Merge for Mission 2: Mo' Mission, Mo' Problems

 

"Mission Together Meeting" (Archived)

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But there's more! Three more "Merge for Mission" videos available on the YouTubes, to be specific. First, we have Pastor Joel Gaertner's presentation (Archive) to the congregations of Immanuel, Shirley (WI) and surrounding congregations. Pastor Gaertner let a few things slip where Jon had been a little more tight-lipped. Joel tells us there are 24 conversations "in one phase or another." Note: these are not 24 churches discussing merger, but 24 mergers with two or more churches involved! In the case of Milwaukee it's something like 7 churches, at least five in MSP. If we assume an average of 3 churches per merger (and assuming the average merger is a consolidation) we are going from 72 churches to 24 churches, or roughly 50 churches closed. Which means the WELS is treading water. See, that "100 in 10" initiative doesn't disclose that on average prior to the stunt, we were opening five churches a year. So really, it's "50 in 10" new starts but we're actively consolidating about 72 churches to 24, so it's all smoke and mirrors. Jon Hein's "target" at the last synod convention was 200 fewer congregations in a decade. We're just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Joel mentioned that we don't really have a pastor shortage, the synod is 120k members down from our all-time peak but only two fewer pastors today; so "it's not a pastor problem, it's a deployment problem." 

We're told around the 54-minute mark that if things continue the way they are, we'll be down about 160k members in twenty years, and it's questionable if we'd be able to keep our five synod schools open (Michigan Lutheran Seminary, Luther Prep, MLC, Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary, Wisconsin Lutheran College). So while your local congregation is "kindling for Judgement Day" apparently these institutions are sacrosanct. 

Joel shows a similar insensitivity as Jon regarding the local congregation. Around the 15-minute mark we're told to never ask "how does this affect me" but rather think about the mission. A few minutes later, we're told there's "nothing wrong with taking care of people in your congregation, but" (muh Great Commission).  Towards the end of the video the theme comes back: "the challenge is not the head but the heart" - that is the merger is logical, therefore right, and you need to ignore the emotional component, and that "losing members in the process should not hold you back" because mergers overall grow the membership rolls, so we're indifferent to losing these specific people if we gain more of other people. Joel tells us Jon is a stat junkie, and it shows. We're just fungible economic units.

The final kick in the nuts is "If we do nothing, we're not serving the Kingdom" as if our frantic flurry of activity is what spreads the Gospel. 

“I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.” - Martin Luther

Then we have Jon Hein presenting to churches in Minneapolis-St. Paul (Archive), where we are told that there is a "Lack of strong ministry" and "Little energy and momentum." About an hour and a half in, Jon says you have to pick between local congregations and world missions, because "we can't do both" and that we have to remember that "our churches are kindling for Judgement Day" and, like Joel said, "you have to pick" between local congregations and world missions. It's all just numbers in a spreadsheet to Jon, who says we should "imagine churches are Monopoly hotels that you can redeploy elsewhere"

(And finally, a rare variant by Jon Hein (Archive) entitled "Merge for Ministry", the oldest of the bunch, the title must not have focus tested very well.)

I experienced a sense of righteous indignation you could probably sense at the end of the previous post, because the individual sheep in the flock matter. Individual congregations in the synod matter. Yes, even a seven-year-old knows that the Church is little sheep that hear the voice of their Shepard, but real flesh and blood people need real concrete places to worship. God gave us both a head and a heart, not for one to overrule the other but for each to hedge the other. We should not run off of pure emotions any more than we should run off of pure logic. Maximizing mission is not evenly distributing churches to get the maximum statistical coverage. As Dr. Koontz has pointed out several times there are white people in our cities and within blocks of our church that need the Gospel and need the love of a local congregation, and there's actually warrant to do so following the right ordering of loves - God puts us in a place, in a community, in a context and our loves flow out of our natural relationships into the more extended ones. When Jesus sent out the 72, it is incredibly unlikely that they were statistically distributed by population density (they were also sent out two by two, something worth considering - suggestions to our Lord and Savior that we have too many pastors in a given 15-minute parish area might just fall on deaf ears).

And we should think about the net effect of closing old churches and opening new ones. The churches we are closing are by-and-large old midwestern congregations with traditional Lutheran art, liturgical and sacramental by nature. These new congregations we are opening are often in "multipurpose spaces" devoid of sacred art, eschewing much of the liturgy and old Lutheran hymns for contemporary worship, and often even leaving basic church furniture like altars out of the picture, dragging a card table out for communion. And along with the mergers comes constitutional restructuring which means that the new 'consensus governance' models will be recommended further blurring the lines of headship in the congregation. Many of these new buildings are falling apart after twenty years because we don't put the same quality and craftsmanship into what we build for our Savior that our forefathers did. That 150-year-old church might need a little plaster, but it was built like a brick by German immigrants who wanted a place for generations they would never meet to gather around Word and Sacrament. The vision of our synodocrats is short-sighted if they simply view congregations as fungible economic units in a zero-sum game. 

Sigh.

All in a day's work,

-your foolish host