Lead Time
Lead Time
"The Ends of the LCMS” with Pastor Joe Beran
Get ready for a compelling discussion with Pastor Joe Beran as we journey into the heart of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS). We're cracking open the pages of Pastor Joe's new book, The Ends of the LCMS, as we delve into the modern challenges and transformational power of faith. This podcast is an exploration into the changing role of pastors and the profound impact of societal attitudes towards belief in God and organized religion on the LCMS.
Get Joe's new book here!!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CKX14C9H/ref=x_gr_bb_kindle?caller=Goodreads&tag=x_gr_bb_kindle-20
Join the Lead Time Newsletter! (Weekly Updates and Upcoming Episodes)
https://www.uniteleadership.org/lead-time-podcast#newsletter
Visit uniteleadership.org
Leigh Time is a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective, hosted by Tim Allman and Jack Calliberg. The ULC envisions the future in which all congregations fully equip the priesthood of all 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 Leigh Time, tim Allman, here with Jack Calliberg. Today we have the awesome opportunity and I pray as we dig into this conversation. The joy and love and peace of the Prince of Peace, jesus, is resting on your heart as we get to chat with my like second or third cousin. Right, joe, we go back. Right, our families go back. Joe, barron was a vicar here and I rediscovered you. You're a cousin of mine, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you are the only person in the LCMS that really relate to you and your father and like it's yeah, it's like second cousins or something like that, I thought I didn't have any pastors in my family. And then I learned yeah, second cousins.
Speaker 4:Tim, I thought if you went to the level of third cousin, that that makes you related to all the pastors here. Does that that's?
Speaker 2:a fact. Well, I'm related to so many people in the LCMS. Anyway, Pastor Joe Barron is a pastor at Bethlehem Lutheran in Santa Clarita, california, and a contributing partner, blogger, vlogger with the ULC, and he also the reason we're having this conversation today is the author of a brand new book coming out. The End of the LCMS, okay, wow, that's a good one.
Speaker 3:It just came out in a few. This is coming out November 14th. It just came out, just dropped in Amazon today, so grab it.
Speaker 2:Seriously, nails, yeah, ends of the LCMS. So the end of the LCMS, yeah, with an S. I thought that was a typo for a sec.
Speaker 3:No, no, no it's intentional. It's an intentional pun on the word ends yeah.
Speaker 2:I get it Ends of the LCMS, reacting to the diagnosis of a post-Christian America and recovering and recovering. So what inspired you, joe, to write this book?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a few different things. So we've had prior conversations before on diving into stats of the LCMS and where it's at and where it looks like it's trending going into the future. But then there's kind of personal reasons too where, anecdotally, I talked with a lot of guys that I graduated with and also pastors that serve around me, and especially as we kind of left COVID and are in this new season of ministry, especially if you talk to some of veteran pastors out there, like they will tell you doing ministry nowadays is just different, right, the way people treat the church, the way people treat Christianity, these things have very much changed. This is culturally the case and so that, combined with just a heart for our church body and wanting to start an open conversation about a difficult topic, I thought could be a healthy practice to just put it out there in book form and see what people think of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. How do you say it's different today? Give me the top two or three reasons that some of our retired guys have said, as they look at what's going on at the local level, it's different.
Speaker 3:So part of it is just the authority of the church and the credibility of the church just wider right. Like I've talked to pastors that are like man, there's people I thought were really faithful leaders but for some reason in the last two or three years, like they've just totally disconnected. There's a lot more skepticism around the church and pastors in society at large. I've talked to pastors, great confessional brothers, who like when they go and do shut-in visits and they're wearing their clerical collar, they will get backhanded comments from people just calling them names and things like that. So the church's position in society has just kind of changed. Where there's a lot less credibility with it. People are not likely to see you as kind of a key leader in society. They're a lot more likely to be skeptical and to say, okay, is this somebody just trying to get people's money for income? Or I'm not sure about what the church is all about and what it has to offer. And so, yeah, the heart of the book is to say, okay, if we as the LCMS and even Lutheranism in general, you look at like going back 500 years ago, here is a culture where everybody really believes that there is a God. Everybody kind of generally holds to this Catholic sort of a faith and this is what we were grounded and founded out of, even in American history, like, yeah, you have some deistic tendencies with the founding fathers, but there's still this general belief that, yeah, there is a God, religion is generally a net positive thing, and those have been lost. And as those have been lost, at the same time we're seeing our church body kind of start to shrink a little bit. And so there's all of these kind of consequences of, okay, we built these systems up out of times where these were kind of givens that, oh, yeah, people believe in God and this is the way that the culture goes and there's just no longer the case anymore. And so the book's kind of meant to be a conversation that says, okay, let's look at the reality of some of the effects that that's had on us as the LCMS. What does it mean for our institutions like our colleges, our seminaries, our churches, the amount of pastors we have, the amount of people we have worshiping with us? And then let's talk about some different things going forward.
