We are not the ELCA
There is an old anecdote about a bishop being consecrated with great pomp and circumstance. And as the other bishops circled around the man being consecrated with impressive and solemn ceremony, a boy in the church asked his cynical father what was happening: “They’re removing his spine.” This joke is known all over the world. A bishop from a far off land with whom we share altar and pulpit fellowship even alluded to it from my congregation’s pulpit when he was once our guest preacher.
In my family, we have another anecdote, a true story about my father when he was fourteen years old. If memory serves, this incident took place in the house that I grew up in. My dad was sitting with his father and uncle in the living room. Uncle Stan, who married into the family, showed up and offered my grandfather and his brother a cigar. They declined. Uncle Stan was apparently a character, and he quipped, “Isn’t there a man in this whole damn Beane family?” My dad responded, “Gimme one of them cigars.” Stan gave it to him and he lit it and smoked it in front of everyone. To provide a little context, my grandfather had been a prisoner of war in Germany for six months, and his brother received a grievous wound and a battlefield commission storming the beaches at Normandy. Uncle Stan was teasing his brothers-in-law. He knew that there were indeed men among men in the Beane family. But my father’s response was priceless.
“Gimme one of them cigars!”
My dad would go on, at the age of seventeen, to join the Marines. I was indeed raised by a real “man in the Beane family.” But what truly defines a “real man” is his lifelong, unswerving commitment to his calling as a husband and father. My dad heroically cared for my bedridden mother, year after year, until her death at the age of 49. And he showed unconditional love to his two sons, while at the same time, not being afraid to discipline us.
I appreciate your indulgence with my familial illustration, dear reader. The point is that we need real men in the pastoral office and in the office of oversight.
We don’t have actual consecrated bishops in the LCMS, though we have some men who use the title in a functional way. Because of the quirks of our early history, in the LCMS, we have “presidents.” They are not consecrated as bishops - though many of the church bodies with whom we share fellowship do maintain this custom that is the expressed preference of our confessions. But whether we call them “bishops” or “presidents,” they have a fatherly vocation of oversight over our congregations and our pastors - as well as over our lay church workers who are rostered.
The story about spine-removal is a cautionary tale about bureaucratic life. And it is perhaps a danger more so for the typical president than even for a bishop. For most of our presidents have been severed from altar, font, and pulpit - with paperwork and bureaucracy consuming their time more than being pastors. And in a polity such as ours, we tend to incentivize presidents to memorize the bylaws more than the Psalms. We end up with presidents who preside by virtue of General Roberts and his Rules (revised) rather than bishops who preach King Jesus and his cross (unrevised). It is said that in a democratic polity, you get the governance that you deserve.
And so the temptation for a president is to always play it safe, to appeal to a wide swath, to justify behaving as if his spine (or other anatomy) has been removed - with the justification that he must stand for election every three years. And without naming any specific examples, I’m sure we can all think of some in our history. That said, I am gratified beyond measure that we now have a lot of men serving as presidents and in the Praesidium who are neither invertebrates nor “eunuchs for the kingdom.”
We need our pastors to exert discipline - whether our “children” want to be disciplined or not. If they want open communion, they should not get it. If they want infrequent communion imposed on everyone in the congregation, they should not get it. If they want irreverent and entertaining worship services, they should not get it,. If they want their pastor to run the parish as if it were in the ELCA or a non-denominational megachurch, they should not get it. If they want special privileges to allow cohabitation because of their family status in the congregation, they should not get it. If they want the pastor to ignore the Book of Concord and his ordination vows, they should not get it.
That said, pastoral practice is an art, not a science. And things cannot be changed in a single day, week, month, or year - perhaps even in a decade. But pastors must not simply give up, like the dad who looks the other way as his son deals in meth or his daughter is turning tricks. Unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional acceptance and lack of discipline. That is not what it means to be a real man.
As for our presidents, they too must act with a spine. They have very difficult and sensitive situations to navigate and attend to. Things cannot be fixed overnight. But where there are violations so gross and flagrant as to be a scandal to the faithful, that a president with a spine, a real man, may have to act decisively. It may mean suspending pastors, congregations, or church workers until they repent. It may mean removal of the same from the roster if they will not abide by the norming norm of the Bible and the normed norm of the Lutheran confessional documents. It is not loving to allow blatant false doctrine and abhorrent practices to continue year after year. We are called to turn the other cheek, not turn the Nelson’s Eye.
