Addressing the Perception Gap in Church Growth with Lyman Stone

Unlock the secrets behind successful church growth and discover the environments that best support adult conversions in the LCMS. This episode features Lyman Stone, a seasoned demographer and LCMS layperson, who shares the motivations and rigorous methodologies behind the recent Lutheran Religious Life Survey. From innovative survey participation techniques to the challenges of interpreting high-response data, Lyman's insights provide a comprehensive look at the current state of Lutheran congregations and the factors contributing to their vibrant community life.

Gain a deeper understanding of the role data-driven decision-making plays within LCMS institutions and the importance of benchmarking. We discuss the complexities of interpreting survey results without a comparative framework and the nuanced difference between documenting what is and prescribing what ought to be. Learn about the intricate dynamics of church planting, growth patterns, and the surprising effectiveness of traditional Lutheran practices in attracting new converts. Discover how strategic church placements can maximize visitor engagement and how sacramentarianism might be key to retention.

Explore the diverse stories of religious conversion and the impact of generational influences on contemporary Lutheran practices. We delve into the often contentious dynamics within the church, emphasizing the importance of proactive engagement and genuine care for its future. Lyman Stone's perspectives offer a fresh, data-informed look at the challenges and opportunities facing the LCMS today, making this episode a must-listen for anyone passionate about the future of their congregation.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

This is Lead Time.

Speaker 2: 0:04

Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman, here with Jack Kalberg. It's a joy to have you listener with us today as we get to have round two with our very own. Not just this is the way he refers to himself on his website and on his emails an LCMS layperson and demographer. Yes, we have the one and only Lyman Stone hanging with us today Round two with him, who just recently conducted many of you may have seen this the Lutheran Religious Life Survey, and the survey was open to anyone. Hopefully you saw it, were able to take part in it, as I was, but the results of this survey only reflect those who are LCMS members who gave their feedback. So, before we get into the data, lyman, how are you doing, brother? Thanks for hanging out with us. I'm doing very well.

Speaker 3: 0:54

It's good to be with you.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Yeah, man, all right, so let's just jump right in. Give us the background. For those who missed the first podcast, I'd encourage you to go back and listen. But just kind of your driving why around doing such a survey? Tell us that, lyman, yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:11

So I'm a demographer. I study population, what factors change population, what causes groups to shrink or grow. That's my vocation, and a number of years ago I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if I could use this vocation in a way that's more directly beneficial to our church, to a church body that I love and I'm raising my children in? And so I started trying to see if there was anything useful I could do. And that led to a range of kind of demographic estimates for the LCMS that I kind of thought, well, what can I do with those? Can I just like say, here's some numbers on the LCMS that I kind of thought, well, what can I do with those? Can I just like say, here's some numbers on the LCMS? Didn't seem like that would be highly useful or impactful. So my PhD is actually in survey methodology, so like how to design surveys, and so I thought, well, I'll run a survey of LCMS members. You know it's not that big a group, um, it ended up being a bit more complicated of a project than initially anticipated, um, but, uh, that was in 2021 that the first survey ran. It ran again in 2022. It ran again in 2023 and later in late summer, early fall of this year. Uh, it'll go out again.

Speaker 3: 2:45

Each wave has been a little bit different, but the idea was just to ask questions, that, frankly, to ask questions that I hear asked. You know, I hear pastors saying, well, like you know how many people are using DS4 or something I don't know, or like you know something like you know we'll talk about, like, oh well, you know it's, it's really bad to do communion this way or this way, but then we have no idea, like, well, who does it that way? So there's a lot of things that could be asked, and so I rotate the questions a bit, and the questions are definitely oversampled on things that I think are interesting for my sort of sociologically informed research, but I try to also stock it with questions that I think are of more general synodical interest as well, and so there's a lot of questions in there. So each year I kind of focus on a different set of questions and kind of say here's some, some takeaways from those questions. And this year, as I'm sure we're going to get into, there was a big focus on converts.

Speaker 3: 3:52

So conversion to the LCMS.

Speaker 4: 3:56

Interesting.

Speaker 2: 3:57

And it is very interesting.

Speaker 2: 3:58

So, tell us how the survey was conducted and and if you want to get into, like how, your question. I love your transparency on survey method et cetera. Regarding, hey, I hear different things and I'm going to change up the questions. So, conversion was a big deal. I'm guessing that's because, you see, like we see the LCMS, like many mainline denominations, shrinking, so are we having a higher emphasis on bringing not just we need to have more babies, to be sure but also adult converts in, and what are the environments, the congregations that are having some success toward that end? I'd love to go deeper into how it was conducted and how your questions have kind of evolved your questions have kind of evolved.

Speaker 3: 4:49

Yeah, so, um, the method um is um hasn't changed a lot since the the first survey wave, which is basically um, I scrape every email address off the LCMS website, um, to every pastor, every rostered, everybody on the roster, and also all the church email addresses, the district email addresses, and I blast an email out that says here's a survey, please take it. And some people, their spam filters block it and some people have unsubscribed. So it's not literally the case that every person some people will. I get emails sometimes being like well, I didn't receive it and I'm on the roster. Well, the email address that's associated with you on the roster is defunct, right, it's not been updated. Okay, so I blasted out and then I also circulated on to LCMS Facebook groups, I circulated it on Twitter, on Discord, that all have appreciable LCMS communities, and then last year I started producing like a short link that was more suitable for a church bulletin. So a couple churches did put it in their bulletin and actually a few churches set up a computer in the Narthex to help older people take the survey, which I was like, wow, that's awesome. To help older people take the survey, which I was like, wow, that's awesome. Now it also means I have a little bit of an analytic problem, because I know that there are like five or six. For the most part, I'm getting like one, two or three people from a given church, but then I know that I've got like five churches where I have like 25 people from those churches and I can't see who's who actually.

