Voting is the problem. . .

I was having coffee and reviewing the news with beloved wife some weeks back and mentioned that the Presbyterians had voted on the issue of whether their clergy had to be monogamous.  It was a shocking thing to think.  Churches will now be required to vote to keep their pastors from practicing one or more versions of the polygamy now becoming avante guarde.  My beloved responded that no matter how the vote turned out, the mere fact that you had to vote on it was itself a sign that the battle was lost.  How astute!  That is the problem with voting.  You vote once every year or two years or three but the effect of the vote is only as good as the last time you voted and only sure until the next time.

We seem always to vote in the Church for things we should not be voting for -- even good things!  It is a good thing, I suppose, to vote regularly for an all male priesthood or for close(d) communion or weekly Eucharist or the value of the liturgy and a host of other good, right, and salutary stuff.  But that is the problem with voting.  You are only as good as the last vote and the next one may change it all.  I am weary of voting.  It is the Achilles' Heel of democracy and it may well be the undoing of the Church down the road.  The mere fact we vote on things that are a given in God's Word and a staple of our confessional and creedal life means that these things are not enough and, without reaffirming them, we could actually overturn them (though the Word of God does require a two-thirds majority vote to be overturned!).

Whether in Australia or in Germany, recent events have shown us that even when the vote fails to change the practice from truth to error, there is always another vote and another opportunity to change the right side into the wrong one.  Even Rome knows that.  The mere fact that a diocese or two has voted to support the ordination of women, for example, shows the problem lies with the vote.  Voting does not establish doctrine but it cannot deny it.  What about the biggest ballot of all -- the one that sends up the white smoke?   And, too often, it does just that.  I cannot speak for Rome and what they are doing with their abundance of problems but I know in the Lutheran back yard voting has become the idea that we get a say so over what the Lord says and a say so over how we intend to implement what He has said.  That is the fallacy of voting.  Voting does not establish doctrine.  Only the Word of God can do that.  When we vote for practices that muddy the waters of doctrine or confuse what we say we confess, the problem lies already with the vote even before we get to what it is we were or are voting upon.

One convention I well recall is when we voted to rescind the XIV article of the Augsburg Confession.  It took nearly thirty years to fix that mistake and we did it by, yup, you guessed it, voting.  Which means we could screw it up all over again.  We were careful to say we were not changing doctrine back then but only tweaking with the practice but in the end we pretty much destroyed the idea of ordination (whether or not you think Apostolic practice is serious stuff or not) and the rite vocatus that led up to the laying on of hands.  Even if you win, unless your margin is 90/10 or so, you almost leave room for the opponents to come back again for another go at undoing what we said we believed and how we practiced it.  There were, after all, overtures submitted designed to turn back the clock so we could party like 1989 one more time.  I am writing this a little early so I will venture to say we did not give into that temptation -- at least not yet.

Some people think that it is a problem of who votes -- laymen or, in particular, female laity.  I think it is a problem of voting period.  We should vote less on even good things which we confess and practice.  Voting gives us the wrong impression -- namely that we are in charge! 

Why are we losing them?

In 2007 Lifeway published the results of a fairly wide study that found some 70 percent of young American adults who regularly attended a Protestant church in high school stopped attending upon when hey reached college age. Interestingly, this was mirrored in those who did not attend college as well as those who did enter university.  Ten years later when Lifeway repeated the study (2017), guess what—it found pretty similar results.  Before we quickly blame the colleges and the secular education industry, we would do well to recall that Lyman Stone made the conclusion to his review (Institute of Family Studies) that “most nonreligious children are born into religious households and lose their faith while under the supervision of parents who believe that they are successfully transmitting their religious values.”  Neither study is alone in its findings or its conclusions.

