The gates of hell. . .

It is often a mighty comfort to the faithful in the midst of trouble and turmoil.  The devil will not prevail.  The gates of hell will not prevail.  But what this does not mean is that the status quo will endure forever.  It is a false comfort to presume that everything that is will continue because God has set His protection upon it.  Indeed, God has not set His protection upon all the institutions and their various shapes and forms.  God has placed His protection over us.  Over you and me.  We belong to Him.  All the things that have articles and bylaws, web pages and physical addresses, phone numbers and email addresses may not endure.  They probably will not.  We will.

This ought to be of great comfort to us as God's people.  We are the people of His promise, upon whom He has placed His mark, whom He has cleansed in baptismal water, and begun the good work of salvation in us.  Yes, this is our comfort and assurance when things seem bleak and threats abound.  We belong to the Lord.  It does not mean we are immune from suffering or that we will not pay a cost for being His disciples.  Of course not.  Our Lord repeatedly reminds us that as He was treated, so shall we be treated by a world at enmity with those who belong to Him as it was to Him.  But the things that the devil and the world can do to us cannot rob us of all that Christ died and rose to bestow upon us.  That is the promise.

At the same time this comforts us, it ought also to push us to action.  As we in the LCMS look around us, we should be chastened by the reminder that even the good institutions among us have no guarantee upon them and carry no immunity from the assaults of the devil or the ravages of time and the whims of the moment.  IF they are good and salutary, IF they are to endure, it will be because we work for them.  We cannot stand on the sidelines and watch the Lord do for us what He has called us to do.  We are the laborers in His harvest.  If we are lazy or complacent, all the good things that are our Synod will fall into disrepair and fail us.  If we are foolish and mistake earthly success for faithfulness to the Lord, all those things we think of as we identify ourselves as a Synod will fall through the fingers of our own neglect.  If we squabble over needless things or overlook serious disagreements over faith and practice, it will come back to haunt us.  

Jesus did not tell us not to fear but whom to fear and whom not to fear.  Do not fear the powers of this world but fear God and heed the voice of His Word.  We will be accountable and not only for the individual stewardship of the time and resources He has granted to us but also for the things we hold of value together as a Synod.  Sometimes we get this wrong.  We act to protect institutions instead of the cause, fearing the loss of the things that may be valuable today but are not eternal over that which is forever.  We also act as if we are merely spectators and God is the only actor.  The witness of the New Testament ought to show us how God does His work.  He works through those whom He has called.  He works through us.  

The hard part is working this out in daily life.  Some presume that the Church grows because of what we do or how we do it.  They would forget that this work is too valuable to the Lord for Him to consign it to others.  His Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies still and He works through means.  These means of grace, the Word and the Sacraments, are administered by us but He is their power as well as their goal.  We would be foolish if we thought that we had the franchise of the Church and it was our duty and our power to make it flourish and grow.  But we would also be foolish if we presumed that if God wants it done, He can just do it Himself.  What we do in the home and in the congregation matters and has profound effect.

Conventions can be a mess, a cacophony of voices and agendas clamoring for the limelight.  They can be boring as we realize that we have dealt with nearly everything on the agenda before.  They can be sobering as our well meaning efforts of the past had unintended consequences.  But they can also be a place of hope as we encounter people from all over the nation who share our common identity as Missouri Synod Lutherans and are working in their own neck of the woods to do what we have been called to us, trusting in the Lord but placing all the attention and energy of their hearts, minds, bodies, and souls at His behest.  Hopefully we will walk away reminded that nothing will be preserved without our efforts but we shall be kept to everlasting life by the Lord alone.  Hopefully we will have met some new folks who labor with us but in different arenas for the same cause and be encouraged.  Hopefully we will learn to set aside smaller loyalties for the larger loyalty to Christ, His Word, and the faithful Confession once made and still kept by us.  Hopefully we will not expect our leaders to do what we have been called to do and we will not try to be a church body of many leaders with no followers.  Hopefully we will find cause for joy even as we are given sober reminder that these things are not easy, clean, or efficient.  It is what it is but the LCMS is still our best cause and the best place to be.  If and when that is no longer so, we will have to cross that bridge when we come to it but for now it would be nice if we showed in life some of the unity we claim in theory.  

Meanwhile on the AI scene. . .

I read recently where many researchers are now convinced that to achieve a more humanlike AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will require something more than merely mastering language and images.  It will, in their estimation, require AIs which can reason about space, causality, and the consequences of actions.  While this is more broadly necessarily for the evolution of AI, it is especially required if AI is to control humanoid robots, operate factories, and explore other planets—fulfilling at least some of the promise of those visionaries who laud its future.

Among those who argue for this need, AI pioneer Yann LeCun put it clearly. “I joke that the smartest systems we have today are not as smart as a house cat,” he says. A cat can’t code like a large language model (LLM), but it can survive by its wits. The notion that simply scaling ever larger an LLM will get to AGI is “complete nonsense,” he says. “It’s like saying you’re going to get into orbit by scaling airplanes. There’s a very powerful delusion circulating in Silicon Valley that this is the case.”  LeCun left a top job at Meta to co-found one of a growing number of labs and startups developing “world models”—systems that build representations of how the world works—and agents that operate within them to learn or plan. Ultimately, these researchers hope that more closely mimicking how the human mind learns will give AI stunning new powers. 

