Lead Time
Lead Time
BONUS! A Wake Up Call - The State of the Synod
Embark with us on this enlightening journey as we explore the 20-year trends of the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod. We'll be pulling insights, dissecting the characteristics of adaptive leaders, and understanding the fine balance between managing stress, taking calculated risks, and maintaining a sense of security. Leadership is more about caretaking than you think, and we're here to tell you why.
Picture the future of churches and pastoral formation as we discuss the steady count of congregations that worship between 50 to 99 members, and the significant drop in the number of large churches. It's a wake-up call for the urgent need for innovative and flexible leadership. We're also shining a spotlight on the challenges of catering to micro churches and the lack of resources for larger churches. Listen in as we contemplate the importance of partnerships, especially with the Unite Leadership Collective who are making strides in leadership development and the need for adaptive change in today's local church scenario. Get ready to rethink, reimagine, and revamp the way we perceive the Church and its leadership.
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Leigh Time is a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective, hosted by Tim Ollman and Jack Calliberg. The ULC envisions the future in which all congregations fully equip the priesthood of all the believers through world-class leadership development at the local level. Leigh Time taps into biblical wisdom for practical solutions to today's burning issues. Each podcast confronts real-time struggles facing the local church in a post-Christian culture. Step into the action with the ULC at UniteLeadershiporg. This is Leigh Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this bonus episode of Leigh Time Tim Ollman here with Jack Calliberg, and today our conversation is going to be on the state of the Synod, a report that you may or may not have seen, that documents the 20-year trends of the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod from 2002 to 2022. We're going to get into that, but before we do, I'm also reading a book right now and our team's going to be walking through it by the late great Pete Stanky. I've referenced Pete Stanky and his work in church systems many times, but this came out in 2016, teaching Fish to Walk. It's church systems and adaptive change, and I'm just going to read a quote here as we get going, because this entire conversation today should necessitate, at the highest levels in the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, inner institutions, in the International Center, the necessity for adaptive change. But guess what adaptive work brings?
Speaker 2:Conflict, conflict. Pushback is always present, stanky says, and the greater the change people must make and the deeper their learning needs to go, the more their resistance gains strength. Adaptive leaders put their leadership on the line. He uses this analogy from a physicist who did work a Danish physicist per Bach is what his name is about a century ago, where he had granules of sand fall straight down. And as these granules of sand fell down, guess what they made Jack. Very naturally, a cone, a cylinder type of object started to form we call a statistical pattern, right, exactly.
Speaker 3:And now what happened?
Speaker 2:What happens when a certain level of sand hits that cylinder? What happens to the cylinder or the cone? It breaks. It breaks and then a new cone forms, and we really believe we can use that analogy. Today, in the midst of the pre-Pagan or the post-Christian culture in which we live, this is a wonderful time where I think the Lord is dropping new granules of sand and new cones are beginning to form, all under the umbrella of the confessing Christian church.
Speaker 2:Now one other point of data which is kind of fascinating to me. Jack, do you know the behaviors that are needed for adaptive change in leaders? A high ability to manage stress and a certain level of risk tolerance and entrepreneurial skills, and what is also needed then is a certain sense of safety. I can run tests and I don't fear for my job, for my life, and I think right now, in the Lutheran Church in Missouri Center, we're walking through a season where there is too much fear. Jesus is on the throne, he is in control, and two of the characteristics in this adaptive season of change a lot of it.
Speaker 3:Let me comment on that real quick, do you mind? Pause, go ahead. Oh, that's fine. I think, in the line of what you're talking about, the adaptive leader is the mentality of sometimes it is OK to fail and actually failure is going to be part of the process, and if you know that that's the case, then let's fail quickly and learn as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Well, and I hate, I don't like the word failure. It is such a fearful, crippling word. Oh, everybody's going to laugh at me, I'm going to lose, and what are they all going to say? You know, I mean, these are the thoughts that every leader has in their head.
Speaker 3:Yeah, go ahead. That ties to your security right. Exactly. If you're insecure, then the idea of failure is impossible. Of course, I can't seek out failure. I have to do everything possible to ensure failure never happens, ever. But if you're secure, then you have the freedom to use failure as a tool to learn how to do things better.
Speaker 2:Jack, and where does our security come from, bro?
Speaker 3:It comes from Christ yeah.