Speaker 3: 6:27

Though I'm working on a way to I want to guarantee people their privacy and anonymity if they want to protect it.

Speaker 3: 6:34

But I am looking for this next wave. I'm going to provide a way that churches can have a unique link. So, like, if a church wants to partner with the project and say look, we're going to help you get respondents and also we're just curious what our own people answer to this, we can set up a unique link and also we could slightly vary the questions. If a pastor's like also I'd love to know if people were upset about that voters meeting we just had like we could ask that for their church specific. So I'm going to work on inviting churches to like partner more formally so that we get more complete samples of churches and also we can put more information in the hands of, like, a pastor or a group of elders to, the idea being that, you know, they would get them an even more anonymized version of the data right, just to protect people's privacy, and not just privacy but anonymity. I want it to be impossible for these people who give me their responses to ever be identified.

Speaker 4: 7:37

I'm saying I can see it being really cool thing like as a district trends. I'm sorry, go ahead. I'm saying I can see it being a really cool thing as a district trend.

Speaker 3: 7:50

The districts could maybe aggregate their data and see what's going on southwest versus northeast. So the idea is that I can produce essentially an infinite number of unique links right. So now there will always be just a generic landing page for the survey for people who just I want to take it. I don't care, but yeah. So the idea is we can do things like that, and the exciting part of that is that in the past, the survey has just been me.

Speaker 3: 8:15

So, like all the survey reports, basically they say somewhere in there like no external funding was received for this report, internal funding was received for this report. What it amounts to is it's kind of a more oblique way of saying you know, if something's wrong in this, it's nobody's fault, but mine, and also the couple of thousand dollars it takes to run this each year just came from my pocket, right, nobody else was paying. But that is changing Um, but that is changing Um. So I'm in the process of of, uh, um, of uh, working out an agreement with uh, one of our Concordias, um, but I'm just looking for a place to make it more uh, institutionally, uh, licit you don't have to give any kind of indicators I was gonna say I know we're under, go ahead tim over under on concordia, nebraska.

Speaker 2: 9:20

but I I'm just my guess, that's my, my guess, knowing Bernard Bull and his I can neither confirm nor deny. Or deny Exactly, exactly so.

Speaker 4: 9:29

Jack go ahead, yeah. So I know, kind of our theme here is to talk specifically about this survey, but surveys in general. We are really big on kind of being data informed with respect to how effective are we being in ministry. So I know, in the Christ Greenfield context and even the work that we do with the ULC, we are very intent about doing surveys. You know is the discipleship work that we're doing or the worship services, all that kind of stuff. We are constantly sending out surveys to try and understand, like, how are we connecting with people, how are we impacting people? We do. I mean, you're probably familiar with the net promoter score, right? Um, you know how likely would you be to recommend a particular brand to people? Um, and using that as a tool for engagement? So, um, I I'm just really delighted that we've got sort of this activity happening, where it's data informed and then, like, the ultimate goal is how do you use that data to make decisions?

Speaker 3: 10:30

You know, what is the decision? Well, and the challenge you have is like so you know, I know I'm not the only person who, I'm not the only person or LCMS affiliated institution that is running surveys. But the challenge you get is you'll get like one district does a survey of something and then they get a result and then as soon as they look at it, they're like, well, is that good or bad, or is that high or low? And they don't have a comparison, there's not a benchmark. So my interest is benchmarking. Um, I want to be able to develop uh figures that in the future, other people as they are you know, if your church does like a follow-up survey with you know recent, recent confirmands or something I don't know. Um, uh, and you get a certain answer. You could then go and look somewhere else and be like well, what's typical in the lcms, what's normal, um, so that's that's kind of.

Speaker 3: 11:21

A long-run objective is to be able to establish benchmarks so that we can just better understand Um cause, many of us, we, we have a view of our church and maybe of a few other churches that we that we sometimes visit, because your parents go there or your sister goes there or whatever for pastors. I think this is actually an even narrower field because, like lay people, we get in other churches on Sundays, like we kind of float around a little bit, but like pastors, like you're in one place every Sunday you actually have a really, really circumscribed vision of, like, what's happening. Now you all have more connections between each other than lay people have across congregations, but pastor to pastor connections between each other than lay people have across congregations but pastor to pastor connections are very different than the experience of actually being in the pew right? So my hope is that one of the things this can do is it can actually really like, let's say that we found that only 55% of LCMS churches commune weekly. Okay, let's say we found that, and that's not what we actually found. I think I actually find it something like 85% commune weekly or something is my recollection, because I asked about that in this recent wave, though that, though that's not in the survey report, as it would happen. There's all these questions I ask about, but I don't have enough time to analyze it all, so I'm in the process of trying to acquire a research assistance. Um, but uh. But let's say we found that it was 55% that were communing weekly. Would that tell us anything about how frequently communion should happen? No, it would tell us absolutely nothing about that, right? Because you might say, well, that means 45% of people are doing it wrong. Or maybe you'd say that means 55% of people are doing it too much. Okay, it tells us what is happening.

Speaker 3: 13:23

But I try to I mean, I don't fully stay away from this but I try to be clear that there is does not always imply ought. There are times where is and ought are fundamentally and metaphysically tied, but there are many times when they're not, where we can say this just is what it is and we can have a separate conversation about what ought to be. And I'm very well aware of the fact that my vocation is very strictly on the question of what is. I'm not a pastor, I'm not a synical official, I'm not trained, uh, in in ecclesiology or anything like that. Um, I have no authority, I I'm not even, I'm not even like on the council of my local church. I'm just in the pew, I'm trying to keep my children mostly docile, um, and if I'm lucky, maybe they'll participate for like part. But so my vocation is what is is just documenting what, what is actually happening, the question of what should happen is is often beyond what, what I'm the best witness to.

Speaker 4: 14:42

Even the, even what the should is, can be a little bit misleading, because you might find correlations and as a data guy you know correlation is not always causation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 14:54

Yeah, so like a great example of that.

