Selective Fellowship
Officially, we in the LCMS don’t practice selective fellowship. We view official fellowship (“altar and pulpit”) as a matter of doctrinal agreement between church bodies. And this is a matter of our polity.
To give an equivalent from the world of government, we are national rather than federal. Fellowship is between the national church body of the LCMS and the national church body of, for example, the Lutheran Church Canada. And while Tennessee and Alberta have their own speed limits, Tennessee and Alberta do not negotiate trade deals or mutual defense treaties. These are done at the national level. In the days of the Reformation, there was a more federal system, in which there was an emperor, but the individual principalities, kingdoms, and duchies had far more power to negotiate their relationships with one another.
In Lutheran churches that have bishops, fellowship is often seen in a more federal than national way, especially as a Lutheran church body may be a patchwork of dioceses that “ordain” women and those who do not. Therefore, Lutheran churches with episcopal polity will sometimes practice selective fellowship between bishops - as the early church often did in the days when there were both Arian and Catholic bishops bound together under the same hierarchy. This was reprised during the Reformation, as churches in various principalities practiced selective fellowship with this region or that, based on confession, rather than considering everyone to be in one super-synod fellowship based on the emperor. This is why we see selective fellowship practiced in some Lutheran churches, but not in others.
Sometimes, people in the LCMS scratch their heads and don’t understand how this works. But it is really that simple: are we a national or a federal church body? We in the LCMS are ecclesiastical nationalists, not federalists. We have a centralized republican model of governance, not a decentralized feudal model.
Moreover, it was not that long ago that the districts and congregations of the LCMS had a palpable sense of unity. We did not have selective fellowship on paper, nor any significant selective fellowship in practice. We did not have some districts supporting closed communion, while others went the opposite direction. We did not have some districts consecrating women “deacons” - complete with vesting them in albs and stoles - while others did not. We did not have some districts having their own hymnal project (including their own liturgies), while others did not. There was a pretty healthy unity among our districts.
It was also not that long ago when our congregations - while having healthy flexibility and reasonable local variation - had a common service and common hymnal. You could go into any LCMS congregation and find TLH in the pew and in the hearts of those gathered to worship. If you were on vacation, or if your job transferred you, or if you were serving in the military, the local LCMS parish or pastor would be walking together with the rest. You knew what to expect. In those days, when your family went on vacation, you didn’t have to do research to find a congregation with a familiar “worship style,” or a liturgical practice that your children would be able to follow - because the services were liturgically the same. Your church website didn’t have to have a tab called “what to expect.” You already knew what to expect. You did not have men visiting the seminary considering serving in the ministry who had never seen a liturgical service until their visit. You could just go to the local LCMS congregation. The synod was not a Gumpian box of chocolates that might include both Queen Anne cherries and Ex-Lax. Going to church was not the equivalent of playing Bean-Boozled, in which the jelly bean you’re eating might taste like popcorn or stinky socks. (The latter analogy fortunately breaks down, because, unlike the jelly bean game, you can easily spot the differences just by looking at them. For example, if I were walk into an LCMS congregation or school chapel and see a stage with guitars and drums, I’m not communing there. I would not preach there. I would not be preached to there. In fact, I would simply walk out.)
But this former sense of unity has all changed - in doctrine and in practice - and did so in two phases.
First, our unity in doctrine was threatened in the LCMS with the Trojan Horse of progressive biblical theology that began to deny God’s Word. This quiet revolution was not really noticed until Herman Otten and Kurt Marquart blew the whistle and exposed the infiltration at Concordia Seminary. And since we could not indefinitely maintain such disunity, the progressives and innovators were forced out. They are today part of the ELCA, and we can see where that has all led. As painful as it was, the Walkout and Seminex were a blessing. The only downside is that more of them didn’t leave. Some of these people and their liberal theology stuck around. But on the whole, the LCMS maintained its doctrinal unity around the Word of God in those crucial years.
Second, our unity in practice was threatened by means of the worship wars. The congregation in which I was baptized as a convert to Lutheranism in the early 1980s began playing with “contemporary worship” at that time. It started with the maximum cringe of the Chicago Folk Service: flutes, accoustic guitars, and the replacement of hymns with hippy campfire songs. It was shockingly bad. As the “contemporary service” gained traction and outgrew the Chicago You-Know-What-Show, and as the Holy Sacrament was rotated between the two services, it made it harder to actually commune every Sunday in a dignified liturgical setting. Thanks to this new disunity in worship, the once-unified parish began to fracture into essentially two different congregations: the traditional and the contemporary. Typically, the traditional was shoved into the earlier slot, making it harder for people who were bringing elderly relatives. (Now, it’s the elderly that might actually want the boomertemporary service). The issue was further exacerbated by the hymnal debacle. In my parish in the 1980s, our TLH hymnals were replaced by LBW (the green to-be ELCA hymnal), over the objections of the “Worship Committee” (whatever that is) that recommended the LCMS alternative LW (the blue hymnal). I was too young (and blessedly and blissfully ignorant) to know about the political machinations that must have gone on. I just wanted to attend a Lutheran Mass. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable hope. Our senior pastor at the time was more liberal (years later, I ran across a resolution that he had put forth in the 1980s proposing that the LCMS join the ELCA ), while our associate pastor was more “Old Missouri.”
This hymnal and liturgical fracturing reverberated throughout synod, as some churches retained TLH, others changed to LW, a few used LBW, and still others started experimenting with “creative worship,” writing their own liturgies, or abandoning the liturgy entirely by aping non-liturgical churches that deny the Real Presence. These “worship wars” destroyed the unity that we had precariously held onto in the defeat of the Seminex cancer. As many have pointed out, the worship wars were never really settled, but ended in a kind of tired, uneasy truce, a “peace of Westphalia” that has turned the LCMS into a situation not unlike Korea: a single nation with two states divided by a demilitarized zone - a ceasefire, but no actual resolution. That said, LSB has exceeded what many thought possible by providing greater unity, at least among those who practice hymnal-fellowship, while at the same time bearing the scars of the 1980s by having five Divine Service options.
