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...

In the first release of this piece, I made a methodological error  by taking total institutional cost of education and treating it as if it were an annual per‑student cost . That was careless. I own that mistake without qualification, and I regret the confusion it created. I am grateful to those who challenged the data directly and forced a needed re‑examination. This revised version now relies strictly on ATS‑reported “Cost to Educate per Student” annual figures , which are publicly...