possibility of error and misjudgment is far too great for such an important office, so we must seek and appreciate the widest participation in the process by the Church’s best teachers, who are, in turn, called to that role.

      1. Examination — determining fitness for the Office of Holy Ministry (OHM) based on a prolonged period of evaluation, instruction, and correction. We can tolerate deviation from this model in unusual circumstances (e.g., The Lutheran School of Theology outside Nairobi), but it should always be exceptional.

      2. Sending — certifying to the church that a man meets the Scriptural requirements of the Office of Holy Ministry and will faithfully preach, teach, and administer the sacraments according to the forms our body has adopted so that order, propriety, and doctrinal purity will be maintained.

      3. Discipline — when a church body rather than your buddy is responsible for oversight, encouragement, reproof, and correction, there is less likely to be a scandal.

   3. The Divine Call — there is a profound mystery in the First Article interactions between a calling congregation and a pastor. Whether he accepts or returns a call, none dare suggest it is divination; only that God is doing the calling even if the means are a motley collection of individuals who make up the church temporal.

   4. Ordination and Installation — Our churches have sacred rites and joyful ceremonies to ensure transparent and public affirmation of a man’s calling. Likewise, through these rites, we emphasize reverence for and solemnity of the Divine Call and the tremendous burden it transfers upon the pastor. In tandem, it signals that we desire “good order and propriety, or otherwise to maintain Christian discipline.” (FC X)⁵

   5. Concentration — By its nature and essence, the orthodox Evangelical Lutheran Church does not desire or promote innovation. As a result, the pastor is not called to be a ‘leader,’ only Christ’s undershepherd. He has an extraordinarily narrow job description, “The various tasks of the ministry can therefore be consolidated into this one: to make the voice of Christ heard through preaching and through the administration of the Sacraments and the power of the keys.”⁶ In addition, he is to be constantly alert to vicious wolves trying to put his flock on the dinner menu. The pastor is not to add to or subtract from his primary duties, which constrains what business a pastor is to be about, and he should not chafe against those bridles.⁷

   6. Separation — A man rightly called and ordained is the shepherd, and his parishioners are his flock. Again, this is very mysterious because the sheep are the ones choosing their shepherd, but there is necessarily an unbridgeable divide between sheep and shepherd even as he lives his life with and for them. In counterpoint, the sheep are made more conscious and conscientious about awarding double honor when their shepherd rules well and is preoccupied with God’s Word and doctrine (1 Timothy 5:17). When we become ill-disciplined and try to reconcile this mysterious separation through even mild innovation; we risk tampering with what God has commanded.

   7. Permanence — Once the sheep have called their shepherd, the arrangement is permanent unless he falls into great sin and scandal, accepts another call or resigns his office (is such a thing possible for a pastor unless he cannot perform all his duties with vigor or is fomenting doubt among the parishioners?).

   

   CTSFW Faculty at the 2023 Opening Service.

Conclusion

America has a long history of excessive and even dangerous religious innovation. That should give us pause whenever a church seeks or does new things. Our dogma is static, so we should not be surprised or unhappy that our forms of worship and routes to ordination might seem “old-fashioned.”

This is not to say everything is perfect and must remain unchanged, but it is very easy to confuse symptoms and cures in our haste to make things happen. In the LCMS’s 2025 American context, we have plenty of resources and a massively rooted capital structure to continue prioritizing residential seminary education and constraining alternate track options unless it is the only option for a congregation to receive Word & Sacrament Ministry.

Here’s a challenge for the affluent districts and congregations pressing for alternate-track ordination: How about helping to raise up or provide a pastor to a struggling congregation that does not have regular Word & Sacrament Ministry, is more than 100 miles from a major urban center, is willing to rationalize and consolidate if necessary, and has some resources for a pastor but cannot fund a complete package? Undoubtedly, the Synod can also step in with National Mission assets to give these churches rightly called and ordained men where the sheep can be free of doubt about their qualifications and intentions.

☩TW☩

1. CSL: https://www.csl.edu/academics/programs/specific-ministry-pastor-smp/
CTFSW: https://www.ctsfw.edu/future-students/pastoral/smp/

2. Article V. Of the Ministry.

1 That we may obtain this faith, the Ministry of Teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted. For through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, 2 the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith; where and when it pleases God, in them that hear 3 the Gospel, to wit, that God, not for our own merits, but for Christ’s sake, justifies those who believe that they are received into grace for Christ’s sake. 4 They condemn the Anabaptists and others who think that the Holy Ghost comes to men without the external Word, through their own preparations and works.

3. Article XIV - Of Ecclesiastical Order.

Of Ecclesiastical Order they teach that no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments unless he be regularly called.

4. Article XXVIII. Of Ecclesiastical Power.

…the power of the Keys, or the power of the bishops, according to the Gospel, is a power or commandment of God, to preach the Gospel, to remit and retain sins, and to administer Sacraments. (See full context: https://bookofconcord.org/augsburg-confession/of-ecclesiastical-power/#ac-xxviii )

5. https://thebookofconcord.org/formula-of-concord-solid-declaration/article-x/

6. Holsten Fagerberg, A New Look at the Lutheran Confessions (1529-1537), trans. Gene Lund (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 244. Quoted in Doctrine of the Call in the Confessions and Lutheran Orthodoxy by Robert D. Preus, Church and Ministry Today (The Luther Academy, January 1, 2001), 3.

7. This is why a class of Synodical clerics detached from an altar or not teaching should be considered aberrant.