Speaker 3: 14:56

And again, I always forget which charts are in the report and which ones are the ones that, like, just I've made for my own interest and which ones are the ones that, like, just I've made for my own interest. But it turns out that in churches that have preschools or higher schools, but that have at least a preschool, there are more child baptisms per attendance. So if you take child baptisms divided by attendance, there's a higher implied fertility rate, let's say, in churches that have a preschool. Okay, so which way does causality run? Is it that having a church preschool leads your church to have more child baptisms? Or is it that churches that have a lot of child baptisms, that is, that have young families, invest in, in keeping a preschool, right? Um, and that's very difficult to untangle.

Speaker 3: 15:49

And so if, even if we found churches that have such and such a trait are growing, you know, at five times the rate, that might not tell you anything about the actual effect of that trait. Um, so, like, um, you know, we know that churches that have lots of young people are going to be declining less, um, if for no other reason than because they die less, okay, um, uh, we also know that young people, particularly young people interested in having children, um, tend to shift towards churches that they think are not declining. Okay, that is, people with a long time horizon tend to gravitate towards churches that they believe are going to be around for a long time. Now. This creates a huge problem because one of the first graphs that I show, in fact the first several graphs that I show in the report, show that perceptions of growth in the LCMS are wildly out of sync with actual growth. That is.

Speaker 3: 16:52

I will say in the report I focus on attendance growth. If, if instead I shift to like baptized membership or confirmed membership, the error is is actually rather small. Okay, but my view is that, like, attendance is kind of what matters because one we care about communing communities, not lists. Secondly, a lot of churches, quite a lot of churches in the official records report zero deaths across rather long time horizons. That is to say they're just not filling out the death section long time horizons. That is to say they're just not filling out the death section. A lot of churches also report zero removals across rather long time horizons. That is, they have people who are never attending and they just never remove them. Of course, the historic Christian norm before modernity would have been that if you were frequently not attending communion you are effectively removed. In fact that would be under the Catholic Church. That would be a mortal sin that would have to be dealt with before you could commune again. You missed communion too much. Now you can't commune, so not anymore.

Speaker 3: 17:57

With modernity we don't do these things, but okay, but regardless, so I care about. But if you look at confirmed membership it's not as much of a mismatch. But what does remain true, whether you look at confirmed or baptized membership or attendance, is that who is overestimating growth is not random, right? Small LCMS churches, overwhelmingly, are way too pessimistic about their own experiences, like are way too pessimistic about their own experiences. Small churches are not declining as much as LCMS members think. As their own members think it's not as bad as it looks for the small. For the small, and by that I mean like, less than 30 weekly attendance.

Speaker 2: 18:40

Less than 30. Okay.

Speaker 3: 18:54

Big churches, so like those with like over a hundred weekly attendance or especially like Less than 30. Okay, their church is growing. Half of the churches over 300 people in the LCMS are not growing. In fact there's no difference in growth rates by church size in the LCMS. There's almost no difference. It depends on how you define size and where you benchmark it. But there's very little difference by church size.

Speaker 3: 19:19

It's not that big, but people in big churches believe their church is growing and the reason is human ability to estimate numbers or accuracy declines rapidly with group size. So it's very easy for me to tell the difference between 10 and 20 people. It's very difficult for me to tell the difference between 500 and 800 people. Likewise, bigger churches tend to have multiple services or multiple sites. So sometimes what's going on is people are saying, well, the service I attend is getting bigger, but sometimes that's happening at the expense of other services or other sites or whatever. So all that to say, we have a serious perception gap in our church that we are overestimating growth in general and in particular, we have a deep misunderstanding of patterns of growth in our church that the reputation of large churches as high growth churches is not correct. Now they're also not like high decline churches. Okay, there's just not a lot of difference across church size.

Speaker 2: 21:09

That's fascinating. Why, jack, I get your take on this too, and maybe this is beyond what a demographer talks about, because you just say what is, you just say what is. But I'm wondering why that is that we overestimate. And when you say overestimate, you're talking more about their individual church rather than the denomination as a whole.

Speaker 3: 21:35

That's something huge to distinguish Growing, stable or shrinking your church, or, I think, your congregation is what I said your church or, I think, your congregation is what I said.

Speaker 4: 21:51

We did see a longitudinal study that kind of tracked the number of churches that exist by size, let's say over the period of a decade. I remember this report, tim, where it did seem that the number of small churches had basically doubled over the period of, I want to say, 10 to 12 years.

Speaker 2: 22:04

It was a 20-year scope.

Speaker 4: 22:05

It was from 2002 to yeah 2022.

Speaker 2: 22:09

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 22:11

Yeah, yeah, and some of that is, you know, I mean a lot of churches are shrinking. You know, churches of all sizes in the LCMS are shrinking on average and so a lot of those what used to be mid-sized churches are now small churches. And then you have plants and we, you know there is some planting work, that's true. And scaling a plant from, you know, five members to like 20 or 25, statistically is like not that uncommon. But scaling to like 75 is much more uncommon because basically your social surface changes in kind of a way that's suboptimal as you start to scale beyond, like four or five families.

Speaker 2: 22:55

Basically, so do you have data on church planning? Did a number of new church plant and pastors fill it out? I'd be curious to know their experience. You know I didn't ask.

Speaker 3: 23:07

Actually, yeah, I didn't ask about plants per se and I didn't ask about congregational age, like the time since founding. I do have data on it because I also scraped the website for all the congregational data. It's like those reports that you upload. Yeah, um, I scraped them all off the website, um and so, um, obviously, like new plants are the fastest growing churches that's not controversial, like partly because some of their growth comes from members that they are borrowing from like seed churches, so to speak. So that's like not a win. But even beyond that, they do report some elevated rates of, like adult confirmations, and not so much child baptisms, but adult confirmations are a bit higher in recent plants.

