Co-missioners,
I live these days in the northeast corner of Ohio, twenty miles south of Lake Erie and fifteen miles west of Pennsylvania. I started serving in 2024 as a supply preacher for my ELCA synod. Most all the congregations I’ve been to have been achingly small. One closed its doors at the end of last December. Twelve people were present at the service I led last Sunday. I won’t be surprised if twelve is the most I’ll get to see at another church this coming Sunday. Not that they aren’t a glorious sight. Well, of course. Isn’t God the One who calls them saints? Still, with numbers like these it’s tough to keep the doors open. And when every person is in the pews is over 50, there’s not much chance that the kids who dropped out a few decades ago will be dropping back in, bringing grandkids with them.
Such is the state of Lutheran congregations all over the U.S. I’m not alone in sensing anxiety in the air we Lutherans breathe. I’ve begun to see the phrase “Lutheran collapse” popping up in print here and there.
It’s against this backdrop that a recent issue of Forum Letter pointed me to an article on 1517.org by Mark Mattes and Russell Lackey. Mattes I know. I’ve read some of his work. He spoke at a Crossings conference a while back. Pr. Lackey is new to me. Together they addressed the anxiety I mentioned just now. What they propose is captured in their title: “The Future of Lutheranism Belongs to Builders.” Here’s how they wrap up their argument:
“Our tradition is not inadequate. It is under-practiced. The question is not whether we have the gifts, but whether we will inhabit them—boldly, joyfully, and without apology.
Builders, not curators. Architects, not demolition crews. That is the pastoral leadership this moment demands. And by God’s grace, it is the leadership that can form the next generation in Christ.”
I can’t encourage you enough to read the article yourselves. As extra incentive I pass along a note our Crossings Table Talk host, Carol Braun, sent some of us three days ago:
“We’ve just secured Mark Mattes and Russ Lackey to be the speakers at our Table Talk on May 19th at 1 p.m. Central, to speak on the arguments presented in their piece. I hope you can all attend and share your thoughts!”
Carol was one of several colleagues I forwarded the link to when I found the article six weeks ago. I also asked them for thoughts on what its argument might mean for the mission of Crossings these days. A day later Matt Matevelis sent me a response that I can’t help but share with you—such is its insight.
Insight, of course, is one of Matt’s particular gifts. You may have seen it on display a few days in the Crossings text study he wrote for this coming Palm Sunday. If you missed it, check it out! Then keep going with the paragraphs below, where you’ll encounter as sharp a take on our current situation as you’re likely to find anywhere.
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor,
for the Crossings Community
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A Response to Lackey and Mattes, “The Future of Lutheranism Belongs to Builders”
by Matt Metevelis
Matt Metevelis
I really appreciated this article. The sense I got in seminary and continue to get from the ELCA church-types who write and coach about evangelism and church is that successful evangelism involves a kind of radical openness to new possibilities and “creativity” about approaches and ways to reach people. And while I am willing to concede that an approach like this might have led to success in some quarters we have to acknowledge at some point, given our overall decline, that in the aggregate such an approach is failing.
The way this turns out in actual practice just leads to exhaustion. Creativity is a real burden in ministry. This is not said enough. It always falls on the pastors and the lay leaders. And I’ve known many people in ministry who have creativity coming out their ears but zero ability to follow through on anything. And when the “brave new church” people start coming around all they end up doing is telling a bunch of personal stories about how the church has changed, and that we’re failing because we don’t like change. It’s pretty amazing that Canoeing the Mountains, a book which is basically a regurgitation of late ‘90s management literature, just made the rounds in both the LCMS and the ELCA without saying anything meaningful theologically. Andy Root has a wonderful book about the absolute dead end “creativity” is in church circles.
The last congregation I served was a failed mission redevelopment within the ELCA. We changed our name. We changed our focus from a hospitality/service orientation to a more strident left-wing advocacy witness. And while some people were lost and refused to join, we did actually grow. In fact we had a huge bump of new members joining the church. Many came from bigger non-denominational churches.