Speaker 2:who says you're my Christ, yeah you've been baptized, your love by God. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. You think about the courage that the Apostles had. This is why the story of Saint Paul man we're talking through in our 6 am Kind of theological discovery is 6 am On Sunday Experience. We're walking through the book of Galatians and and how much courage did did Paul have to challenge the, the church there at Galatia? I mean, he calls out James, he calls out Peter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right in front of everybody, luther moment, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I opposed you to to your face. What you were preaching was counter to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is for, which is for all people. I'm the interesting fact, though, about the characteristics of pastors. I talked about what is hopefully needed. High-risk tolerance manages stress well, but Stanky draws out. As for conflict, studies have shown that clergy's Conflict management style is mostly avoidance and accommodation. Avoidance and accommodation clergy are basically caretakers, scarcely prepared for volatile emotional Systems. Few clergy are change agents. That's from Pete Stanky. Anything to add on on that? I?
Speaker 3:Think it comes from, if we kind of peel back the layers and say, well, why would that be the case, which I do believe. It is just personal observation, I think it is. We know we're selecting people Because I think the predominant characteristic we're looking for is caregivers. Right, and there is. We're gonna use this turn, you know, but there's the positive and the negative. Every great Characteristic gifting that a person has, there's a flip side to it that can be Harmful or toxic in certain types of situations. Yeah, same is true, by the way, like with very bold, risk-taking leaders, both types of leaders. They have a blindside and we need to have a balanced team, right. So? But what we're saying here is there's maybe an imbalance towards the more conservative, risk-adverse, very, very, very care caring caretaker, but they're not taking risks.
Speaker 2:I Well we're conservative Lutherans, jack, and I'm not saying this tongue in cheek Conserve. We want to conserve the parts of us that are the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is a good conservation effort, but there's this tipping point, or this turning point, that is needed when leaders look at the world not as they want it to be, but as it actually is, and we resist artificial harmony. Pat Lenshione, who's written a lot, you know, pat Lenshione, the five dysfunctions of a team, he says nowhere is a tendency toward artificial harmony more notable than in the local church. And so we let's use Christ Greenfield and what we're walking through right now as an example.
Speaker 2:Jack, we got some data that a giving trend for our first quarter was about 6% behind what our 2.4, 2.9 million budget is as a ministry. Okay, so we're trending in a direction, if that goes year over year, that we're between 200, you're great, you're a master at projections at $200 to $400,000 shortfall. And so, instead of waiting until the end of the year or maybe two years, jack, and we keep things from the congregation right.
Speaker 1:I mean, that would be an option, that would be, an option to do.
Speaker 3:You know, I don't think it's a wise option Because that is a difficult conversation and if your greatest fear is offending people and not rocking the boat you do not want, you are not inclined necessarily to go into that conversation boldly. But it does require what we would call a difficult conversation. We have to lean into a difficult topic and be transparent with the congregation and actually provide potential solutions here. Right, exactly.
Speaker 2:Exactly and we're just honest with the data and we know the Lord owns a cattle on a thousand hills. He's been the story. He's been faithful in the past. He's not going to let us down now. The future probably will be riddled with. It will be riddled with struggle and trial and loss, dreams that don't come to full fruition. But again it goes down to the Lord, who holds us in all things in the palm of his hands and, as you said, earlier in some of our own conversations.
Speaker 3:you know when a when a ministry is at its healthiness, healthiest, satan comes in to steal, rob and destroy, right To divide, and so you can expect, if you're doing great things as a ministry, to have to deal with some really, really, really tough issues, including some really gut wrenching issues. Absolutely that is par for the course. So I would say that that is something that you know. If you want to ask yourself the question is my ministry healthy If you're not dealing with some really, really, really tough issues, the answer is probably no Right.
Speaker 2:There's artificial.
Speaker 3:You're not leaning into things that you're being called to lean into right.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep. Artificial harmony and how many churches right now are living with a sense of artificial harmony? There's a few. I like looking at this, this graph, because it it mentions congregations who worship between a thousand to 500. Christ Greenfield would fall in that 1000 plus to 500. And then at the bottom, it lists congregations that worship between 29 and one person per week and, going back to 2002, on the 1000 plus to 500, we had 306 congregations in that category. In 2022, 84. So that's quite a bit of a decline. Any understanding, and I don't know that all that is bad. By the way, I Think a lot of times that people would look at us and say all growth is good. No, maybe there's a, maybe there's a pruning and refining, and maybe some of these congregations had Lost their way and, and I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't know that I would have seen that much of a statistical drop. We're talking about, over a period of 20 years, of 72 percent decline in what we would call large churches. I mean, I don't think it's good. No, I don't think it's good. And the overall number of congregations has not changed. And so what this just you know what the data is showing is that congregations are contracting in size.
Speaker 3:They are they are declining Some of those churches. As they decline, they're gonna cease to operate. They may limp along for Honestly longer, probably, than they should With the resources that they have. There will be fewer and fewer churches that can afford to hire full-time staff and full-time pastors.