Our presidents and our pastors - our patresfamilias - need to be real men with spines. We need them to be shepherds, not merely buzzword-blathering messengers of mission statements and corporate cant. We need them to be churchmen, not CEOs. And we need them to be fatherly, not feminized. Our presidents and pastors should set the example of dignity and decorum in the chancel. They need to be reverent when they conduct matters of rite. They need to carry out their vocations with the self-awareness that they are not acting only as themselves.
For we are not the ELCA. We actually believe this stuff.
And that is the crux of the matter. If we really believe this stuff, we will act accordingly - whether as pastors or as presidents. What we say and do has eternal ramifications. Just as it is the pastor’s mouth that consecrates the elements, but it is Christ Word that acts through his office. So too is it that the hands of the president are laid upon the heads of the men, but it is Christ who ordains through him. There are certain duties for pastor and president that call for a joyful but serious solemnity, when a real man stifles his own personality, saves the humor for another time and place, and speaks and acts as if he really believes this stuff.
The ELCA has become a parody of a church, the ecclesiastical version of Clown World complete with pronoun drama and the transgender circus. Sadly, it will not give up the name “Lutheran,” and their stink clings to us by virtue of a shared name and a shared past history - before their member synods and congregations fell into apostasy. And their downward spiral began by hedging their bets on the Bible and the Confessions. They believe the Bible “contains” (but not “is”) the Word of God. They subscribe to the Book of Concord in a cafeteria-style quatenus manner, rather than the submissive quia way. And so the ELCA sits in judgment of both God and His bride. And as a result, we see what we see in the ELCA: women clergy, goddess worship, transgenderism, normalized homosexuality, unionism - if not syncretism - celebrated abortions paid for by the church’s healthcare plan, and the embrace of Progressivist, neo-Marxist politics.
We are not the ELCA.
And unless our presidents and pastors act as men, willing to discipline Trojan Horse-style liberals lurking about the LCMS like the proverbial man in a trench-coat hanging out near the playground, we will be mirror images of the ELCA - perhaps in a generation, perhaps in a decade, perhaps in a single election cycle. We are depending on our pastors - but especially our presidents - to be real men, godly fathers, men with chests, spines, and other body parts, to ward off the rot of Progressivism. When this godless infestation reached its high water mark in the LCMS of the 1970s, it took a president with a spine to muck out the St. Louis Seminary. And though the “walkout” and “Seminex” were painful events, they needed to happen for the integrity of our church body - or else we too would have neutered the Bible and emasculated the confessions. Our own rebels shortly thereafter joined the ELCA. But there are, even to this day, still some “Seminexers in spirit” in the LCMS. They need to go.
We are not the ELCA.
As St. Paul says:
“Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.”
We are counting on our presidents to “strive side by side for the faith of the gospel.” For our faith has always been a strife. We have always been at war. But the nature of the war is subject to change over time. Conservative, traditional, Bible-believing church bodies are especially in the world’s crosshairs right now over issues that are resulting in people losing their jobs, losing access to the public square, even losing a sense of personhood through being “canceled.” And these losses are enforced by a combination of cultural, corporate, and government forces - and in the ELCA, also ecclesiastical forces. If we have ever needed strong, manly leadership, it is now. We must not be frightened of our opponents to the point of compromise and concession. We need pastors and presidents like St. Paul who are willing to suffer, and who proclaim the cross - and the churches need to bear it rather than flee it.
Of course, we can’t predict the future. Perhaps our clown world will normalize quickly, and we will not be attacked as viciously in the future. But I suspect that this will not be the case. My guess is that it will ramp up, slowly at first, and more harshly if we don’t capitulate. They will start with “soft persecution” by threatening our tax exemption. And when that happens, there may well be advocates of compromise - both well-intentioned weak men, and outright revolutionary Trojan Horse traitors - who will urge us to be flexible on certain controversial matters of confessional doctrine and practice. And if we opt to remain true, the state and its lackeys may well revoke our tax exemption - and this will cause us severe hardship at every level. Where it goes after that is anyone’s guess. Of course, I hope that I’m wrong, and that the forces of sanity return. But we have presidents and pastors with the vocation to lead us in times of war and in times of peace. We are called to be faithful “in season and out of season.”
But how can we argue that we will not comply with their “social justice” and “non-discrimination” edicts because we refuse to ordain women as a doctrine of our church, when for many years, we have seen women in vestments, women giving “children’s sermons,” women in the pulpit, women leading prayers, women conducting devotions, women serving in institutions, women teaching adult men, and women giving “pastoral” care to men and women alike in various institutions?
