Thank you for the followup – the insider information is useful!

On the other hand, this might force the ELCA (although perhaps for the wrong reasons) to really engage in some reevaluation of what it does as on a churchwide basis and how it does it. We’ve long had too many staff positions and programs, many with too little impact on the local congregations of our church. All this while, the support for the seminaries, for example, continued to decline over the years, and has been much too low. But keeping certain programs alive seems to have been a greater priority among ELCA leaders. (Seminary support from the ELCA should be 100% of each seminary’s budget, ideally. This is most unfortunately probably not currently realistic, but it still should be a our goal, probably combined with having fewer seminaries.)

Perhaps it is time to move more and more to actually using the membership of our church to actually do the work of the church. That is to say, things like coordinating certain kinds of ministry do not need to be done by paid staff in Chicago, but by those being coordinated or by volunteer leader groups of (lay or clergy) church members. Task forces should be able to work electronically and by telephone, and need little or no staff support except when they need to communicate their work to the church at large. This might mean some things take longer, and we will need to change how some things are done, but it should also move things closer to what the church is supposed to be (i.e. much less a corporation type entity and more a body of believers working in God’s kingdom).

As background, I’m an ELCA pastor, just recently deployed through a companion synod program to do pastoral ministry in another country. This means that I’m paid by my synod, and I’m not a GM staff member; until this summer, I barely knew any of them, and had the same impression that you do.

But because we are rostered personnel, and our call has to come through the ELCA Church Council, my wife and I were required to spend several weeks in Chicago, for GM “orientation.” Most of it was pretty good — much better than I expected — and it included some reasonably frank discussion about these issues. Here are some of the things I learned:

1. There are surprisingly few pastors doing non-pastoral work, like the guy you describe. That used to be more common, but has become less so. I did meet a pastor who was going to work in an exotic place as a church accountant, which sounded odd until you realized that he was also a CPA. Most GM field staff seemed to be either skilled specialists in long-term positions, or eager volunteers in the short-term ones.

2. Companion parish and synod relationships are clearly understood to be the growing edge of ELCA global mission. There is certainly some internal resistance to this — the old pros who prefer a centralized model — but less than you might think.

3. But those companion synod/parish relationships are not all equally well-thought-through. In some cases, they result from a brief spurt of unsustainable generosity, and raise expectations of a continuing relationship which doesn’t materialize. In others, they create ministries which actually compete with existing ELCA or other Lutheran work in the same region. And in many cases, because the GM unit doesn’t know about them, and in some cases even synod bishops don’t know about them, they are difficult to track, report and coordinate.

4. Needless to say, the burden of straightening this out falls on the national church — meaning GM. And to do that, as well as to support the now fairly small number of foreign missionaries, the ELCA really needs a staff of skilled professionals in Chicago, who can handle the paperwork and logistics.

I’m very concerned about who on the staff may have been let go, because nearly every one seemed to have a distinct and important role.

One of the neat things that we’ve done lately (I’m not for sure when this started) is the ‘partnership church’ program – our congregation is “partnered” with a companion church in Tanzania as are other congregations in the synod. We’re not providing support “through” the ELCA offices – we’ve been dealing with them in a very one-on-one kind of relationship.

Lutheran World Relief is also doing some really amazing work out there – I’m always a bit confused as to why the ELCA appears to duplicate efforts with LWR (such as “ELCA World Hunger” or the “ELCA Good Gifts” catalog sent with copies of the Lutheran) when we could be focusing more on our partnerships with other Lutheran churches and parachurch organizations.

An aside: I listened to an interview with Pr. Matt Harrison – the director of “LCMS World Relief and Human Care” where he described the model they use for relief: instead of working “as the LCMS” they work more to support churches in areas around the world effected by disaster. His primary example was using Indonesian and Indian Lutheran churches as the ‘conduit’ for the relief efforts they could provide, which allowed the local congregations and churches to direct aid to where it was needed “locally to them”. That struck me as a good model in the way that LWR/Oxfam is providing aid – instead of the old model of shipping all relief goods and services, use the local providers where you can to provide those goods while rebuilding (and not crushing) their local economies, hopefully averting an economic disaster as well as a natural one.

In summary, I wonder if in the midst of the turmoil there isn’t an opportunity to create a ‘better model’ for the work we want to do. I think that sometimes we get the role of the things that should be ‘top down’ confused with the things that should be ‘bottom up’ and what we should use ecclesiastical and national structures *for*.

(An example: I sat in a session where one of the ELCA mission developers was talking about his work in the developing world, etc. – and was somewhat baffled that he as a trained clergyman was giving a talk on agriculture in the developing world…. to a congregation that included several professional agricultural economists and planners who understood the nuts and bolts of agricultural planning and operation far better than the presenter was communicating. It seems we might be better off if we find ways to support our laity to do some of this kind of mission work rather than having trained clergy “playing out of position”.)

If we’re committed to building a diverse church, as well as to thinking of ourselves as part of a global communion, our global mission is a big part of that picture.

In New York, at least, we have only been able to reach some immigrant communities because of pastors from the Chinese, Indonesian, and Latin American Lutheran churches (among many others).

Continued support for our partnership in ministry with those churches abroad has a direct payoff for our church at home.

The churchwide office has been through one round of budget & staff cuts after another. It’s time to admit that we need a whole new model for the ELCA’s structure which will be much smaller and cheaper. (Eventually this probably will include saying bye-bye to the Higgins Rd tower but this isn’t time to be selling commercial real estate.)

Wyvetta Bullock may have been more prophetic than she realized when she said the ELCA will be doing less with less. Our denominational membership loss has been slow but steady (well, maybe not all that slow) and there is no reason to think that will change. (Susan, I think the improved finances of the past few years was due primarily to our fake national prosperity which is now so deflated.) We need to drastically rethink what can be realistically expected of the ELCA’s churchwide and even synodical expressions.

The ELCA’s multi-cultural ministry strategy is a good example of the consequences of its “magical thinking.” At its inception the ELCA set a goal of 10% minority membership yet never had any real idea how to achieve this or what resources it would take.

Here in the Chicago area this resulted in many minority congregations being started but without commiting the money to support them over the longhaul. It was just assumed they would transition into financial independence like any other mission start. There have been some successes but more have been “flaming out” as their mission subsidies come to an end, with understandable frustration and disappointment.

A similarly impossible model is our method of pastor preparation. Seminary graduates enter ministry with ever larger student debt loads while fewer and fewer congregations are paying the so-called synod “miminum” salary. A growing number are not even pretending anymore that they can support a full-time pastor. A 4-yr graduate degree and 5-figure debt load for a part-time job? I don’t think so. On top of that, we continue to maintain EIGHT seminaries.

The times they are a changin’ but the ELCA isn’t changing nearly fast enough to keep up.

A) Senior staff are typically offered ‘early retirement’ as there are some age-discrimination-test things that can happen if folks over a magic age (55?) are laid off.

B) Don’t forget ‘crossed the boss’ on the list of reasons that some people are selected to lay off. Hopefully that is not the case in this deal.

My apologies – I meant “Lutheran Church of Hope” in West Des Moines whose contributions (thanks for the tip!) are listed for 2008 as ~$100,000 to the ELCA and ~$1,000,000 to “Other Benevolence”. (They’ve gradually shifted from giving to the ELCA with a high of about ~$500,000 in 2004 apparently.)

… and I appreciate the notion that you can understand the “ELCA” and Lutheranism in a global context; I think a great many of us (including myself) often cannot.