Speaker 2:That's a fact. Let me give you the numbers at the bottom of the graph. So churches worshiping 29 to 1, 439 back in 2002, which that's a remarkably low number at that point, like we were pretty, pretty healthy right to today. 1442 congregations and a congregation worshiping 29 or less, like you said, can't afford a full-time pastor, and here's been one of our main calls. Is why our leaders not talking about the need for bivocational or co-vocational Word and sacrament leaders for those ministries? I don't, I don't really get that.
Speaker 3:So let's get real here, because a church that's in the size of you know, between 29 and 1, we would call that a house church. You know you can, you could, in most cases you could fit everybody in a, in a decent size house and you have a worship service in there, and so that is the type of congregation where, like, the very, very best way to serve that type of congregation is with somebody who's working by vocationally they probably have Something close to a full-time job and then they're also working to find a very, very inexpensive way to gather people and give them word and sacrament.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that that would do that well, and that could grow into something bigger, right, but?
Speaker 3:this, this. This requires, like a radical Rethinking of how we're raising up ministry workers here, because we do not have a large pool of people that could serve those types of churches right now. We have not created the systems to do that. There is not because, as you said here, the number for 1400 of what we would call Micro or house-sized churches. We do not have 1400 people that could work by vocationally to serve these churches. We could. That's something that could happen if we chose to have a strategy and systems around that, and there's nothing Theologically wrong with doing that and it is an urgent strategic need, and yet it's not been addressed.
Speaker 2:No, tim, I've been on the set apart to serve Gatherings and and it was a good presentation, number of number of wonderful people that were on there sharing, and there was no conversation about by vocation or co-vocational. It was all about the, the next generation, and that's a good conversation to have. But I don't know if these congregations have that long before the lights turn out and the resources then go to district and or Senate see is now.
Speaker 2:The urgency is absolutely now, because let me give you the middle data. This is fascinating Conrogations worshiping between 50 and 99, so they're right on the edge of maybe being able to afford one full-time worker. That number has largely remained the same. It was 1537, so 1537, and today about 150 more congregations are in that category 1683. There's some urgency for those Conrogations. Which way are they going to go? Are they gonna drop drop down? Innovation, adaptive leadership, change, and we got.
Speaker 2:There's a handful of these congregations that are in in the Phoenix Valley right now, mm-hmm, and, and we want to. We want to have an impact on, on helping them see their community, reach new people with the gospel, care for families, meet felt needs, all of that. That is the you all sees and I think that that needs to be the bread and butter of any organization that's trying to serve the wider church. In the Lutheran Church, missouri Senate is trying to care for the pastors, and many of them, like I say, avoidance and accommodation, avoidance of conflict. So these are behaviors, jack.
Speaker 2:This is why I love the Harrison behavioral assessment behaviors that can be learned, appropriate risks and be taken. Small and small challenges can be Walkthrough and then they build that resilience, that that kind of persevering skin. Oh, it didn't go as bad. Even if it was a failure, I learned something and the church isn't closing down. We're still on mission, my congregation still loves me. I mean, these are the types of conversations that we need to be having with a lot of, a lot of leaders. Anything Unique that you think about, that kind of middle point data where we've not changed in the 99 to 50 member category.
Speaker 3:I think it's interesting that that number hasn't changed. So if you look at the different, if you look at the different buckets, the different tranches of church sizes, the micro church, the tiny, tiny, tiny little church, the number of those has blown up, it's gone. I would call it exponential growth in those. Likewise, there's been a precipitous decline in very, very large churches and then there's been a stable number of what I would call small Congregational churches, as you said, kind of like bumping up at the around a hundred you know, 50 to 100 Barely. I would say a church that size barely can handle, you know, a full-time pastor if they're not paying them super well. That seems to be the model that if you kind of infer, look at 20 years, that's the area that we've been able to sustain and one could kind of back back into that and say, well, that's the model we're designed for. Our seminaries, you know, are most likely Equipping people to come out and serve and be the sole pastor of a very small congregation, and that's what they're, that's kind of what they are Designed to do. They're not designing people to go out and serve in big team ministries which would be required for the big, you know, thousand plus church. You're gonna have sometimes a dozen people on staff and you're gonna have to have unique leadership skills and operational skills and all that kind of stuff and you're not equipping people to work by vocationally. So you have basically the one path. That's probably you could say, okay, we probably do a good job equipping people for that one Trunch of church sizes and we don't really address the, the the large churches, which is one reason why I would say that that's declining and we're not really doing anything to address the thing that's emerging, which is the micro church size.
Speaker 3:Now, this is this is my area of challenge. I think you have to address both. You have to have a system that addresses all three. You have to Realistically deal with it's gonna be always gonna be that kind of size of church the 50 to 100 where they can have one person on staff, maybe a secretary if they're lucky.