Speaker 3:And the reason I call it a diagnosis and recovery is I use a metaphor throughout of my own struggle with rheumatoid arthritis.
Speaker 3:So back when I was in seminary, I had this weird thing happen where, like I would just have these weird pains, like I would be writing on tests and my hands would cramp up, or I would be walking in the morning and like I'd just start limping and I'd have no idea why it just kept getting worse and worse and worse until finally I went to a doctor and they said, oh yeah, like this is why this is happening.
Speaker 3:You have rheumatoid arthritis and because of that, it means your immune system is attacking the joints in your body and this isn't something that we have a cure for at this point in time. But you could take this medication or you can do these rehab and muscle strengthening things and it should be able to help. And as I talked with different pastors and as I had conversations about kind of this post-Christian transition, I kind of saw light bulbs go off where people say, oh okay, this is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm feeling. And then the second half is saying can we have a conversation on what it could mean for different institutions moving forward?
Speaker 4:Yeah, once you get a diagnosis, then actually, then you have an option, a possibility of treatment, right Anywhere, from treating to curing, depending on what it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the other part of the metaphor that I like too is, at the end of the day, if I wanted to, after I got my diagnosis, I could have said you know, I'm just gonna pray that things change and do absolutely nothing different. And that's like I could have done that. And similarly, like as a church body, we can say, hey, we're just gonna keep doing everything the way we've been doing it and pray that things are different. And that's a way we can go. But I don't want us to pretend like that's the only way when there's other options out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amen. You know, in terms of cultural transition, you know I think there's a flywheel effect that I think we're seeing, the negative flywheel effect where things are kind of in the background. You know, I remember hearing lamenting about prayer being taken out of schools, for instance. You know public schools and kind of thinking I don't know why these people this is like early on in ministry, this is 15 years ago I don't know why these kind of old timers are so frustrated about that. But there were these markers, these indicators, these diagnoses that our culture was transitioning. And then I think the flywheel just got put on overdrive negatively when COVID came. And now, you know, we're walking right alongside. Theologically, we are pulled into the political polarization of the day and I really believe the LCMS, the best parts of who we are, specifically our doctrine, should call us to the tension-filled, law-gospel-centered, two kinds of righteousness-centered conversations. That is the ticket for us and the security that comes in being a baptized follower of Jesus. Anything more to say about that kind of negative flywheel, joe, historically, yeah, yeah, no, there's.
Speaker 3:So I don't want to resummarize the book, but I will say that there's in the first chapter. I quote a book called Apologetics at the Cross. That kind of speaks I think is really helpful if you are a church leader in understanding the paradigms that a lot of like parishioners or people outside of the church have for making sense of themselves. Another book that I'm sad didn't come out until recently because I would have loved to have dove into it a little more in my own book that I'm going through is the de-churching of America. I believe it's called, and one of the things they point out is like, if you think back to even coming out of the Second World War culturally, like we enter into the Cold War with Russia and part of what it means to be an American at that point of time is to be a Christian right, you have the Godless commies and we are Christian America. That's going in 50s, 60s. All of a sudden you get in God we trust on our coins and everything.
Speaker 3:And I think you've nailed it with your Lutheran tension paradigm, because you think of who we are as Lutherans and like we would have some discomfort of like prayer in public schools, because what does that mean? Like it means that the Muslim is praying next to the Christian, pretending they're praying to the same God. Like no, that's silly. But at the same time, you do see these kind of wider movements where and this is the metaphor that struck me as I was thinking about it in the book like in the 1920s, the church had so much cultural power even though we would disagree with this idea as Lutherans that they were able to get blue laws passed. Like we have the ban alcohol, something that is cherished by the culture. And then, 100 years later, here we are and you talk to pastors and one of their biggest gripes is like is like families have youth sports on Sundays and they're not going to the church because of youth sports. It's like what a difference in prioritization that is yeah.