There is another problem.  Companies  are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to build AI models with hundreds of billions or even trillions of adjustable parameters, trained on trillions of words and images scraped from the internet.  The latest GPT model from OpenAI is several times the size of its largest 2020 model and trained on an order of magnitude more data.   So LLMs can pass lawyers’ bar exams and doctors’ medical licensing exams, match the achievements of top high school students in math, write poetry that many readers find more beautiful than human works, and do such an efficient job that top programmers now use them to write most of their code.  However, each advance in AI requires disproportionately more resources.  They are running out of input.  Literally.  One 2024 study estimated they’ll exhaust high-quality public text data in the next few years.  The equipment (computer chips and algorithms are gaining efficiency), but not quickly enough and data centers under development will each draw so many gigawatts of power and water that they are straining the grid and turning the minds of the public against them.

In other words, building a better human may be even more difficult that improving the ones we have. 

Addicts of our own success. . .

Sometimes in the life of the Church, we realize that we are not really pursuing the goals and purposes of the Church as Christ has commanded but seeking success, approval, recognition, and, best of all, numbers.  Everything seems to come down to numbers but it starts with success.  We want to succeed.  It is probably in our nature to seek success and no one but a fool would pursue failure, at least deliberately.  But success can prove a poor teacher.  It teaches us less than failure does and it might impart lessons which are hard for us to shake.  When something works, we often stop looking to see if it passes the faithfulness or orthodoxy test.  If is works, that is usually good enough for us.

Approval is what we all seek.  Some of us probably seek the approval of God but I fear those numbers grow less and less over the ages.  We do seek the approval of others.  We are consumed by the need to be affirmed by those around us -- from family and friends to peers and even strangers.  We want approval and that need has led us to find ways around the Word of God in order to get the approval of those whose values and views conflict with God's own revelation.  If given a choice, most of us in the Church would trade God's approval (heck, He forgives us anyway) with the approval of those outside the Church (who are less likely to forgive any intrusion into their chosen way of life or feelings about it all.  Why else would we admit that Scripture has long forbidden as not simply wrong but bad for us in all sorts of behaviors we now want to accept or tolerate or even commend?  It starts with sex but it does not end there -- that is the lesson from Eden.

Recognition is hot on the list of things we want.  It is better to be known and rejected than to be ignored.  Even thought it might be better to be ignored by the forces at work in society and culture, we do not want to trade fame and its fortune for being forgotten or ignored -- even if that was the better path of faithfulness and orthodoxy.  Like Trump's idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity, we want the recognition of society and those around us more than we want to be commended by God.  It is the fatal flaw of sin and it might even be stronger in us than the desire for self-preservation or self-expression.  We want at least our fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

Numbers is where it all seems to end.  Using statistics to define both success and failure is hard for a God who promised a remnant or a nation to an old man and an old woman but it is not difficult for us.  We do not know how to gauge the statistics on faithfulness but we can measure the folks in the pews and how much they put in the plate or the ratings given to us on social media.  Is this the primary concern for the Church and her leaders?  No, I am not saying that decline is the cost of faithfulness always but sometimes it is.  The world is filled with the same itching ears as the pews and we attach our hopes to those who seem to show revival just as we blame those who suffer decline.  We take our comfort in numbers even more than in the Lord and, if we had to choose, we would probably choose stars, a satisfactory attendance number, and a healthy bank account over just about everything else.  That is what we wrestle with even within the Church and even among her pastors.

In some respects, we are addicts of our own success -- wishing to recreate the golden years of boomtown economies, suburban sprawl, immigration, or whatever else was working when we seemed to have no end to our future.  Now, we kick doctrine to the curb and jettison the liturgy and shop in the catalog of evangelical practices to find something that will make our glory filled yesterdays into today and tomorrow.  We forget how the Church began, the sufferings of the early years, the controversies that nearly tore us apart, the confusion of regal splendor with churchly nobility, the isolation of people from their churchly leaders, and so many other things.  He who endures to the end shall be saved.  I wish I listened to that more and I wish my church would as well. 

Moments of euphoria or irrational exuberance. . .

Every now and then a church acts in a radical way that in the moment is seen as one thing but in the rear view mirror looks different.  Often these actions are seen in the euphoria of the moment as opening the door to a bold new future but, looking back, they are often seen as moments of irrational exuberance (a phrase from a former Fed chairman I love to quote).

Let me give some concrete examples.  In the case of Rome, Vatican I and the papal centrism of that council were seen as essential if a bit radical in the moment.  Now, in the wake of the failed papacy of Francis and how quickly he undid some of the better work of JPII and BXVI, it looks like irrational exuberance.  If only one could go back and dial down some of the over the top rhetoric that virtually equated the papacy with the church and made bishops more assistants to the pope than real bishops.  So what do you do in the wake of it all?  If you are Rome, you try to ignore the excesses but you always have those folks who refuse to let it fade away.