Speaker 3: 24:06

However, when you look at, like what churches are most outperforming population growth in their county, the answer tends to be quite old churches. So it does not appear that our newer plants or newer plants are going to places where the people are, which is good, okay, like I'm in favor. But like, once they hit kind of a modest scale, they start to underperform local population growth pretty quickly, whereas a lot of our older churches actually are overperforming local population trends, that is to say, they are increasing as a share of local population. In fact, if you look at, it's kind of a strange twist, if you look at like. So I have strong feelings about this because my father-in-law, who's close to retirement, is a pastor at a?

Speaker 3: 25:02

Uh, a lutheran church where he's the only he's the only lcms pastor in quite a large radius and it's in a county that's declining in population and has been for quite a while. Um, uh, and his church is about stable in size over the last 20 years, 25 years, and he's been there for 30 years and he sometimes feels like I've been here 30 years and it's like it looks the same as it did when I got here. Like that's not what. It's not what you like, it's not what you hope is going to happen when you like start your ministry, whereas I look at it as a demographer and I'm like brother, your county lost like like 30 of its people and your church is the same like your share of pops. Like you're like top 10 best performer in the in the senate.

Speaker 1: 25:53

like you're like this is amazing you should write a book, um, uh, um.

Speaker 3: 26:00

And I believe his big secret is he just talks to everyone he meets at the grocery store and like this is like Kroger, is fruitful ground for him. But like a lot of our fastest growing churches are actually, so to speak, like underperformers relative to local population. Right, they just are in really fast growing counties.

Speaker 4: 26:19

I'm curious to know if you've seen any change in trend with respect to people becoming formal members of the church, because I know, in our context, a lot of times in our new member class, people are coming to our class and I've been worshiping with you guys for 18 months, you know, or two years, oh, welcome aboard, you know and so in a sense they've been functioning like members of our church, right, but they've just not gone through the formal process yet, you know. So in a sense they, you know they may not be counted as converted, right? Yep, have you seen anything like that?

Speaker 3: 26:55

Yes, so the LCMS asks congregations to report statistics on visitors versus members. To report statistics on visitors versus members. Churches that get more visitors end up having more adult confirmations as well, which is not surprising. The rate at which visitors are turned into members you tend to have, over the course of a year, you're likely to have anywhere from in the highest performing churches, a hundred visitor week butts. Okay, so, like, add up if one visitor comes 50 weeks, that's 50 butts. Okay, in pews. Or if you have 50 different over the course of the year, that's 50. Okay, so on average you know your highest performers it's about one adult confirmation per hundred visitor week butts, and your lowest performers is going to be about 300. Right, so that tends to be the, the, the conversion rate, so to speak, is that for every one to 300 visitor contacts that we have in our church services, right, so this is not like out in the world, okay, but this is in our actual, like weekend services that generate the numbers that we report and this is only physical, right, so nothing online here, because the official statistics are supposed to be physical only.

Speaker 3: 28:23

I think there are some churches that may be deviated from that, but that's our typical rate is about 100,.

Speaker 3: 28:31

100 to 300 yields a confirmation, I should say churches that are I don't have rock solid date on this, but my experience in the mission field, particularly in Montreal.

Speaker 3: 28:46

In Montreal we averaged for a congregation of 40 to 50 members worshiping on a Sunday, we would average about anywhere from 300 to 1,000 visitor week butts over the course of the year. Okay, that is to say like maybe 20, 30% of the congregation on a given week was a visitor. We, that church, also had much higher rates of adult confirmation than the LCMS average like three times as high, okay, adult confirmation than the lcms average like three times as high, okay, the actual conversion rate of like visitors to confirmations was actually lower than the average, right, because what was happening is we were doing lots and lots of activities to generate visitor week butts okay, and when you do that you get lots more people coming, but you're kind of pulling farther and farther from the social ties that that through which God tends to work, through dealing with people who are more weakly attached and so they are not as prepared to receive the good gift that they're being given.

Speaker 4: 29:56

Just for my clarification the visitor week, but if somebody visited three weeks in a row, that'd be three. Ok, good, good to know the the visitor week, but if somebody visited three weeks in a row, that'd be three, okay, good good to know because I always and for my own sake, I always think of just like names added to the database. This is a new person first time?

Speaker 3: 30:10

no, right, yeah, so one person coming 50. You know one. One visitor coming 50, 50 times. Yeah, here's what I would say. If you have a guy coming to your church and he came 25 Sundays, I would wager you've got a 12% chance he's going to be confirmed in the next year. Okay, okay, that's it, which is kind of low. You'd think a guy who's not a member and he comes 25 times in a year, like seems like pretty high commitment.

Speaker 4: 30:41

And in my mind, that guy already in my mind that guy already thinking of himself as a member, even though he hasn't been through the class, if he's not I regret to inform you he is not now in practice.

Speaker 3: 30:49

So in practice, I wish I had like true longitudinal data here. My suspicion is actually that repeat visitors that like the effect of each additional visit on like odds of being confirmed probably rises, right. Yeah, I suspect that if we say like, out of all unique visitors, what share, um, what share ultimately confirmed, it's probably like an even less favorable ratio. But out of repeat visitors it's probably so whatever, um, yeah, but yeah. So all that to say that like um.

Speaker 3: 31:19

But I think this is important, by the way, in terms of planning plant locations, because one of the things you have to think about, what we often think about for plant locations is like a viable building, which often means like vaguely church-ish and has parking. We think about overall geographic proximity, like commute time kind of to seed members and to sort of target community, okay, and those are like kind of the big factors and then also financial limitations Okay. But in my view, probably one of the things we actually need to be thinking about is walk-in density. Is walk-in density that is like how many people will be moving past your church sign at a sufficiently slow pace that they are likely to read it, and that basically means foot traffic.