Speaker 4:Joe. So there's a really cool research document out there. Have we talked to you about the, the Don ratio? Have you heard about that? Yeah, so this isn't a Lutheran initiative per se, but it was sort of like a inter-church kind of initiative about church planting and missionary work, and they did a lot of research, you know, because we see that Christianity, while it might be in decline in the US, is actually blowing up in other parts of the world, like the global south, and they did some research on you know what does it take? What does it take for the tipping point? What is the tipping point where Christianity becomes normative and that's really kind of what we're talking about is America used to be a place where Christianity was normative and it is now much, you know, depending on what region you are much less so that it's normative.
Speaker 4:And what they discovered is that there was a ratio of preachers to the local population. Yeah, so the idea was how do you saturate a population with people who can preach? And they discovered that if they could saturate a region with a ratio of one to 500. One competent preacher for 500 people in an area that that was what was necessary for Christianity to become the normative belief system in an area I've talked about that in our local region.
Speaker 4:We're in the Phoenix metro area, right, and if I do the math for the Phoenix metro area, we need probably 12,500 people that can preach the gospel and if you actually look online at how many churches there are, there's probably 1200 churches, so there's a massive. You know you can celebrate the fact that there's some big mega churches out there, but in the reality there is a massive deficit of people who are preaching the gospel and I think that ratio gets us to rethink the urgency of like what is actually our strategy for sharing the gospel to a nation, what I would call a neo-pagan nation. Right now, the biggest mission field you know that you said in your book the third largest mission field in the world right now is the United States.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's so much I want to hit on there because that was so good. So, as I was doing research for the book early on, one of the things that I've learned and I was talking with there's a guy who considers himself to be like a missionary to LA, specifically Santa Clarita. That embodies with and you know, we don't theologically ground everything so we get on good conversations. But one thing that is interesting is he has like an uncle who was like a pastoral trainer and developer overseas in the Philippines and like if you look globally at the wider church this is something I've heard. I'd love to if anybody has data, please find a way to send it to me on this that over and above time after time, what you see is that churches and church bodies don't tend to expand or grow larger unless you have an oversaturation of leaders, unless you have enough leaders where all the churches are taken care of and there are some leaders that are therefore going to go out and multiply and so like sometimes that's you look at Makana, yesu and that's done through like equipping and different giftedness.
Speaker 3:But one thing that I was struck by in the conversation with this young leaders is uncle reached a conclusion that I've kind of wondered about which is this caution of? In the West we love really highly intellectually robust pastors, which isn't a bad like it is a good thing to have a high intelligence and a good education, but it's also a potential bottleneck for the amount of church leaders and planters and starters that you can have. And so it's one of those where for his uncle, he reached a point where he was just like it kept him up at night because he was wondering are we in the West exporting systems of pastoral development and training? That is actually slowing down the church overseas, where they would look at different church bodies that they would partner with and after they would partner with them because they would say, okay, now adopt our system of education. Then all of a sudden those church bodies would just start to shrink.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't go into that as much in the book because that's a global church thing.
Speaker 3:But it's one of those where it's a question worth asking and then, kind of similarly, that's yeah, are there different ways that we can consider both keeping integrity this is we do cover in the book that has both integrity to intellectual robustness and high requirements, while at the same time trying to meet needs for potential bivocational churches?
Speaker 4:And let's be clear here, I want to say kind of a bold statement right now we have models for pastoral formation. Those models you said this in your book I 100% agree they are not prescribed by Scripture. There's something that's been devised by human wisdom because we think that, at least for a season in history, this was a really great way of doing that, so that freedom exists to explore different models for pastoral formation, all while at the same time saying we want to teach people what is the truth of Scripture and equip them to preach that to a community. There is incredible freedom and as a church body the LCMS we are in Pulpit and Alternative Fellowship with other church bodies that do pastoral formation differently while at the same time holding to much of the almost identical confessional basis of us.
Speaker 4:One classic example is the ALC. So the ALC is a church body that is, a confessional Lutheran church body. They raise up their pastors locally using an online MDiv program, and you want to guess where the headquarters of their online seminary is located. Is it in Canada? No, it's actually located at Concordia, fort Wayne, oh wow, yeah, interesting.
Speaker 4:So it's an online MDiv program. All of their seminarians are raised up in an online MDiv program. They share virtually identical confessional basis to the LCMS. Most of their pastors vicar in the LCMS.
Speaker 3:Yeah, interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is fascinating. Let's go into the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod opportunity for growth. What do you say to someone, Joe, who says, well, if the Synod is declining, churches are closing and things are heading in a downward direction Overall, does it really matter as much if we have fewer pastors, teachers, directors of Christian education? How do you lovingly respond to that person, Because I have heard that statement.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, first off, I would want to correct a little bit of that question because actually our schools are growing and not having enough teachers in DCEs for growing schools and churches is a huge flaw. If you talk to a lot of our principals or people at these schools, they need good, solid Lutheran teachers and there doesn't seem to be that we're raising up enough of them. What's happened culturally is, even though there's skepticism around the church wider, they're throughout COVID and different things. People have seen different ways that our public schools are operating and have said I want something different and something else, and we have a lot of possible.