The synod as a “walking together” metaphor was replaced by the synod as a “box of chocolates” model. And it has gotten worse since the 1980s.
Here is a snapshot. Here are two LCMS member congregations and member pastors at worship. Note how they treat the holy things, how they confess the Real Presence:
For this first example, you can go to minute 20 to see the consecration:
In this next example, go to minute 50 to see the consecration:
These two congregations, pastors, and their worship forms are in fellowship with each other - in the technical de jure sense, that is, on paper. Both pastors took ordination vows that their ministries would be normed by the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions. Both congregations agree to abide by the same. Theoretically, these congregations “walk together.” They may or may not share the retirement plan or health insurance, but they are represented by the same convention and hierarchy. On paper, it’s all very united. But in practice, it’s not. There is selective fellowship de facto, not district to district (as in episcopal polity, diocese to diocese), but congregation to congregation.
Indeed, the first congregation in the two examples above, which has “satellite campuses,” was seeking to add a new pastor. Their confession of the Holy Office shines through in their “help wanted ad.” In the second congregation, the pastor is on his way to retirement. I somehow doubt that we will see the parish put out a “job recruitment” ad. The call lists of these two congregations will not overlap. This is once again an expression of de jure unity and de facto disunity - namely, in their view of the Holy Ministry.
Fellowship is a matter of “altar and pulpit.” The de facto reality is that members of these two congregations are not going to worship at one another’s congregations. Their pastors will not be on each congregation’s call lists. The reality is that thanks to the radical innovations in matters of worship, we do not have a de facto synod, even though we still have de jure unity. And no amount of “conversation” is going to put these two congregations into one another’s orbit. Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall decades ago. The only unity that they are going to have is institutional.
The narrative from the crowd that denies “Lex orandi, lex credendi” is that these churches are internally the same, and that their differences are only minor externals about how they hold their hands or what style of music they like. The reality is that the externals grow out of the internals. What is confessed by the mouth and hands comes from the heart and mind. And indeed, ceremonies teach. The miraculous reality of Jesus’ Presence in the Holy Sacrament is confessed by reverence in the Holy Mass. The doctrine of the Holy Ministry (as well as the sacramentology) is confessed by who is given the vocation of consecrating the elements. The vestments of the ministers speak to the seriousness with which they confess what is happening at that moment. Is it a miracle, or is it a show? Is it worship, or is it entertainment? Is it eternal and transcendent, or is it faddish and banal? Whether the chalice is used, or is simply a stage prop, is a confession of the Words of Institution.
Granted, these are two extremes. But even in the less extreme examples, there is a very real divide between those who practice “contemporary worship” and those who do not. My congregation’s liturgy is less ceremonial than what you will see above. But my members and I would attend the latter but not the former. My parishioners would be scandalized to walk into an LCMS congregation like the former. And even without the baseball jerseys and the lady lay (with apologies to Bob Dylan) “consecration,” my parishioners would recognize the admixture of the common with the sacred.
But these examples nicely illustrate the incongruency between de jure and de facto fellowship. Ideally, these two would correspond. It would be a nice thing to be able to once more go to a random LCMS congregation without having to do Internet research first. It would be a great boon to once again have de facto unity and not merely a common retirement plan. This will happen in one of two ways: a division or an amalgamation. Either the two de facto synods will become two de jure synods, or the matter will be settled by power. It is interesting that the pastors of some of the largest churches (all of whom have “contemporary worship”) are pushing to change the formula of representation in the synod. They understand how synod power works, and they want bigger churches to have more representation in synod. They are also seeking to give the bigger churches a bigger vote by creating more delegates for churches that have rostered laity as part of their staffs. They want to do away with the equality of all of our congregations and drown out the smaller churches (which are, by far, the typical churches, as well as the churches where one is more likely to find the exclusive use of the hymnal and the liturgy). I’ve heard bitter big-church pastors refer to us contemptuously as “dying” churches - even when we are holding steady or experiencing slow generational numerical increases. They don’t see why they shouldn’t run the synod as a kind of expert managerial class. I think we need to resist them, and see this power-grab for what it is.
Unless one side or the other leaves or changes, we won’t have de facto unity. While some pastors and congregations that have gone to a radical model of worship at odds with Article 24 have left (including one that was practicing fortune-telling on the stage), most of them want to stay and fight. They want control of the seminaries. And if they can’t get control of the seminaries, they want to work around the seminaries to form, educate, and train their own pastors their own way according to their own theology and practice. Listen for the words “context” and “contextual” - they are red flags of separatism. The quiet revolution continues behind smiling faces and calls for “conversation.” By contrast, the pastors and laity that believe in upholding Article 24 generally champion our seminaries. And this divide is yet another indicator of our de facto state of selective fellowship.
Though some won’t (or can’t) admit it, we all practice de facto selective fellowship at the congregational level. This goes deeper than surface issues and pastoral personalities. It won’t be fixed with beer and cigars and podcasts.
The key to understanding this paradox of unity without unity is to come to grips with the dichotomy between de jure and de facto fellowship. It is important to see reality for what it is. Had we had more “conversation” with the Seminex crowd, indeed, we might have stayed together in the LCMS. They would not have changed, but we would have. Had we not had the ecclesiastical divorce of the 1970s, we would today be de jure members of the adulterous ELCA. We need to confess the faith in doctrine and in practice. We need to see our situation from the perspective of history.
For as the old saying goes, those who do not learn from history…