But none of those people were “builders.” What’s funny is that the people the ELCA bigwigs came to shame and cajole were builders. They built the congregation when Las Vegas boomed in the post-war era. They ran soup kitchens, thrift shops, after-school nutrition and tutoring programs, and they had massive campaigns to knock on doors and invite people to church every couple of years. Even when the neighborhood became elderly and emptied of the white middle class, they just recommitted, started a program to help homeless families, and partnered with a lot of other churches to accomplish a great deal of social good. Many of these leaders were older when I got there, but they were still running things like ESL classes and providing blankets for newborns to indigent and low-income mothers at a local hospital. Lots of them were Pennsylvania and Minnesota transplants with a good stock of the older Lutheran culture that Mattes talks about. They were builders at the core. And they absolutely loved the gospel, loved the church, and wanted to see their work continue.
The contrast with the Gen-X and younger new members we got could not have been starker. Very few of these tithed, or gave anything. They loved big advocacy projects like having “this church loves you” booths at the Pride festival but tended to shy away from things like taking a shift at the thrift store. And I’m not judging them. It’s a generational thing. I cannot believe the demands on my time that come with raising kids. But there was a preference to do things which influenced the branding of the church over the work.
James R. Thomas, a scholar of Lutheran history, came to Vegas for MLK day to talk about Lutheran outreach to African-American communities. He noted that African-Americans didn’t end up in the Lutheran church because there was some program to invite them. Instead Lutherans set up schools in places like the post-bellum south which actually fulfilled a need in those communities.
After reading Lyndel Roper’s history of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 and noting her astute contrast of Luther’s ontology with that of Müntzer and Karlstadt, it struck me that gravitating toward the latter is a particular problem in the ELCA. The most theologically committed of the rebels in 1525 assumed that the freedom of the gospel might simply emerge by fraternal bonds and good intentions and that through suffering and hope God would reward them with a good society. Luther on the other hand didn’t look for God’s activity in some future eon of the political world. God was already present and acting in the world as God does in the Eucharist. I constantly feel as if the church is looking at our real problems and assuming that the solutions necessarily involve doubling down on ideological commitments so that, as a reward, the right people will like us and form us as a “beloved community.” This contrasts with the orientation Mattes talks about where the church built schools, developed organizations and institutions, and focused on theologically training pastors.
Panel discussion of the Preaching Mentoring Program.
The third of these areas is where Crossings can make the biggest impact. The seeds are there in the mentorship program. I think the emphasis of Crossings needs to be on training pastors to preach a usable, faithful gospel. This will not involve hammering petty distinctions or insisting on a pristine orthodoxy as the mark that distinguishes Crossings from the rest of the church. It will involve reaching out to pastors and congregations who are just exhausted with the treadmill of making everybody get on board with left wing causes and theology (and right wing causes in our sister denominations). Let the gifts we offer be the study of a gospel that is distinct from the quotidian concerns and fetishes of the moment but still has plenty of things to say to them.
Crossings puts the lie to the sense that gets communicated in seminary and among the ELCA elite that you cannot at once be theologically rigorous and practical in your preaching and practice of ministry. I think that little by little we can start detaching exhausted pastors and congregations from the failed promise of the ELCA’s institutional enthusiasm that results from taking the third article of the Creed and asserting that the Holy Spirit exists in the church’s institutions and initiatives. Putting the Spirit back to its more proper work of preaching the gospel is the essential task of Crossings and all of us who are tired of crumbs and magic beans and who remember what our call is.
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An editor’s quick addendum—
Matt spoke just now of the Crossings program for mentoring preachers. We are starting to recruit participants for our 2026 cohort. Thanks to the Neeb Family Foundation, funder of the program, we’ll have twelve positions available this fall. That’s five more than we were able to offer last year. If you know of a preacher who is eager to grow in their ability to communicate the Gospel, encourage them to send us a note. Address it to me, Jerry Burce. —JB