Speaker 4:They're even more skeptical of the public school. Yeah, yeah, and so our.
Speaker 3:Lutheran schools are actually doing wonderful and are great and missional opportunities for different churches, and so that need is already there.
Speaker 3:But for pastors, and specifically when you think of churches, I would go back to a little bit of what we expressed earlier.
Speaker 3:As you look historically, it seems as if the need over and over is going to be for church planters and people raising up and starting new things, and what generally tends to happen is we have so many calls currently with our different churches that the overwhelming amount of our seminarians are always going to head to your traditional route, because it's not only that there is a lot of church open for them, but they get to really kind of have their choice.
Speaker 3:They get to choose where they want to go, now more than ever before. And so there's that basis of okay, we're not doing as many plans in these things because of us, but even just from a confessional basis Like this is what really makes me sad is like if you recognize what we believe about the Lord's Supper and what it is, and like the importance of having it, like you would think you would want a pastor at every church so someone can rightly hear the word and receive the Lord's Supper, and you think that kind of a thing, if church is not having it, would keep you up at night a little bit yeah it should it should.
Speaker 4:Even as we have our peace in the Lord. Right Joe, an interesting observation. This is something I've recently learned about the history of the LCMS in the early days, and I don't know how long this was a requirement, but in the early days of the LCMS you were required to have a school if you wanted to have a charter as a church. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 3:I've heard that. Yeah, where that was like this is so important to who we are fundamentally that we are going to make this a part of membership. That's really cool yeah.
Speaker 2:I love, joe, how you look at culture and how you looked at unemployment rates in the United States as compared to the unemployment rate found in many churches and pulpits. What did you find in that parallel between unemployment rate?
Speaker 3:So this came out of something at convention that I hadn't heard before. That was really helpful to me. This is why conversation with people that disagree with us is so important and so valuable, because the idea that I heard at convention this last summer was that, hey, you need a certain amount of churches that are calling pastors. The reason why is, if every single church has a pastor and let's say you have a pastor that needs a call somewhere else or for some reason or another, that there needs to be a shift, that happens, well then they would still be stuck, and especially if it's some sort of unhealthy dynamic, that district president would just be out of luck. They couldn't make things work, and so that kind of sparked my mind a little bit, because it reminds me of unemployment rates.
Speaker 3:But if you think about it, that's the idea economically of unemployment is really similar to that where in a healthy economy, it's not 0% unemployment Most economists will argue it's somewhere between like 2% to 5% unemployment in a healthy economy that way.
Speaker 3:And so I— was curious about this and I said, okay, well, if you know, like four percent will take a higher number is kind of ideal unemployment. And I do the math on this in my book where are we at when it comes to the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate currently? Right now, we're not projecting into the future and if you take, if you assume there's about 5900 calls and you can shrink the base and it would only make my case better and you take what the last stats that were given by the council of presidents was, you end up at about, I think it's like 9.1 9.2 percent of our churches that would be, you know, unemployed, that don't have a pastor currently, which, economically, that would put us at either the great recession in 2007, 2008 or in the midst of covid. So neither of those were really peak, healthy times that way yeah, yeah, there's definitely.
Speaker 2:There's definitely a need for innovation to meet this, this bottleneck that we find ourselves in right now. Let's talk about the metaphor of bottlenecks, especially in relation to 1st Timothy and Titus, and I'm going to bring a direct quote from your book, a specific ministry program, because SMP was put together as one opportunity for us to solve our church worker formation bottlenecks. Here's a direct quote specific ministry program on Concordia Seminary. St Louis website spells this truth out beautifully. You write, joe, scripture provides several models and, more importantly, specific criteria for pastoral ministry from 1st Timothy, chapter 3 but this is from the seminary now but it does not specify any particular mode, pattern or length of pastoral preparation. The New Testament model of raising up local elders, already proven for spiritual maturity and leadership, is actually much closer to the non-residential models than the sending of potential candidates off to a centralized location for pastoral formation and academic education. So here's my comment. It's almost like we forgot we wrote this on the seminary website. Any response to that, joe?