Speaker 3: 32:11

That I suspect a lot of your actual best church plant locations may be somewhat suboptimal in terms of commute time, but may actually basically be. You want places that have businesses that generate traffic. And I know, like when I say generate traffic, like everybody, community church is like that sounds awful, but actually like Sunday businesses are particularly good, like you really want Sunday businesses. So like a great place to cite a church would be like on the other side of the parking lot. As like a great place to site a church would be like on the other side of the parking lot, as like a mall Okay, probably not a strip club. I wouldn't advise that for other reasons, but that is a lot of Sunday foot traffic.

Speaker 4: 32:55

A really great breakfast restaurant right. People go out to breakfast Sunday morning.

Speaker 3: 33:29

This is like this so like our church in Montreal where we had just vast amounts of foot traffic was in a mostly Hindu and Muslim neighborhood that we were surrounded by restaurants on all sides, like throw a rock in any direction and you would accidentally hit an Indian restaurant. It was great, it was like after church lunch was delicious. But so I think you know my sense is that just kind of raw visitor density is actually probably an important factor for church plants.

Speaker 2: 34:04

So I love this study for so many reasons. One of the main reasons is it disrupts confirmation bias and I think we're so prone to think it must look like this. And for me, one of the confirmation biases, based on the traditional and missional church distinction that you say. One of your data points is traditional Lutheran churches and we can have a debate Sure, this is ecclesiology, theology, et cetera about what distinguishes traditional, missional, et cetera. Okay, it's probably more like a church that does contemporary worship right, maybe a mission orientation.

Speaker 3: 34:41

I can tell you, that's basically what it is.

Speaker 2: 34:43

It's contemporary and traditional worship, Fine, but that traditional Lutheran churches are being more productive at engaging those outside the church. I think for a lot of people that maybe are in circles that I run in, that's like huh, that's kind of wild. So I'm going to give my take. I totally see it. I totally see it. I think people in our culture are looking for the transcendent, the above. And traditional worship, you know, smells bells, et cetera. The robes, the high church. You know, smells bells, et cetera. The robes, the high church.

Speaker 2: 35:13

I think, if done in a accessible way, meaning the pastor is a normal guy who they can see themselves in, right, it's not the air pastor, but it is like wow, we are entering into the transcendent, God is descending to us, and that's what Lutheran liturgy does at its best. It's God for us coming down through word and sacrament to remind us of who we are. Apart from him and now, with him, we're being liturgized or invited into the story of God in the liturgy. I believe that's very attractive today for those who are outside the church and there's a lot of data to support that in the spiritual and not religious. I think we bridge Lutheran worship in general bridges that very, very well, and that we shouldn't just carte blanche right off everything as it relates to our tradition and our liturgy to do exactly what the mainline or non-denom churches are doing. I think that would be counter to what it means to be a confessional Lutheran in 2024 and beyond. Anything more to add to that, Lyman, yeah, so I mean this is an area that I've.

Speaker 3: 36:19

It's, of course, an enduring area of discussion in our synod and it's one that I've explored in different ways in all three survey waves all three survey waves and in this one, I would say, the data got strong enough to allow me to venture less tentative conclusions. So I show, like a graph that since I collected data in 2017 on congregational level worship style, let's say, and basically what it was is, at the time there was a website that would like identify these are like the super, super, super traditional churches that like do things exactly this way. Okay, great. And so that's like 10% of our congregations. So I can look at those churches in 2017 versus every other church. Okay, so we can say, like are, like the super traditional churches, kind of the extreme there, how are they doing compared to the rest? And the answer is since 2017, they've had appreciably less decline, whether you look at membership or attendance. And that's true even with like lots of control variables and stuff like that. And so that's interesting. We say, well, okay, that's like kind of might be a fringe, 10%, whatever. What if we look at other variables? So that question I asked about growing or declining it turns out the church size. Bias is the same whether you look at like more traditional versus less traditional Lutherans like for both of them, if they're in a big church, they have more biased answers, which is good for our purposes because it means, even though the answers are biased, they're not biased by this liturgical split. That's good news for us and what we can see is that the more traditional churches are much more likely to have converts showing up in the data. So, for example, you know, I'm not doing a census of churches and then saying how many of their members are converts, right, I'm doing a survey of people and then asking them to describe their churches. But it works out similarly in that I can say okay, so what percent of the people that say they're in these churches are XYZ? Okay, and it turns out that there are appreciably more converts in the more traditional churches than there are in the more contemporary ones.

Speaker 3: 38:36

I also find I have a series of questions I use to create an index of. I call it means prioritization. Initially I called it sacramentarianism, until a pastor told me that that was actually a name of some past heresy and I was like, oh crap, I can't do that. I just meant is like people who really put a big emphasis on the visible means, like they talk about it a lot, they think it's a big deal and if you start to get like, oh well, the spirit kind of worked on my heart, they go like no, he didn't, he did this thing.

Speaker 3: 39:07

Okay, like I'm just looking for like kind of like a kind of grumpy orthodox and, to be clear, like this is what I believe, like I'm a very my wife could attest I'm very like stodgy, grumpy, like these are the means they work this way. This is how it is Okay. But I'm like looking for these people Like, okay, what are there? Very many of them, because they definitely that vibe has kind of an outsized influence in like perception, intra-denominational perceptions. Okay, um, um, very starched color, possibly incense, and strong opinions about what to do when wine spills. Um, okay, uh, so, um, uh. But I was curious like who are these people like? Am I like? Because I am one of these people, so I'm like interested in sociology, we would call this me search.

