Dr. Ferry Knows What’s to Blame for Everyone Else’s Membership Loss

By nearly every measure, Christianity is in decline in America. CNN ran this graphic on the numbers back in 2018.

 So five years ago, Evangelical Christians (among whom the LCMS is numbered), Roman Catholics, and the “Nones” each made up just about a quarter of the American population. Trends being what they are, the Nones are now surely a plurality.

The Missouri Synod has not escaped these societal trends, along with the Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, the Presbyterian Church in America, the ELCA, WELS, etc., etc.

In 2010 President Harrison inherited a Synod that was more than 10% smaller than the Synod of which President Kieschnick took the reigns in 2001. In fact, the Synod shrunk each and every year that President Kieschnick was in office.

Because he is an honest churchman and a thinking man, President Harrison did not go around blaming President Kieschnick for the decline. Nor did he seek a scapegoat to pin the blame on and divide the Synod. Instead, he encouraged the Office of National Mission to study the problem. An outside expert, Prof. George Hawley of the University of Alabama (a Presbyterian) was hired to evaluate the situation. Prof. Hawley became so interested in the Missouri Synod’s data that he eventually expanded his work to include all of American Christianity. The title of the resulting book, which beat CNN to press by a year, summarizes his findings: Demography, Culture, and the Decline of America’s Christian Denominations (Lexington Books, 2017).

In 2019 the candidates opposing President Harrison made the Synod’s membership decline a campaign issue, so we crunched the numbers for institutions which those opponents led. It turned out that the district and congregation which they respectively led had experienced declines even steeper than the Synod as a whole.

Once again, the man challenging President Harrison is making the membership decline a campaign issue. He asserts,

“Demographics are not our reason for decline. We’ve lost sight of our mission — our “co-mission” — from Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them all things.” (patferry.com)

Well, you’ve got to give Dr. Ferry points for boldness! He accuses the Synod he wants to lead of having lost sight of her mission. Every district has experienced membership decline: so I guess Dr. Ferry thinks every single district is doing a bad job. If your church has lost membership over the past decade or so, Dr. Ferry would like you to know where the blame lies: with you and your loss of mission focus.

If membership numbers are the chief indication of mission focus, we should be able to get a good idea of Dr. Ferry’s mission focus by examining the numbers for Concordia University Wisconsin over the course of his tenure as president.

There is no doubt that enrollment went up: Dr. Ferry was very effective at getting more tuition paying customers for his university. He did this chiefly by expanding the number of majors, especially in the medical fields, and by increasing the number of graduate programs. But that’s not quite the same as growing the Kingdom of God. In fact, it’s nothing like it at all. Selling a product, like a four year education or a professional degree, is not evangelism.

But since CUW is a churchly school, there are aspects of its enrollment numbers which might be good indications of “mission focus.” For example, we might look at church worker numbers and the number of LCMS students. You can find all the numbers for yourself in the Lutheran Annual – but here are the highlights.

In regards to pre-seminary students, Dr. Ferry’s tenure started out strong. From 1997 to 2006 there were rising numbers of pre-seminary students until the total was over 100. But then, I guess Dr. Ferry lost his mission focus, because around 2008 a decline set in. By the time Dr. Ferry retired pre-seminary enrollment had declined over 40% from its 2008 high.

It’s far worse with Lutheran Teaching Diploma students. When Dr. Ferry took the helm at CUW, the LTD program had a robust 300+ enrollment. Some good years followed with 400, even 500 LTD students. But after 2011...well, I guess he lost mission focus, because again a decline set in. And what a decline! Under Dr. Ferry’s watch LTDs fell 64% from what he inherited and 78% from their all time high!

So Dr. Ferry’s tenure at CUW saw a precipitous decline in church workers, but what about LCMS members? Sorry, it’s another case of lost mission focus: raw numbers of LCMS students are down 22% from when Dr. Ferry became president of CUW. If you count it as a percentage of undergraduate enrollment, it’s slightly worse at 24%.

When it comes to decline, Dr. Ferry is in the same boat as the rest of the Synod. He had very direct control of the mission at CUW: and the result of that was a sharp decline in church worker numbers and LCMS members. Instead of blaming the rest of us for loss of mission focus, and castigating President Harrison for having the foresight to actually study the problem of membership decline, perhaps Dr. Ferry’s time would be better spent in self-reflection.

In fact, if Dr. Ferry were intellectually curious about the causes of this decline, he would have actually read Dr. Hawley’s book. If he had, he would have learned that more than a third of Lutheran adults were not raised as Lutherans. It turns out that Missouri Synod Lutherans know the Great Commission, love their Lord, and share the Gospel. Just think about how many evangelism programs you can name from the Synod: Dialogue Evangelism (I and II), Go Tell The Good News, Ablaze!, and Every 1 His Witness (created under the Harrison administration).

But I should not be so harsh. Dr. Ferry has been too busy since 2007 at CUW to make use of these resources. After all, it’s hard work bringing the numbers up. And there is one number that Dr. Ferry did a great job of raising at CUW. In 2007 tuition was $10,700 per year. Today it is $32,770.