Speaker 3:yeah, I. So in the second half of the book I kind of in I don't just do this with pastoral formation look at kind of several different issues that that we need to address and look at as a church body. That one of the biggest takeaways actually from book is this is pastoral formations big, but there's actually a couple that are even bigger in my mind, but we'll get to that in a little bit. But I it was really kind of eye opening to me where it's like, yeah, we recognize scripturally, we, we do have some leeway and some freedom in this. It really comes down to a question of what we're comfortable with.
Speaker 3:I. I use the framework in the book of economic bottlenecks where in economics it's, it's an idea of whenever you have supply and demand within an industry and something artificially cuts the supply down, it's a bottleneck that's introduced to the market. So, for example, um, electricians in certain states there's kind of a question of should electricians be certified and have certifications that make them legitimate, or should we just let them kind of run around free reign and do what they want? And so if you do a state by state analysis, because local cities will have different things, but if you do a state by state comparison. This is a study that came out from, I think, like the, the 70s and 80s, that is, state by state comparisons of states that had zero requirements for entry for being an electrician statewide and states that had some requirements of being an electrician, whether it be different testing classes, etc. Um, what you found is that the difference didn't seem that much at first on paper, right like the states with requirements, the electricians cost a little more. It was a little bit longer of a wait time in those states, until you look at the stat of, uh, electric, electricity related deaths. And what they found is that, um, the unintended consequence it seemed to be that in these states where they have the additional requirements, um, that there would be more of a wait time for electricians. And so what would happen? And people would essentially say, well, I can't wait three days for an electrician. You know there's problems. Right now I have a buddy who I think can maybe step up and do it, and so it encourages people to do dangerous things himself and you'd end up having more accidents, more house fires from shoddy work and these sorts of things.
Speaker 3:And I think um kind of similarly within the LCMS, as we see a shortage of pastures. I think this is where some of the frustration in the back and forth comes, with um, the, the deacon program or these sorts of things, where for a number of churches, they're in settings where they can't figure out how to get a pastor, whether it be like in where I'm at, in high cost of living or for other reasons, and like they want somebody to preach the word and they want to be able to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and so for some churches they they saw the, the deacon thing as a route to that. Now we decided in convention we're not comfortable with that. We want our you know, well trained, well formed pastors. But as long as we have bottlenecks to ministry, we got to recognize there might be some unintended consequences, and so, as we look at pastoral formation, one of our questions should be how do we remove these bottlenecks? What are we comfortable changing and what aren't we comfortable changing?
Speaker 4:because there's economic ones, there's scholastic ones, there's temporal ones, there's literal movement ones and, yeah, so one unintended consequence is well you know, if the LCMS is not going to serve us with pastors, maybe I just have to go to another church body right.
Speaker 3:so it's so sad that you mentioned and yeah, so sad you mentioned that because that was.
Speaker 3:I've had this happen to me where we have a there's an LCMC church across town.
Speaker 3:We are not in Ulterpult, the fellowship, but you know I try and meet the local pastors and know them in town and during my time here they have had two different pastors there that are in their like late 20s and early 30s, both of which came from the LCMS and wanted distance digital training that was not offered by the LCMS. One of them went to St Louis for a year, was kind of like overwhelmed a little bit and said I'm going to take some time and just do an internship at a church and then after that internship fell in love with the girl with an amazing job that they weren't kind of prepared to leave as he entered into ministry and so now he's at a point where he just serves the church across the town that's an LCMC church, because he didn't want to make the move that way. And then another young man that kind of had a similar story. So there are some people for whom those bottlenecks for our church body is enough, where they say, oh, I can find one. That's that similar, which is kind of heartbreaking.
Speaker 2:Here's the big question, Joe. In all your research for the models and modes of training pastors, have you discovered any research that says residential education is far and away the best model for raising up pastors? I have not seen this data.
Speaker 3:Now, it's a hard question to ask because it's like what do we mean by best?
Speaker 3:model Right, so the pre-subposition built in is like I think it's a very academically robust model, like you get to study at the feet of incredible teachers who get to dive into a lot of academic issues that you otherwise might not be prepared for there's. I think the helpful thing in all of this is to recognize that every model of ministry that was within the bounds of scriptures comes with strengths and weaknesses Right, and we just have to address what those strengths and weaknesses are and we have to decide collectively, as a church body, how do we want to move forward in light of these things.