Speaker 3: 40:01

So it turns out that these people are, first of all, they're more likely to be converts, and, like I'm a convert, so I was like, hey, that checks out, they're more likely to be converts, particularly from more distant traditions, so like not from other Lutheran denominations, like from atheism or from Islam or from Roman Catholicism or Pentecostalism or something Not saying. Catholicism and Islam are similarly distant, just that they're all not other Lutheran denominations they tend to be. So, these people, they're more likely to be converts. They're also more likely to be pastors. So pastors tend to put a bigger emphasis on this stuff than lay people do, and they are also much younger younger. So the average LCMS member under 30 has almost as means prioritizing opinions on this as the average pastor, whereas the average LCMS member over 60 is like, far less quote, unquote means prioritizing than the average LCMS lay person in general. So in general, our kind of like high means prioritizing group is young and ordained and they're also much more likely to report that their churches are growing, which again suggests that there's growth in this more.

Speaker 3: 41:32

I always wonder. We could say traditional, but then there's, that's not quite what it means. We could say confessional, but there's debate about what that word means. Okay, like. So this means prioritizing view is associated with convert status and congregational, less negative congregational change, um, uh. So I mean that's, that's um, pretty striking. And then finally, uh, you know you're, maybe you were going to ask me about this in a second, but I'll just jump the gun and say, um, I also asked people about what factors influenced their conversion.

Speaker 3: 42:07

Um, and so I asked them like you know, did you have a romantic relationship with an LCMS member before you converted? 40% of converts did so. Like we marry them in Cyril of Jerusalem is like banging on the table, like yes, so it has always been. If you don't get that reference, you can go look up the catechetical lectures. So you know that's a big thing.

Speaker 3: 42:29

But the dominant experience of conversion, like the most common reasons cited, are people found in an LCMS church. They found a welcoming community that offered them something that was fresh and different from the world around them and gave them a sense of history and rootedness. So, those three reasons welcoming community, fresh and different, history and rootedness and I think that speaks to what you're saying, tim Right, people want like a different thing, like a little bit of mystery, maybe a little bit of sense. We'd be okay with it. Like, people want that. They understand that the demythologize I don't want to say demythologize uh, the world denuded of of its real layer of spirit is a sad and boring place, and also a place of deception that describes my own conversion to yeah, yeah, like every one of those points that you laid out there, I'm like yeah, yeah, that's exactly interesting thing.

Speaker 3: 43:31

There was an option people could check where they just said, yeah, I converted because I concluded my prior religion was false. And you might be like, well, that's obviously part of conversion, not really so. First of all, a lot of people they're converting from similar traditions, right, so it is just a social conversion for them because they actually didn't have to change many beliefs, like they were coming from another Lutheran background. Like, if a Wells person becomes LCMS, how much does he need to change? Like not a lot. But more importantly, we can actually see that where converts end up varies by this type of conversion they experience. Converts end up varies by this type of conversion they experience. Also, I should say converts of every group here have really high agreement with LCMS faith statements. In fact, converts, regardless of their story, end up with higher agreement with benchmark statements of LCMS belief than lifelong Lutherans do.

Speaker 3: 44:30

And I know for myself, like my story is basically I married a Lutheran and here I am like I'm like how confessional can we be? Like let's get, let's max that. So like the fact that somebody came in one way doesn't tell you that they're like less serious about belief now. It's just some people. Their conversion story is I realized my prior belief was false and so I went looking for something else Other people it's. I fell in love with a girl and so I experienced Lutheranism and I realized it was like great, okay, these people both end up as faithful Orthodox believers, but their path is different. And the interesting thing is that group that said, yeah, I realized my prior religion was false and I went looking for something.

Speaker 3: 45:17

Overwhelmingly. That is the most typical conversion experience for converts in growing churches. The most typical conversion experience for converts in shrinking churches is romance and friendship, that is, they married someone or they made a friend or kind of these classic like relational evangelism ties. So growth is associated with having something that when people realize their other views are false and they go looking, they see it and they go. Oh yeah, that's what I'm missing.

Speaker 4: 45:51

Yeah, and I wonder then how that ties into, like the catechism approach to what they're doing, what they're inviting people into, for new members to actually learn about the faith, to be able to actually compare and contrast from the background that they came out of, because that was very powerful for me going through that experience.

Speaker 3: 46:11

Yeah, I mean, I will say you can say if this confirms your experience or not. My experience has been a lot of this particular conversion story is guy I say guys because it is disproportion. This group is disproportionately it's not entirely, there are women here too, but it is somewhat more likely to be men um uh um, they often their experiences. You know, I became really disillusioned with some prior belief. I've been looking for something else. I found Lutheranism. I read the entire book of Concord. I listened to issues, et cetera. For six months I started listening to you know, podcasts, whatever.

Speaker 3: 46:50

I joined an online Bible study and then I finally walked into a church a year later and when they show up they're like I'm ready to be, I want to be baptized and confirmed. Like now, let's do this, I'm ready. And the pastor's like who are you Like what? And then you go to confirmation and the guy's like, look, I've actually already memorized the small catechism. Like can we just like, do this already? Like you get these guys who when they come in, they are really, really well-versed, actually in the head knowledge of Lutheranism.

Speaker 3: 47:26

And my thought is maybe we need to think about a two-track adult confirmation. One is like okay, you need to learn what Lutheranism is, doctrinally, dogmatically, didactically, catechetically. And the other one is like, okay, you read all the books. We would like you to put some roofs on widow's houses because, like, this is also what Lutheranism is, like you're going to be. You need to be socialized. Like some people, they socialize very well. They need to be educated. Other people, they're quite educated, they need to be socialized. And I'm like maybe we need two different tracks here for, like, what's your like, what? What we're working with when you come in.

Speaker 4: 48:02

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 48:02

Or you're so lit up.

Speaker 4: 48:07

Maybe we need to fast track you into some sort of leadership or teaching role and actually get you to like really, you know, lean into this thing that has gotten you so lit up in your faith. Right yeah, although you know you always worry about.