Organization	Study / Source	Year	Key Finding
Lifeway Research	Church Dropout Study	2007	70% of young adults who attended church regularly in high school dropped out for at least one year between ages 18–22.
Lifeway Research	Church Dropout Study (updated)	2019	66% dropout rate—a slight improvement from 70% in 2007. 71% say leaving was not intentional.
Barna Group	You Lost Me	2011	59% of young adults with a Christian background disconnected from church during their 20s.
Barna Group	Faith for Exiles	2019	Dropout rate rose to 64%. Only 10% of young Christians qualify as “resilient disciples.”
Pew Research	Religious Landscape Study	2023–24	29% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”)—up from 16% in 2007.
Pew Research	Why Americans Leave Religion	2025	53% of those who left religion did so by age 18.
Gallup	Church Membership Trend	2020	U.S. church membership fell below 50% for the first time ever, to 47%.
NSYR	Longitudinal Study	2002–13	Parents are the single most important influence on long-term religious outcomes. Retention drops to single digits without parental engagement.
Fuller Youth Institute	Sticky Faith	2006–10	Intergenerational worship participation is the strongest predictor of sustained faith into college.
PRRI	Census of American Religion	2020–24	36–44% of adults under 30 are religiously unaffiliated. Young women now leaving faster than young men.

The data points to a dropout rate somewhere between 59% and 70%, depending on how you define “dropout” and depending upon the time period being surveyed.  Of course, many of those who "drop out" will eventually return but even so, the situation is serious.  What is concerning is this.  The surveys found that: 71% of those who left said it was not an intentional decision—it just happened. They drifted away.  They stopped attending for a while and it became a habit. They did not get angry and storm out.  They did not rebel against church teaching.  They just woke up one day and had lost the habit of attending Church.  Some of them worked to regain the habit.  Many did not.  It is also interesting that many, perhaps even most of those young adults who dropped out of Church were not rejecting the faith outright (though this might come later) but they had lost the habit.

 

While it is true that many eventually return—especially after major life transitions—those life events that would eventually provide an opportunity for them to drop back in are themselves in decline. Survey said that the reasons for returning include feeling that something was missing and having the desire to return (34%), feeling God was calling them back (28%), having children (24%), and getting married (20%). About half of young adults who leave eventually return in some capacity which is good but if having children and marrying are on the decline among those same young adults, that means there are fewer entry points for them along their lives. 

 

The single strongest predictor of long-term religious outcomes: parents.  Duh.  This should not be a surprise.  So the fix does not lie with church programs.  It is not youth group, not summer camp, not a youth pastor or leader, not participation in church leadership, and not worship style that is the biggest factor in the long term religious connection of young adults.  Far and away the most significant variable in all the studies is the home, the faith of the parents, and the practice of the family. Though it is politically incorrect to admit this, the faith and practice of the father in the home has the greatest impact.  The declining presence of the dad in the home is therefore also very concerning.

 

Retaining youth is key to the vitality of the Church.  We may be great at evangelization but if we are a failure at keeping the kids we have, we will decline.  It is inevitable.  So having children and raising them in the faith and in the Church with a strong father example is part of the solution as well as a sign of the problem.  This is not earth shattering but it does reinforce the common wisdom that the strength of the Church is the strength of the home. 

Elections and mandates and governance. . .

It is probably impossible to resist but it is not good for churchly institutions to borrow from political ones to conduct and interpret elections.  We are not a democracy.  We do not decide things by plebiscite.  Even when we have votes or elections, we are not doing what political institutions do.  Interpreting elections can be dangerous or difficult.  Even Rome knows this and they insist that they do not conduct democratic elections or cast ballots (except to cause the white smoke to rise or at councils!).  People who try to make the Church fit into political style jackets find themselves disappointed and disillusioned.  There were those who expected one thing from JPII and BXVI and FI and LXIV only to see their visions disrupted by unexpected things from them all.  The little corner of the Christian world called the LCMS should be also chastened by such political hopes and aspirations.  Is this really what any one of us wants from the Church?

We do not have political parties in the Church and our political patronage is not as deep or broad as it was in the heyday of American politics.  We do not have the layers of political offices in which to identify and promote political candidates.  Some would suggest we have the rudiments of such a system and some would insist that this is exactly what we ought to be doing -- conducting the business of the Church as if it were some grand plebiscite voting on what God's Word says, what it means, and how it is to be lived out.  We already have something of the kind coming at us through the rear entrance as culture influences and shapes what we are willing to tolerate as God's Word and what we have decided to overlook.  We do not need to give culture and the mind of the individual more room to influence or shape Christian faith and practice.