Speaker 4:We've seen the data in our partnership with Leadership Network and you know, seeing the statistics of different types of models, and what we've seen is that churches, that church bodies that are growing, congregations that are growing church bodies that are multiplying even beyond growth, like you could see exponential growth. Those church bodies, practically speaking, they put priority of leadership development at the local congregational level. They see they build into the mission statement of the local congregation a responsibility to raise up leaders. You, you, you local church, have the responsibility of raising up your staff. You, the local church, have the responsibility of raising up teams that are going to do church planting and somehow we're going to come alongside with you, we're going to equip you to do that. It may be distance learning, but you know they're expecting the local congregation to build that into their, their purpose statements.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I it's. There's also another kind of value aspect of it. Where we had an interview recently with I was like Ben Halft and the director of the CMC and Irvine, and somebody from the audience asked a question where they said, hey, I'm a little bit nervous because I I didn't know a lot about those cross cultural ministry center path and I didn't know that there are guys who are kind of learning digitally and I am afraid because I am afraid are they really absorbing the information while this is a serious concern for them.
Speaker 3:I mean really absorbing the information while they're taking their classes and juggling all these sorts of responsibilities and and the the director of the CMC kind of said it beautifully we said, actually, what we've found is that the information, the both in the confessional subscription and what they learned that way and in light of our theology and our systematics, they tend to stick better because you are living them out while you're learning them, like you are practicing what it means to apply them to ministry while you're learning them In seminary. You have an opportunity for that at your fieldwork church, but it can be a little bit tricky sometimes, like I know, when I was going there I was one of three workers at a fieldwork church, so like, sometimes, even like like leading a Bible study would be like a once a month thing. So there wasn't always kind of quite that same opportunity that way. But yeah, it's one of those where.
Speaker 3:The other thing I would kind of reply to that I wish I could have talked to that brother afterward is, if that is, our main concern is, is, you know, making sure that those things that we learned that are good, right and true, and seminary are really staying with us. My hope would be that that same group would have an equal passion for continuing education, then, and making sure because, like you know, there's some guys that they've been out of the seminary 40, 50, maybe 60 years and I don't know how well everything that they've learned is stuck that way. But maybe also, instead of having kind of this hesitation of do they remember the right things, there could be some other questions about hey, are they formed properly? How do we make sure they have the right character and competencies?
Speaker 4:And yeah, yeah, we're intimately aware of the model that LCMC is using to raise up their, their pastors, and although it is an online program, it is extremely robust and the expectation of the students is that they have to have to watch lectures and do a tremendous amount of reading and, you know, write essays and all you know, write papers and all that kind of stuff, and then they meet in class once a week in the class that they're enrolled in, and every student is expected to talk about either whatever questions, whatever observations, what are the aha moments? All you know the insights that they've seen on that, and it's a very, very interactive conversation, and so I don't see anything being lost. If anything, it's just opening the door for way more people to play in the sandbox.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is good. We talk about formation a lot on lead time and and the need for new models. I don't think that is necessarily the core concern, though.
Speaker 2:I really believe the core concern is this balance between ecclesiology and missiology. I go back to our president, our president, Michael Gibson, and if you get Christology, Missiology and ecclesiology out of order, you're going to really, really struggle. And so, Joe, how do we learn to balance ecclesiology and missiology? I would say we're aligned in the LCMS, Christologically, I pray. But then how do we balance ecclesiology and missiology? And really the core question should we focus more on church revitalization or church planting? Thoughts there, Joe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Super good question.
Speaker 3:I go on this a little bit on the second half of my book, although I want to like ecclesiology is a very, very loaded term, as you guys know because it like it encompasses so much right, and so when I talk about ecclesiology in the book, I narrow the definition a little bit to kind of this question of how do we make sure that there's correct practice and praxis and there's sort of a good uniformity in the right places when it comes to our doctrine lived out along with our missiology? And I talk a little bit about how, in a very Christian culture, you're going to tend a little bit more to prioritizing ecclesiology when you have a more Christian context because you have more nuance in that. Right, it's like you have to differentiate yourself from the Baptist next door who have some things wrong, and the Methodist next door have some things wrong. But as we move into an increasingly more secular post-Christian society, there needs to be a little bit of not just a shift but a doubling down on both ends, and what I mean by that is we need to clean up our ecclesiology and make sure that, yeah, what we are saying communicating, doing is right that way, but also that we have a healthy leaning on what it means to effectively communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ into the culture around us, because this is one of the generational differences that I've heard I think Tim Keller talks about this Is that, like, if you go back into the 80s and 90s and kind of my parents' generation, there's this core belief that most people have.