Speaker 3: 48:15

There's, um, the joke about like calvinists go through like a cage phase, like like when they convert, like they discover reformed theology and they're like, oh, this is so cool. And they're like really angry suddenly because apparently that's the thing. Um, so you do get some cage phase lutherans too, where they're like, oh, like, chill a little bit. You need to be, have the same faith as that sweet grandma over there. You are communing together. So you got to find common ground.

Speaker 2: 48:44

Well, there are so many ways that we can go from here. I affirm that the Lutheran expression has radically evolved within the last generation and we have two different extremes. And this is one of the missions of the Unite Leadership Collective is it's a big room with lots of different people and lots of different contexts. Who can play in the same room, play in the same sandbox, and we may have varying behavioral tendencies, given generational. So I'll make a generational statement.

Speaker 2: 49:27

I think the boomer generation by and large, because it was so centered in the church growth movement, the Jesus movement, that there are pockets in the Missouri Synod, even our congregation here, that was heavily influenced by boomer entertainment, attractional discipleship, right and so to keep that generation we had to kind of move in and this is largely worship, but maybe it was social justice kind of move. We have to move beyond Right, and you have the battle over the Bible, the higher critical method, and and that generation was way kind of oh, let's, let's do it and and serve me, me, me. And now you've got a generation you move past kind of Gen X and millennials, jack, you and I kind of orient in that world and we feel like and I'm just speaking sociologically right here I feel like I'm arms outstretched. Okay, boomer, you need to probably repent on a number of different things, right, and you and I could go down the list there. But again, we're painting with a broad brush. We may be sold out on deep theology, for attractional theology Could some of you in that generation say that?

Speaker 2: 50:39

And then, on the other extreme and this is what I hear, lyman, you kind of kind of pointing to okay brother, who's 30 and now is a fast track toward one of our seminaries If you miss on character development and having the kindness of Christ, the humility of Christ, you can go down a pharisaical track very, very fast. So maybe that's a good way to kind of make a very general generational statement. Is the boomers had a stronger tendency toward hedonism, pleasure this is in the midst of america and the you know all the fun do that and then right now we see a tendency of amongst some and maybe there are newer converts to lutheranism, toward toward pharisaism. Um, any, any comments on those extremes, lyman?

Speaker 3: 51:31

I. I think it's a. It's not an unreasonable general characterization. I'm always a little resistant to to general, but yeah no I mean, I think there is.

Speaker 3: 51:42

There is some of that now. So you know, so one of my like personal heroes of modern Lutheranism, right, and when I say this it's gonna be like well, that's cheating, because it's like that's like half our synod, okay, martin franzman, like amazing dude, okay, like like very like top shelf hymns, like some of the best ones in the lsb also just like like truly a sainted figure, who's a blessing, truly a blessing to our church. And I think in the like final colloquy over the battle over the Bible, that. And some listeners are like who's Martin Fransman? And my answer is like go look it up, he's awesome. Okay, he was called to like kind of try to like come out of retirement, summon the old general out of retirement and have him like marshal one last battle, okay, and like try to like mediate a little bit of this like debate, and he tried to do so and like argue, like okay, we can talk about history, we can talk about critical reasoning about the Bible, but we're not going to set ourselves as Lord over the text. And like at the end of the day, whatever you do here has to be disciplined by the fact that, like you have to believe all of this is true, like you talk about how it came to be historically, but you do have to believe it's true and if you can, you can hear, you can read results, this. I think there's also recordings of this. I've just read things. You know it's.

Speaker 3: 53:14

It's exasperating to see how the two sides responded Right that like the historical critical side responded with just like not taking the olive branch, just like no, like we should be able to do all this stuff because it's very cool and look, the good journals do it. Like that's basically the response and you're like oh my gosh, you were just fishing for excommunication. And then the other side like turns around like rebukes Franzman with nowadays in internet lingo we'd say, like they basically said you don't know what time it is Like you're not seeing how dire the situation is. There can't be a compromise, and I think there's some truth to that. Ultimately, as we see from the direction the ELCA has gone, there really wasn't a viable long-term compromise. At the same time, now, 50 years removed, you read this exchange.

Speaker 3: 54:10

What actually comes across is that there was somebody in the room trying to be an actual, in that moment, like decent and upstanding and Christlike person, and two sides of people who were kind of jerks and not like in the oh, I'm just saying the truth and you have to just say the truth but like, like, willfully and very publicly unkind in a way that was unbecoming of ordained men, very publicly unkind in a way that was unbecoming of ordained men. And the reason I say that is Franzman has this, this thing. He says in one of his, one of his essays that when someone becomes more theologically educated, their first instinct is to see all the things wrong with their church, all the things that need to be fixed. Like, oh my gosh, lcms is wrong here, it's wrong here. He's giving this lecture to like a group of seminary students, okay, and he's like, look, you're probably in seminary and you're thinking like, look at all these things that are wrong with our church now, like they're not doing it right, they're doing this thing wrong whatever with our church now, like they're not doing it right, they're doing this thing wrong, whatever. And he says but eventually, as you grow enough, you learn to turn that, that that critical wrath, back on yourself and you realize, oh my gosh, the reason they're doing it wrong is because they're exactly like me and I do everything wrong, like, I am exactly like that and you know, put me up on that stage, you know it's. It's like the everybody can preach a better sermon than the pastor issue Right, like um, but guess what? Ask them to preach a sermon, oh, I can't do this.

Speaker 3: 55:50

You know, and I think we have some of that in our congregation, truly on both sides. And what I mean is a sense that there is a battle within our church that needs to be fought, sometimes because it was fun to fight the last one or it was interesting to fight the last one other, because we're young and it feels like we should get to have our own battle, and that the sides are defined, our own battle, and that the sides are defined by these groups. And one of the prior survey reports I did is show that, like these sides make no sense, like if you look at like beliefs about evangelism or beliefs about family size, fertility, they're like, not correlated with like traditional or confessional or missional or contemporary. They're just not correlated. Like there are huge shares of both groups that have the things that the other group says are wrong. So we need to learn better battle lines, I think, and figure out where the actual battle is, and I don't think it's actually well described by this like confessional, missional, contemporary, traditional divide divide.

