A Clearer View Than Ever Before For years, conversations about pastoral shortages have been shaped by anecdotes and local experience. Recently, tools like AI have made it possible to quickly gather and analyze publicly available data from LCMS reports and related sources. We are especially grateful to Pastor Rob Bailey, whose initiative in leveraging these tools helped bring greater clarity to the conversation. His work has made it easier to see patterns that were previously difficult to...

There’s a chart making the rounds that shows membership trends across major U.S. denominations since 2000. It’s not a pretty picture. Most churches are shrinking, some rapidly. But three denominations stand out in green: the PCA, the ACNA, and the Assemblies of God. They’re not just surviving. They’re growing. Meanwhile, the LCMS is down roughly 34%. So the questions are obvious: What do those growing churches have in common? & What might the LCMS be missing? What the Growing Churches Are...

A Demographic Moment We Cannot Ignore Over the next one to two decades, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is likely to experience a significant, but temporary, surge in estate and bequest giving. The reason is straightforward: the LCMS is older than the U.S. population as a whole, with a large concentration of Baby Boomers entering the final chapters of life. When people age, estates are settled. Giving rises, and then inevitably, it falls. What matters most in this moment is how leaders...