Speaker 3:That is a question of like, how do I know that I'm a good person, how do I know that? Like, maybe you've heard this before from people in that generation like, how do I know if I'm going to go to heaven or hell? And if you talk to people in my generation, that is off their radar. Man, like the idea of like, oh, they're not fully
Speaker 3:convinced, and so that changes the paradigm a little bit for how we communicate the law and the gospel effectively and what it means to kind of speak to those different areas and the question of church revitalization and church planning, I would say it's it's a both and not either or.
Speaker 3:But I will also say this that my anecdotal conversations with people has led me to believe that church planting both of them are very difficult. I will say this both of them in our culture nowadays very, very difficult. Church planting tends to be a little bit more effective just because there's some of the baggage that comes sometimes with church revitalization. While it is a good, right and necessary thing that it just takes a lot of maturity to deal with that when you just say, hey, instead of saying I'm gonna take this thing that isn't working and try and make it work, as opposed to hey, let's just start something new. It's a very different kind of a foundation that way. So they're both good, they're both beautiful and necessary, but I think leaning into church planting could be a little more helpful between the two.
Speaker 4:And some church revitalizations really are probably the most effective when you think of them, as we're kind of doing something new here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, every plant is working.
Speaker 4:We're gonna honor our history, but we're gonna start with a clean slate, and I've seen that as well.
Speaker 2:Amen, adaptive change is going to be needed, doing a thing within a thing. If you wanna change culture, you always start a thing within a thing and that's very hard for existing churches to do, but it's absolutely necessary and I agree with your general anecdote we're going to need more churches to reach our post-Christian era, coming down the home stretch. Here a couple closing questions what changes in your estimation, doing all this research, joe, can or should the LCMS leaders make Institutional leaders, as well as down to the grassroots pastors and teachers, dces, et cetera? What changes can and should we make that could reverse our downward numerical decline here as a denomination in 2023?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So shout out to Limonstone, who I think you're gonna have in the coming weeks, for his amazing work on the Lutheran Religious Life Survey. The biggest thing we absolutely need to address is the amount of people in our church body that we lose from birth to 21. So Limonstone's estimation is that it's possibly up to 80% are gone by the time that they reach 21 years of age, and it's just, it's not sustainable as a church body.
Speaker 3:We gotta figure out how do we better keep, retain, disciple, cataclyse our youth and anything we can do to help equip our churches in that, whether it be hey, here's some best practices, here's what we found to be effective and my proverbial I'd love to see kind of us reach out to churches that are doing really well with different sizes, because the prescription for Christ's greenfield's very different than the prescription for Bethlehem, which is a little bit smaller, to a church of 30, 40, to give, hey, here's some healthy practices that have been good in helping to equip and retain kind of younger generations. That way, because until a lot of things are secondary, until that kind of key area is addressed, but then kind of practice on the ground, without, like, I have a whole chapter dedicated to like literal next steps in these things, depending on like what area you wanna focus on as an individual leader, but as a denomination, I would say, focus there For you individually as a leader. You know your context better than I do or better than a book does. However, the needs of that context might be important, I think, even if you just started at the local level and said, hey, what if every single pastor made it their mission to say I wanna try and raise up the pastor who replaces me, Like all of a sudden, we'd have a lot more kind of promise for future generations.
Speaker 3:I think that's the heart of Set Apart to serve that way. But yeah, there's all sorts of different ways, whether it be if you're facing different financial struggles as a congregation or you are kind of losing your youth that you can address those things or take kind of basic steps to speaking to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are gonna have Limon Stone on here soon. Any other curious insights from his research that you found helpful?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so one of the things I love in Limon Stone's research and I hope you get the chance to talk with him about it is because he had in his 2021 report he had this big kind of analysis of, like the missional confessional divide within our church body, and I love how he kind of gets this point where he says that, honestly, the divide that we should be a little more concerned about in our church body is I forgot exactly how he names it, but he says it's pretty much the divide between those who think that talking about Jesus, evangelism, discipleship are really important. To retain time.
Speaker 4:I remember that.
Speaker 3:Having the next generation, and those who say, no, I don't have anything, that I don't really have a part to play in that, because it's all God's will Actually.
Speaker 4:I remember reading that survey and there was a difference between what clergy thought and what laypeople thought. And you wanna hear is that actually laypeople felt that the issue was way, way, way more urgent than what clergy thought.
Speaker 1:Isn't that interesting.
Speaker 4:You would think it'd be the opposite.
Speaker 2:But you would hope it would be yeah.