Speaker 3:And I do believe honestly that there is a role for large churches. There's certain things that large, big and I call it mega church-sized congregations can do creatively and with their resources that a tiny little church can't do. I think that we need to have churches of all different sizes. So the decline of that is concerning to me, not saying that it's better, but I think that the diversity of church sizes is very healthy for a large national church body.
Speaker 3:The thing that is absolutely missing is how we're addressing the micro churches. Absolutely, if we could think, okay, if there's 1400, 1500 micro churches, if we really really, really, really went all in on a strategy to provide people bivocational training and, you know, inexpensive, let's call it an online MDiv, where you can do it from home and then serve your local tiny community, a certain number of those are going to blow up. A certain number of those, you know you could say just the law of statistics is a certain percentage of those are going to become. They're going to grow, they're going to become self-sufficient. They're going to, you know, in some cases grow to become those very large congregations out there. So that's kind of where we have to start to think entrepreneurial about pastoral formation and staff formation in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Partnerships, why the United Leadership Collective exists. We really believe that we're better together, all different sizes of churches and all different types of leaders listening to one another and caring for one another, providing relational safety for one another, in the adaptive change that is needed today, because the trajectory does not necessarily look good. Churches worshiping between 199, so 200 to 100 has gone from 16, over 1600 churches down to less than 1,929. So the churches that are moving up on this we're not seeing a lot of growth there, jack. So the urgency is now, not later, not the next generation, and we're praying for those who are in positions of influence pastoral formation, committee, seminary presidents, those who are on the respective Board of Regents for these institutions, as well as those who are at the International Center in the LCMS, to be honest with where we're at and hopefully provide adaptive solutions that put the needs of the local church first and foremost. All of those institutions and LCMS Inc itself exist for the local church and man. If I were in a district president role, if I were in a leadership role the highest level seminary I would look at these numbers and this would be troubling to my spirit. And if I were holding on to things very, very tightly and not looking at adaptive change. Man, that would be troubling to my spirit.
Speaker 2:So I pray this is a call for love and care for one another and for those who can make adaptive change to do so, and those of us that are trying at the local level, and the Lord is moving in beautiful ways. We're not compromising our Lutheran Church, missouri Synod doctrine, the Lutheran Confessions, and we're partnering to raise up many, many Bible-cational and co-vocational leaders. Right now, in our partnership with Luther House of Study, I've been challenged by a number of not a number a couple pastors saying why are you partnering with the Luther House of Studies? They ordain women, they're not LCMS. On the one hand, we're praying for LCMS leaders to come to the fore and they're providing service for many LCMC congregations Because it's a network model. Many, many of those congregations are not ordaining women.
Speaker 3:Some are, so as the Luther House folks so a little more conservative view on that. And it's permitted within their system. It's permitted?
Speaker 2:Exactly? And what is the Lord doing from a data perspective? Jack in the LCMC, this is a story we should probably observe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the same period of time where we've noticed a large decline in church sizes, we've also seen a large growth in the number of congregations in the LCMC. So about 20 years ago they kind of got formed. Around the turn of the millennium they were started with about a dozen Lutheran churches and at this point right now, the last report they put on their website there are now consists of 790 congregations in the US and another 200 that they're affiliated with internationally. So there's been a big expansion. Now, To be fair, a large number of those churches are congregations that have dropped out of the ELCA.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say that.
Speaker 3:Not entirely those types of churches. There have been church starts. They talk openly about the process of church planting on their website and talk about the different models that they use to plant churches, so they're leaning heavily into it. And we see that their seminary, which is the Luther House of Study, is bursting at the seams. They are growing rapidly.
Speaker 3:There is so some of you may not know a partnership that does exist between the Luther House of Study and the ULC, even while we remain passionately LCMS, where, as it is developing right now in this partnership, it looks like every new seminarian is gonna be going through ULC content training. So they're handling kind of the theological development and we are kind of now handling the leadership development side of their students and every single student that's going through their system is going to be taught using our content. So it's kind of exciting for them. I would hope that you know, our own Synod could have an open hand and actually think about the benefit of doing a similar type of partnership. I think it would be fantastic, very, very winsome and kind of actually very specifically address the concerns that we're seeing in the data.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a very unique time to be a part of the church and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and for the no one here knows my. Only God knows my motivation and I can say with I've said this numerous times my motivation is not to tear down. Our motivation is not to tear down. With the Lord has built up over the last almost 200 years. It really is to build up, and for that to happen, adaptive change is going to be necessary. It's a good day. Go on and make it a great day. This is a bonus episode of Lead Time. Sharon is caring. Please like, subscribe, comment wherever it is that you take this in, and we promise to have hopefully compelling and challenging conversations as we steward these days in anticipation of that great and glorious day, jesus returning. May he find us faithful as his people. Thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theunitel leadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.