Merge for Mission: "You don't serve families, you serve Christ."

 

Merger? I hardly even know her!

(2025/03/07 UPDATE: Video has been pulled, but you can find a cached copy here.)

Mission Together is a program put together by WELS Congregational Services but is not listed on the WELS Congregational Services website; a reader shared this presentation and the associated Google Drive resources: a copy of a similar presentation, a document with the types of mergers, the process document. and a Bible study. Unclear to me 

Let's talk our way through the two-hour video presentation. Our presenter is Jon Hein the Director of WELS Congregational Services. He makes it clear that the WELS does not push mergers on congregations but is ready to assist when congregations have questions or want to consider mergers. After the pleasantries around 15 minutes in, we get to the problem statement: WELS congregations are not optimized to "maximize soul reach": right now, about 2% of Americans are within 15 minutes of a WELS church, but if more evenly distributed that number would jump to 33%. That's a spreadsheet-jockey type of answer, but as a recovery spreadsheet-jockey I know that premature optimization is, like the love of money, the root of all evil. It also peanut-butters over the fact we are dealing with souls in concrete places with families, communities and heritages - but more on that later. Around the 29-minute mark Hein makes the curious claim that the Great Commission has more weight than Jesus' other words because they occurred just prior to His ascension, emphasizing the "mission" component of the Great Commission. At the 36-minute mark Hein notes that if we talk 'school, school school' and not evangelism we are wrong. While Hein's statistical report notes that while schools are used for outreach but mostly for generating revenue, he's probably taking a nod towards the more traditional view that Lutheran education is for Lutheran children and not for outreach. 

After a short break we return and Hein mentioned the "Judeo-Christian ethic" (cringe) and then presents concerns that might fall under the category of "consumer Christianity" - we should show sympathy to single moms not coming to church because her kids are distracting her, that specific times and places of worship cut against the grain Americanism, and talks about "Christian community": but what is missing from this discussion is the fact that we are a sacramental church. If we were only about the Word then we could be asynchronous, perhaps, but the example of Philip and the Ethiopian reinforces the idea that sacraments bind us to a time and a place. Hein misses this.

(He reinforces the consumer Christianity point around the one-hour mark, acknowledging that WELS is not "high expectation discipleship" but falls closer to "consumer Christian," but not much is said about increasing the expectation of members.)

Survey says: "justification" for Consumer Christianity

We're a post-Christian nation, and our synod has experienced exponential losses "But we're better than ELCA" so we got that going for us. We worship about 120,000 any given weekend out of the 330,000 on the books. By Hein's own admission, we are "the healthiest guy in the ICU." Our attendance is declining faster than the number of souls on the books.

Moving on to appearances, Hein said that small attendance "looks like death", and we need critical mass to "do ministry well." Less churches means more ministry, because a big box congregation can do more visible ministry than small ones, not only due to economies of scale (financially: less money spent on liability insurance, increased purchasing power, debt consolidation) but pastorally: assuming you have multiple pastors in the consolidation they have to write less sermons and can do more mission work. And besides, silly, if we have a bunch of small churches near each other, when things change (for instance a vacancy or transition to contemporary worship) people jump to a nearby congregation: if they are all satellites of a large campus, who cares? It's the same 'local congregation'. 

Around an hour and thirty minutes we transition to world missions. Those fields are growing, but "we don't have enough horses to get there" - referring to the laity. Maybe he meant cows. Cash cows, that is. 

Plenty of pastors, never mind the vacancies. 

We'd send half of them overseas if we could!

And then we get to the part that really grinds my gears. An hour and thirty-five minutes, Hein makes the curious claim that it is selfish to want your own pastor if you are in proximity of another church. You are giving up on mission opportunities. Ten minutes later he echoes the thought again saying we should not have an emotional attachment to our church building, property or heritage. "You don't serve families, you serve Christ."

Synod, Inc demonstrating the outgroup preference.

But Christ did not die for an ambiguous blob of souls called All Nations; those people have names, you know. He died for the individual men and women that comprise all nations; men and women who were placed into families and birthed into specific geographical locations. A father was birthed into a farmhouse two down from the one his great-great-grandfather built by hand, that great-great-grandfather who immigrated (legally, natch) and built the Lutheran church just a mile down the road - close enough for him and his fellow countrymen to commune on Sunday and still keep the cows milked. The same church where this father brought his son to be baptized on a major anniversary of the congregation, whose graveyard contains the bones of his fathers in blood and in the faith awaiting the resurrection of the dead, buried among the faithful he knew in this life (and the legacy of faithful sons and daughters he never got to know). I'm sorry Jon, but time and place matter to the souls for which Christ died. Why did Jesus celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem? Why did he die on Golgotha? Why born in Bethlehem, why flee to Egypt, why settle in Nazareth? Time and place matter. Why did Paul send Timothy to install local elders? Time and place matter. In the fullness of time, God sent His Son, born of a specific woman, born under a particular law. In every time and place, God gathers specific individuals to specific altars. While there are times and places where consolidation may make sense, an attachment to this altar at this place is healthy and should be dealt with in all sensitivity.