Although some might disagree, I do not believe I am naive.  I know some of this will always be there and our baser nature always wants to fight for control and self-preservation.  But do we formalize this as the way we act as a church body or do we right against the intrusion of worldly ideas of how to govern the Church?  Do we interpret elections as mandates for change or for the status quo?  Do we measure these mandates by election majorities?  Do we play politics with the numbers in order to diminish our opponents or magnify our favorites?  Social media has become the perfect platform to do this.  We can do this almost anonymously -- doing everything from character assassination to slander while hiding who is doing the accusing.  Is that serving us well? 

I am not here simply thinking of such things as elections and votes but also policy based governance.  We want efficiency in the Church and in the name of efficiency we have elected to put more power into fewer hands.  At the same time, we have not bothered to differentiate between authority and responsibility and so the power gets to choose.  In my own church body we chose to eliminate boards and executives and funnel nearly everything through a very few hands.  We have done a mighty fine job of burning good people out and promoting some to their level of incompetence and, worse, created a perfect scenario for blame politics.  We blame our leaders for every problem in the Church -- from not having babies and the graying of the pews to not recruiting enough pastors.  We seem to look everywhere to blame someone for the problems that belong to everyone.  How is that working for us so far?

Finally, everyone agrees we need rules.  A constitution and bylaws are those rules, duly adopted and faithfully enforced.  But we cannot and will not solve some of the vexing problems of the day by throwing bylaws at them.  We cannot bylaw our way to more people in the pews or more souls baptized or more folks being catechized or more folks coming to the rail or more missionaries sent or more church workers trained.  Votes cannot create the answers to the problems we have largely created for ourselves.  We all need to look into the mirror and admit this and work, as best we are able and where we are placed, to correct our inadvertent or deliberate errors.  Governance can sustain what is but it cannot grow the Church.  Leaders can faithfully lead the Church but they cannot grow it either (especially in Rome where they have no wife!).  It is frustrating for us to work so hard to make the business of the Church about votes, governance about control, and then to ignore how our rules cannot fix what we have broken.  When we begin to admit this, we just may take the first step toward improving the state of things. That is called repentance.  

What is the Law?

Sometimes we forget the obvious or become so comfortable labeling something what it is not that we no longer notice it at all.  Preaching the problems of this mortal life is not the same thing as preaching the Law.  We have problems.  You bet we do.  Some of those problems are caused by our sins and some are the consequence of living in a sinful world.  But preaching the problems of our individual or communal lives in this day and time is not the same as preaching the Law.  The Law accuses and convicts.  Identifying the problems we face is good and salutary but unless we go the second step of connecting those problems to our sins, the Law has not yet been spoken.

Preaching to "felt needs" or problems has become popular today but for the Lutheran, we must admit that preaching about the problems we face is not the same as preaching God's Law.  We struggle with many things that are wrong in our lives.  Loneliness is epidemic.  Marriages are struggling and failing all around us.  Our economic circumstances confound and conflict us.  The world is not a safe place.  Violence is all around us.  Medical diagnoses threaten our lives and the lives of those whom we love.  These are real problems.  We all feel them and they contribute to the constant anxiety of our lives.  But speaking of these things and identifying them as the sources of our fear and angst is not the same as preaching the Law.

Sadly, the identification of problems as Law in preaching has consequences for the Gospel.  Instead of being the answer of God to sin and its death, the Gospel becomes something rather weak and passive.  God is present with you in your problems.  God wants you to be happy.  God can be called upon in your hour of need.  All of these are true (well, maybe not quite the idea that God's greatest desire for you is your happiness!) but none of these are the Gospel.  The Gospel cannot be removed from the cross where Christ suffered in our place for our sin and from the empty tomb where He rose that we might rise with Him to new and everlasting life.

Preaching can easily become formulaic.  Even Lutherans are not immune.  When we simply identify the problems people have identified and tell them that God is with them, we have not told them a lie or deceived them in any way but we have not quite proclaimed the Gospel to them.  Preaching to the felt needs of the people can often become a simple exercise of identifying what things people are struggling with in their lives and then simply reminding them that they are not alone in their struggles.  It may sound relevant and appear to be successful but it is not preaching God's Word faithfully.  In the end, such preaching does little to help the people and everything to make it easier for them to fall away from Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  Perhaps it is better than telling people to fix themselves and their problems on their own but it is not preaching the cross or empty tomb.  It is not preaching Christ.  

