This coming week, I (Pastor Jay) will be at the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod National Convention. This is a gathering of representatives from the near 6,000 congregations within our church body, representing about 1.75 million members. Each Circuit (a unit of approximately 7 nearby churches) elects one lay person (non-churchworker) and one pastor, each from different congregations to represent them at this convention. I believe this means that we will have approximately 650 voting delegates.
I am going not as a voting delegate, but as the advisory delegate from the Board of Directors of our Florida-Georgia District. You can kind of think of what I’m doing as being a third base coach for the voting delegates. It is my job to give them perspective and context as they go about the difficult task of voting on a variety of things.
What are we voting on? That’s a great question. There is a great variety of things that are up for a vote this Convention including the following:
- Approving an initiative and the finances for planting new churches in North America and training for personal witness
- Seeking new ways to assure funding for declining International mission work
- Helping to address mental health issues both within congregations and with church workers
- Encouraging the practice of house blessings in the LCMS
- Addressing some issues around human sexuality and our witness as a church body
- Further define what “proper pastoral training” entails
- Bring about a new relationship between the Synod and Concordia university schools
- Possibly elect the Synod president at the Convention instead of every congregation having a vote
- Attempt to bring about uniformity in Lutheran schools
- Talk about our church body’s relationship with race and racism
Those are just a few of the almost 90 pieces of business that the Convention will engage in, as well as the election of over 50 positions of leadership within our church body. Some of these things will seem to have no immediate impact on our local congregation, some will have a bigger impact. Please pray for clarity for those who are voting, that we would discern God’s will and follow Him.
(If you are interested, you can follow some of the action and watch some of the sessions at http://lcms.org/convention )