Another facet of this is the fact that younger people are looking for authentic, traditional faith and practice. They just are. Many of them have little or no exposure to Christianity. But they don’t want a fake faith, like the myriad boomer marketing schemes that just never seem to go away. They don’t want a big-box, ginned up, emotional, non-denominational parody of Christianity. They don’t want a mealy-mouthed faith that says one thing and does another, that confesses one thing and practices another. They don’t want a dichotomy between style and substance, between the orandi and the credendi. They don’t want more entertainment. They do want the sacramental presence of God Almighty. They want something grounded in history. They want law and gospel and theologically rigorous hymnody (not sing-song, ding-dong pop ditties). In my circles, I encounter many such people, who are mostly young: the next cohort after the Millennials, who are presently known as Gen-Z. And they do take a look at Lutheranism. They may even visit a local LCMS congregation - where they may find what they are looking for, or they might find what they are fleeing from. It’s a crapshoot. How do I tell them that we aren’t the ELCA when some of our churches look just like the ELCA? Is it a coincidence that a congregation that is open to a deaconess leading worship also has the ELCA hymnal? Where are our presidents? If a congregation wants to be in the ELCA, why not help them go? Why leave them in the LCMS and pretend not to see it, only to cause us grief on many levels?
There are three possible explanations. The first (and best construction) is ignorance. And how sad when that is the way to explain this in the kindest way: that our presidents are simply unaware of what is going on in their districts. They don’t see that which they are supposed to oversee. And that may be so. Maybe our structure is too big, and maybe it needs reconfigured. Or better yet, how about our presidents be informed. Are the circuit visitors not doing their jobs and reporting to the district presidents? I’m honestly asking. The second explanation is that such presidents are secretly complicit: that they are liberals in conservative clothing, wincing at the word “liberal” (preferring the euphemism “moderate”). There have indeed been district presidents in the past (can anyone deny this given the Seminex debacle?) who were pro-women’s ordination, pro-unionism, pro-open-communion, pro-anything goes in the chancel. The “Daystar Journal” is still publishing on the web, and there are still rostered LCMS personnel involved. The saving grace is that they all seem to be dinosaurs, and time is not on their side. The third explanation is that these presidents have convinced themselves not to rock the boat, that benign neglect is the best way to preserve “unity” in the synod - not to mention their salaries and backsides.
And this trichotomy is not only with presidents, but also pastors. Until we had the internet - and especially with the post-covid use of technology - I did not know such things were happening. I would hear occasional anecdotes about women being called upon to give prayers and lead devotions with pastors sitting around in certain Usual Suspect Districts - but had I not seen the video myself, I would not have believed that a vested deaconess - a district official - would lead the liturgy, preach, and conduct confirmations in the LCMS. There was a time when I would not have believed it, and dismissed it as a mere legend or myth. But here we are. My ignorance is over. And so it is for a lot of pastors and laity. We are not going to be bullied or ignored into silence. We’re done. We’re not going to shut up. We are not the ELCA. And we don’t want to be.
And indeed there are pastors who are themselves liberal - some openly so, and some in the closet. A couple years ago, an LCMS pastor retired, and his daughter did a film project about her father. It was released on YouTube (it has been since removed from that forum). In this documentary, the pastor admitted his shameful and deceitful duplicity in becoming a pastor for the purpose of making the LCMS accepting of the normalization of sexual deviancy. I know of another LCMS pastor who retired, immediately came out of the closet, “married” his male paramour, and together they adopted young boys. They publicly posted pictures of themselves with their “sons” at a drag queen show. I believe that they have since “divorced.” We are foolish if we don’t believe that there are those on our roster who reject our doctrine and practice, and who are biding their time and working to bring about revolutionary change in our synod. Why would Satan not attack our church body? There are also pastors who have been conditioned to look the other way out of self-preservation, out of not wanting to incur the wrath of the president or congregation. Some men are weak because they have been beaten into submission, while others are weak because of their own ambition.
But in spite of these challenges, we need our faithful pastors and presidents to stand as men, and make sure that everybody knows that we are not the ELCA. We will not look like the ELCA. We will not practice like the ELCA. We will not believe like the ELCA. We believe in the sanctity of life, in the order of creation regarding male and female, and we practice as such - especially in the setting of marriage and the family and in the office of the Holy Ministry and in the administration of the mysteries - including conducting services, preaching, and officiating at rites of blessing of the church. We hold unqualified belief in God’s Word and the creeds and confessions of our church.
Reminder to our pastors and presidents: We are not the ELCA.