With a whopping six posts so far in 2022, one has to wonder if Congregations Matter is going to dust off the old Model T and take her out for an political joyride. After all, next year is a presidential election in our synod.

In case you have forgotten, CM is a now-moribund political organization that crawled back in their hole after their failed bid to oust President Harrison in 2019. Their methodologies were disgraceful and embarrassing, and everyone involved in their “movement” (and I can think of no better term…) should be utterly ashamed to have ever been associated with them.

In case you need to be reminded of CM, or have never heard of them, here is my January 2019 piece entitled “Glossy Lies.” And here is their so-called “Congratulations” to President Harrison on his election. Just to get you up to speed, other Gottesblog reporting on “the movement” (imagine what Luther would have done with that!) can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

To empirically prove that they are misnamed, that they should be called “Politics Matters” instead of “Congregations Matter,” just look at their productivity. Prior to the July 2019 election, beginning in April 2017, CM posted 48 times. Then President Harrison won the election. CM went “radio silent” for 17 months. I guess the congregations didn’t matter very much after their election bit the dust. In the three years since CM’s candidates crashed and burned, they have posted a whopping eight times. So it’s not really about congregations at all. It’s about elections, because “Politics Matters” to them more than does congregational life - which goes on no matter who wins elections.

But there may be a rattle in those old dry political bones yet! The Naples, Florida Pak-n-Ship sure could use the business! For CM has posted six times this year, and we are now within a year before a synod election! I wonder if the glossy postcards will be coming back. I sure hope so. They gave me a lot of fodder to write about, and they served as the canary in the outhouse to show us the state of the progressive wing of the LCMS.

You can’t blame our seasoned-citizen politicos for slowing down a bit. They are more than a few knee replacements from the good old days of rolling around in the mud at Woodstock. In fact, one has to wonder if their webmaster is running the whole thing with a flip phone.

As the kids say, “OK Boomer.”

Check out their “news” tab. The most recent “news” includes one from just before the last election in July 2019. The “candidates” tab is kind of an admission that they’re really not about congregations at all, but rather all about synod elections. The “essays and articles” tab is a sewage-fest of lurid CNN-like muckraking, manifestations of Harrison Derangement Syndrome (HDS). One has to wonder if, in their anonymity (click here and scroll down to the bottom), Hunter Biden is one of them. Clearly, they are oblivious about how they look - especially when their hysterical predictions about what would happen to synod if President Harrison were re-elected (“EVERYBODY PANIC!”) were about as accurate as the prophecies of the priests of Baal.

Their “Advisory Team” is comprised of four people - with four “former” titles attached to their names. They should start a 1960s tribute band and call it “The Formers.” This achievement is only topped by the latest political move of the LCMS progressive wing - the distribution of a tedious book to delegates of a certain saltwater district convention called The Great Sending. And no, it’s not a book by the cultist Ellen G. White (though the title is pretty close). I’ve got some writing in the hopper about this dud already. Kyrie eleison! But the point is that of the fifteen contributors, or as they are called in the book: “A Consortium of Missional Authors” (yes, “contributors” is not pretentious enough for this crowd), there are only fifteen people, but the word “former” is used as a title in the bio page 21 times! It calls to mind Luther’s quip that there were only twelve apostles, but eighteen of them are buried in Germany.

But at any rate, CM’s “about” tab is actually honest in its first line: “For several years we have been silent…” Well, of course. The whole point wasn’t to support congregations. This was a political hit project to take out President Harrison. And thanks be to God is was a failure. Hence their inactivity in saying anything to our supposedly oppressed congregations who supposedly matter to them.

So let’s just wait and see if The Formers go out on tour again. Maybe the warm-up band will be the The Has-Beens. It will be fun if they do.

Meanwhile, as I said before, “We [at Gottesdienst] are the real Congregations Matter, because congregations are people gathered around the pulpit, font, and altar to participate in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The essence of the Gospel is Christ proclaimed and distributed sacramentally. That happens in real congregations, in the liturgy, not in running slick, phony, cringe political campaigns.

And we have certainly written more than eight articles since the 2019 election. Why? Because indeed, we actually believe that Congregations Matter™.