Speaker 3: 56:58

I actually don't think that that's truly the main divide in our church. I think the main divide in our church is people who um. One is, people who are accurately informed about um the pace at which we are numerically declining, and the reason I say that is people with more accurate assessments of what's happening to our denomination and people who report thinking about it more frequently also have more means emphasizing beliefs. They're more likely to engage in like inviting people to church and they're more likely to desire having more kids. So part of this is just like a lot of people not taking seriously the challenge that our denomination is facing.

Speaker 3: 57:40

And then the other big threat, I believe, is basically a kind of soft crypto-Calvinism. And that is well. God's just going to work it all out and yes, he will. As a Lutheran, I do believe that, but he will work it out by calling people's invocations to do things Like. God doesn't just be like. You know, I'm just going to toss you a pastor down from the sky. No, he raises up someone for decades of their life through education and training, because they and people around them made choices to support and prioritize Like and so this, this attitude is like God's going to sort it out.

Speaker 3: 58:18

We just got to have faith, we shouldn't worry. Because Jesus says not to worry and like yes, I understand we should not be dominated by worry, but like, it's okay to experience genuine frustration or sadness that a church you love might be half the size in 30 years. That's actually the right feeling. If you don't feel like, if you learned that something unfortunate was going to happen to someone you loved, you should feel bad about that and do something to prevent it. And I love the bride of Christ and I think other people should too. And I think that we have a real problem in our church of one, people not accepting that the bride of Christ is standing on railroad tracks with a train fast approaching, and, two, that that in fact, she may need to dress herself for a wedding, that she can't just be like, ok, groom, drop the dress on. Like, trim your lamps, there's stuff to do, it's good man, that's a great place to end the chat today.

Speaker 2: 59:24

There are so many things that you said that dismiss our desire for camps. And if you're a baptized, if you're a multi-generation or new convert to the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, first I say welcome, we need you. I pray you fall in love with the Lutheran confessions, our story, the rich heritage, the liturgy. I pray that, especially if you're a young person and the Lord calls you to get married, you have lots of kids and you train them up to fear and love the Lord and love their church body in need of the light of Jesus, and that we have that sort of evangelical fervor to move into our various vocations, to reach people with the gospel. Those seem to be things we should agree on today. And then we can also agree that our church has challenges and we should be honest about the challenges demographic and otherwise, sociological, cultural and maybe theological.

Speaker 2: 1:00:37

But if we miss on identifying the problem which is declining churches, declining leaders, if we live in kind of a fantasy land and I love that your report says that more medium to larger sized churches live in this fantasy and I confirm that 100% because we've kind of arrived Look at all those churches and we kind of. That's not the posture today and so, yeah, I think there's a lot that we can agree on and I think your survey just gives us a solid footing to stand on. I pray other people take the survey. Hey, give us last kind of sneak peek. You have evolved the survey. Can you give us a sneak peek on things you'd like to survey in the next go around Lyman.

Speaker 3: 1:01:30

I haven't really decided yet. So if people have suggestions on things they'd really love to see explored, you can send them my way. An area that I did start to survey in this latest round that I may expand next time is just getting a better idea of, like what's actually happening on Sunday morning, like you know, even like mundane things, like I'm kind of interested in just knowing. Like you know, like, do you go to Bible class before or after church, and like, what does that involve? Like do you sing a hymn? Do you go from a worksheet? Like do you read the Bible or do you read a book, or it's like some other book or like a work? Like what do you actually do? Like because I hear pastors talk about, like well, you know, bible study, this Bible study, or like this thing, this.

Speaker 3: 1:02:20

And I'm like I'm not. I've been in a lot of your churches. Like we go around in the summer and like raise support for missions, like I'm in a ton of your churches, like none of you are doing the same thing. Like I don't think you all actually realized that. Like there's no stand like other than like literally like the words of institution. Like there's even people who are like, oh, I'm just doing it straight out of the lsb, I'm like, but in a very different way than the other guy doing it straight out of the lsb um, so I'm I'm interested in getting a better sense of, like, what's really happening there, um, uh and and, and being able to describe that more um and uh and have a better understanding that. And then also I'm hoping to be able to do more partnering with churches or districts and do this thing where we can say, look like you know you're going to be part of the national survey, but then also you'll actually be able to look at, like, your congregational results.

Speaker 2: 1:03:08

So Christ Greenfield is in. I'd hope that other churches connected to the United Leadership Collective would be in. I don't have any kind of formal influence with the Pacific Southwest District but, President Mike Gibson, I think we ought to be in in the PSD for sure, to come alongside you. We need better data and that can inform.

Speaker 3: 1:03:27

They can email research at lutheranlifesurveychurch I think is the email address. It's on the report somewhere. It's in there and they can let me know. And later in the summer, when I'm getting ready to launch, we can make it happen.

Speaker 2: 1:03:46

Perfect. This is lead time. Sharing is caring, like, subscribe, comment wherever it is. You take this in and we promise to have great conversations where we can learn, where confirmation bias can be, that balloon can be burst a little bit and we can get up and out of ourselves and say, hey, we can look objectively at what's going on, we can see the truth and we can have creative conversations centered in Scripture and confessions to reach people with the gospel. For the days are very, very short. I love your trim your lamps. Man Jesus is returning very, very soon, dort. I love your trim your lamps. Man Jesus is returning very, very soon and will he find us as his church, faithful to proclaiming who he is and what he's done? I pray that is exactly what he finds. It's a good day. Go make it a great day. Thanks, lyman, you rock. Thanks, jack, great job as always. Take care, god bless.

Speaker 1: 1:04:31

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 theuniteleadershiporg 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.