Speaker 4:No, he found that as a kind of a. I would love to talk to him about that specific bit of data.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I don't know. So this has been so much fun, Joe, Thanks for being a partner with us and you're such a gift to the wider body of Christ. I love the way the Lord made you You're reasonable, analytical mind and for partnering with us to highlight some areas of adaptive change within the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod. For you coming on this ULC journey with us. Joe, I've said on an Umber podcast our heart is not to hurt or tear down what the Lord has built up in the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod. We really wanna build it up. Anything to say to someone who thinks, man, Joe, you've really gone off the island, gone off the reservation, You're pressing the things that are beyond you. What would you say to that person who thinks you're really, no, you're trying to hurt us.
Speaker 3:Well in the book thankfully I think I tried to get enough people that disagreed with me to read it to where I really try and gauge it as a conversation to where all throughout the book there's repeated like we can just keep doing all the things we've always been doing. It's just a question of, as the culture around us has changed, are we willing to have a conversation on things that we could contemplate doing differently or not? And so I love it sounds bad, but I would love to just have a conversation with that person and to hear out where specifically they think I've gone off the deep end in this. Because the reality is I mean, if you look at even you can do this with the history of pastoral formation, or you can do this with so many different areas of the church the church has always done so amazing at adapting and speaking the hope of the gospel in different contexts throughout the centuries. That it's the beauty of the church, is the relationships that are there to say, hey, I think you're going out of the bounds of scripture in our confessions and I wanna guide you back to them in this, and doing that in such a wonderful correctional way, while also holding that tension of communicating the gospel thoroughly and correctly as well. So I would kinda point them back to relationships, say, hey, I'm open to a phone call or chat or whatever, because I wanna hear if I've gone outside of the bounds of scripture, please let me know.
Speaker 3:I just there is a part of this book that came out of a place of just looking around, where at least I'm at in my context and I think I wrote on this in a blog post recently where it's like for where I'm at in terms of our circuit, we have eight churches, but only one of them can really afford a full-time pastor.
Speaker 3:Three of the others have to have some major kind of secondary income sources to make sure that their pastors are taken care of, and then another three or four some of them don't have pastors, other have retired or bivocational guys, and what my conversations with other pastors who have previously been on the coasts and then moved to the Midwest have told me is that many of the things that you see in the coasts are probably about like 10 or so years down the way from being the norm in the Midwest as well, and so I think that earlier we can have these conversations and say, hey, do we wanna consider doing some things different, or can we even just run an experiment and see if these sort of things work? The healthier it'll be for us.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and we're just local leaders. Jack, you're an executive director at a church, you know, and you're a student with Luther House. We're just trying to be faithful to steward the leaders that the Lord has brought to us, and we need to plant more churches in an ever-growing Phoenix area. And you're just a local leader in Southern California, in a very much a post-Christian community, trying to be faithful as well, and we're praying that those who are in positions of influence at the higher levels, are you actively listening to the call of leaders like us, trying to be faithful to the Lutheran Confessions, scripture and, at the same time, reach people with the gospel? The church exists because and for the Missio Day, the mission of God God wants to get His kids back. There are so many kids that are far from Him and we know that the power of God unto salvation, it comes through hearing the Word of God, hearing the spoken Word of God, and so we need more leaders, more churches, from house churches, micro sites to revitalization taking place in our churches, more of our large churches not seeing themselves as islands under themselves. Well, it's great to be us, but no saying hey. If the Lord has given us resources and people, we're here to share in the wider mission of Jesus.
Speaker 2:I'm praying for that in the Lutheran Church, the Missouri Synod, and I'm praying that the leaders would listen and that the conversation is I just heard you kind of closing down, joe the conversation would continue and that we would grow up into Jesus, who is our head. The ends of the LCMS is the book reacting to the diagnosis of a post-Christian America and recovering. It's ultimately a book of hope. How, joe, can people purchase this book which comes out today? You?
Speaker 3:got to get this book, baby. Yes, Head on over to Amazoncom right now. You can type in ends LCMS or ends of the LCMS, whatever You'll find it that way and seriously, if you are a leader within the LCMS that cares about this church. But I really think you'll find it to be fruitful.
Speaker 2:Amen, and the invitation is open for us too. If you want to talk, if you got diverse ideas about how the church can be restored to health, how unity in the midst of our confession can take place, we would love to have you on lead time or American Reformation Podcast. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day, share it, it's caring, like, subscribe, comment wherever it is you take in podcasts, and we promise to have provocative, challenging, jesus centered conversations, like we've just had with the one and only Reverend, joe Barron. Thanks so much, joe, thanks Jack, thanks Tim Peace.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to lead time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collector. The USC'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. Go 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.