WELS Statistical Report: ECMs

 

Much like our Lutheran grade schools, our ECM's are overrun with heterodox, heathen and demon-worshippers, outnumbering our children three to one. Recall from that discussion: there were five different reasons for inviting the heathen and heterodox, and four of them revolved around money. The fifth was evangelism.

As it turns out while our ECM's might have a higher per-student return on adult confirmation than our grade schools, it accounts for less than ten percent of adult conversions. The futility of ECM's as a mission strategy is borne out in Plot KK:

When the distribution is so skewed that 5% of your ECM's account for nearly 50% of your conversion output, this would seem to indicate that the ECM conversions are not due to strategy but are due to a different environmental factor, and that the placement of the ECM was coincidental. Perhaps studying the environment they operate in would be worthwhile to expose a common thread.

As I explained in an article relating to the closure of an ECM,

When Jesus said "let the little children come unto me" it was in such a manner that it did not separate the children from their mothers. Christ did not come to disrupt the institution of the family, the good order God set up in Eden and protected throughout generations. A church can nurture the youth through the Divine Service, Bible study and in training parents how to raise Godly children. Christ most certainly did not set up an institution that used the veneer of "churchianity" to sanctify the pursuit of Mammon.

Furthermore - and potentially borne out by the skew in conversion from ECM's, our ECM's have less to do with missions (something our theological forefathers never would have considered appropriate in the first place) and more to do with money (although as we saw, it's not a guaranteed cash cow, even when government subsidies are applied) while promoting postwar consensus, feminist values:

 

This graphic from the first whitepaper is horrendous. A laptop is held front and center with a crying baby - a distraction from the screen - slung over the hip. Our ECE enablers would take the baby away from her mother in order to enable her to pursue her screen-staring career, facials, fashion and fitness. These are values confessional Lutherans do not share with the world. We don't share the woke worldview of social justice and secular equity; DEI is a false gospel, and we believe that what Paul wrote in Titus 2 about women working at home to raise a family and love their husbands. What our synod's educational arm is woefully missing is that Christianity is a hegemonic discourse that the secular world must fight at all costs. When we absorb the worlds' norms and values we are doing their dirty work for them.

God help us.