Another example in Rome is Vatican II (sense a pattern here?).  There was euphoria about updating a moribund church body and opening the door to some fresh air.  It turns out, in retrospect, that some things that seemed dead were buried prematurely and the fresh air let in was poisoned with the headiness of the moment and it turned out not a great moment to make grand changes.  Now Rome is caught between those who continue to try and redeem the euphoria of Vatican II and those who shrug that it was a case of irrational exuberance that probably should be forgotten.  Of course, it does not help that Paul VI went on a bender drunk with Vatican II euphoria to make liturgical changes the council did not foresee or authorize.

Rome is not alone.  In my own small world of the Missouri Synod, there was euphoria in 1989 about opening up the role of lay ministers to supplement the pastors in places where the ordained were in short supply.  It turned out that the recension of Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession was irrational exuberance that required 20 years to fix and has still left us with the scars of the confusion of our own making.  It was a bonehead move.  Yet there are those who still live in the euphoria of that moment and keep trying to dredge back up the remnants of that ill-conceived resolution today.

Perhaps another example is the restructuring of 2010.  The blue ribbon task force (who can recall the entire name) that proposed it seemed to have studied everything and come up with a radical solution to a management problem many admitted was real.  There was euphoria in the air but the same convention that adopted most of the fix denied its architect from implementing the thing and passed the leadership baton to someone who did not favor it.  Now, the same people who clamored for the centralization of power in the then president of Synod are claiming that the one elected has acted highhandedly to do what the new bylaws told him to do.  Euphoria in 2010 has turned out to be irrational exuberance today as we look at the possibility that we will have to revisit the whole thing again sooner rather than later and undo what was then a classic example of a policy driven executive structure.

My guess is that you could add somethings here and I could to make this a rather long list of things that seemed perfect in the moment but ended up being not so good as we look back from the vantage point of today.  Some will insist that the Church needs to act more quickly.  I am chastened by some of our past euphoria to suggest that these examples are proof that we need to act more deliberately -- not less.  The work of God's kingdom is of too great an importance for us to keep up with the heady euphoria of the day only to look back and see that our irrational exuberance has proven to be a major problem.  My guess is that the undoing of our institutions will likely happen more because of what we felt we had to do or die rather than what we did not do quickly enough.  I know some will disagree but that is my wisdom of the day. 

How you view the line. . .

The state of the Missouri Synod on the question of the role of women seems to hinge upon two very different viewpoints.  On the one hand, there are those who insist that everything matters.  They worry about having women in classes as the seminaries (deaconesses) and about women doing anything publicly that is the domain of men or pastors.  A woman leading an LWML Bible study is often seen as different only by degree with a vested woman in a stole leading worship.  They are constantly on the lookout for places where the line is transgressed, where woman are usurping the roles given exclusively to men or to pastors.  There is nothing innocent in this point of view.  Every infraction is nefarious and threatening.

On the other hand, there are those who insist that it is no big deal.  They see the line as flexible, adjusted in part by circumstance and in part by age or generation.  They insist that it is local and nothing more.  A woman leading a women's Bible study is just that.  Nothing more.  A woman holding congregational offices is just that and nothing more.  A woman doing what any layman might do on Sunday morning is just that and nothing more.  They are hesitant about making anything more out of something specific or local.  It is no big deal.

In between there are those in Missouri who are caught between the two positions.  They have a concern for principle but they also have a concern for rigidity.  They see women all around us in society, government, and industry but they know that the Church is not the same as those domains.  They realize that this is messy and it might mean that the same answer is not the same in every place -- that come congregations may not have women's suffrage or officers and others might.  They want to respect these differences but they also know that both sides push and pull toward the edges and not the middle.  They do not want to make too much out of it all but neither do they want to ignore the real differences which deserve to be noticed.

On the one side, those who want the line to be movable insist that we must trust them in every decision they make and on the other side are those who insist that rules are rules and they must be respected.  And this is not simply about the role of women.  It touches upon the issues of close communion, worship rites, and a host of different things.  Every three years we attempt to blend them all together in something called a convention.  It is sometimes a train wreck.  It is sometimes shallow, preferring to push off things that are urgent and photo ops for real substance.  It is sometimes hopeful, when progress is made even if it is slow.  It is sometimes a real conversation in which people are listening and sometimes it is people shouting at each other without paying attention to what the others are saying.  It is a call to trust with some insisting that there is no trust and others insisting that their trust has been violated over and over again.  And all of this is magnified by the bullhorn of social media and armchair commentators (like me) and backseat drivers who insist they can see clearly what others cannot.  I wish it was going to change, resolve into something less stressful, but I doubt that this will happen soon.  In fact, I suspect this is the shape of things to come -- made more urgent and more difficult as we witness the decline of things around us in the Church and in the world.  What do you think?