Problems can become ways of connecting what is happening in the lives of people to sin, helping them to connect the dots between the troubles of this mortal life and what sin has done to cause these troubles.  Preaching can become a tool through which we connect people to their choices and to the voice of the Law condemning those choices when they are wrong.  But simply identifying problems and reminding people God is with them and working on their behalf to resolve them is to fail in the preaching task.  We might complain about moralism when it replaces preaching faithfully the Word of God but it is no different than preaching a weak idea of sin and what has done to us and a weak idea of what it means for God to love us and send forth His Son to be our Savior and Redeemer.  God is not a silent companion in our lives.  He has something to say.  I guess we would rather not listen. 

The waning influence of Europe. . .

I read a startling statistic that indicated that Pakistan had one million more births than the whole of Europe last year (7M to 6M).  It would seem that the birth rate is not merely a statistic but a sign of the decline of Europe and its influence.  Indeed, it has become dependent upon others to work in its factories, fill the service jobs, and pay into the government the tax money going out to its aging citizens.  No one likes to admit this, of course, but everyone knows this painful truth.  Europe is on crutches or, more appropriately, behind a walker, inching toward its own demise.  It may well be that there are not enough fertile females left in Europe to change this even if they all suddenly desired to become moms.  In any case, the day is looming when the social programs protecting the populace will either fail or be subject to the whims of others who are living in their lands but not European in values as well as ancestry

Even the EU’s largest and most industrialized nation, Germany, is vulnerable to the litany of ailments presently affecting them all.  Europe matters less in the world and Germany also matters less within Europe.  The Germans are victims of the same problems and all their industrial machine cannot produce them out of this problem.  It is related to the decline of marriage, the family, and the lack of children.  For some time now power has been moving away from Berlin and not to other capitals like Paris.  It is moving out of Europe as the population ages and declines and its influence is more ceremonial than real.  This is the real decline of a civilization -- when there is no value to or interest in the foundational structures of any society in marriage, children, and family.  It has taken a while to get here but it takes a longer time to reverse this kind of decline if only because the population has aged itself out of the child bearing years.

Not surprisingly, this same thing is also at work in the US though we are much slower to get there -- at least in part because of the strong birth rate of our population of recent immigrants.  Right now the birth rate of Nigeria is either the same or ahead of the US so the problem is looming for us as well.  Interestingly enough, this has already shown itself in many Christian churches -- the leading edge of this decline revealed among those whose graying membership and birth rate even lower than the rest of America show what will happen to the rest soon enough.  In the LCMS, the thing that is killing is most is not that we are terrible at attracting new people to our confession and church life but that every year shows a significant decline in the number of babies born to our people and presented for baptism.  Our statistical graph is ahead of the nation and the same people who dismiss this as an issue for Europe or the US are laughing themselves to death -- literally -- when it is pointed out for our church body.  Our influence wanes not simply because those outside our church body are not listening but because we do not take its theology serious enough within our own homes and congregations.

In the following table we find summarized the fertility rates of the LCMS compared to other religious groups in America (not necessarily Christian):

Religious Group	Fertility Rate
LCMS	Lower than average
Mormons	Highest among religious groups
Assemblies of God	High fertility
Non-denominational Evangelicals	Moderate fertility
Roman Catholics	Traditionally high

What are the implications of a low fertility rate?

• Decline in Membership: The lower birth rates mean fewer families are raising children within the church, leading to a shrinking membership base.

• Generational Impact: With only 11% of LCMS families currently in the child-raising stage, this is significantly lower than the national average of 20%. This trend suggests that fewer children are being baptized and confirmed, which is the most significant factor in church growth.  It also points out that many of those being raised in the faith, will not stay either due to marginal participation by the family in the life of the church or a break down of catechesis.

• Future Projections: If the current demographic trends continue, the LCMS will certainly face continued challenges in maintaining its membership levels and without a turn around, will probably see a functional decline in the church and its influence in the coming decades.

What we are now seeing in Europe is but a prediction of the future both for the US but in particular for the LCMS unless we work to turn this around now.