First Look at the LCMS Presidential Election 2023

The holder of the office of President of Synod has a great impact on the life of our churches. The clearest example from the past several years came in 2016 when Gottesdienst invited President Harrison to speak at one of our events about supporting the repeal of the “Wichita Exception” to AC XIV. We don’t flatter ourselves to think that this conference led to the success of the repeal, but there is no question that without President Harrison’s active support it never would have happened.

 So while we here at Gottesdienst are chiefly concerned with the conduct of the Church’s liturgy, there is no escaping the fact that who leads the Synod greatly affects all of churchly life, including worship. Thus we have a long history of keeping an eye on the election cycle (you can search 2019 for both Fr. Beane’s and my own analysis).

 So who’s running for President of Synod? The basic analysis we provided in the past still holds. In one corner, President Harrison represents continuity with our Confessional Lutheran forefathers. He’s been seeking to “keep the message straight and get the message out” since 2010. He led the charge to restore AC XIV. He’s been busy appointing Confessional leadership via the prior approval process. He somehow achieved unanimous support from the COP (alongside the two seminary faculties) in suppressing “online communion” in the midst of the Covid insanity. He’s launched investigations into shenanigans at Mequon and Austin. Nobody’s perfect, and all of us charged with pastoral leadership make our fair share of missteps: but with President Harrison you know what direction he’s going to lead us. He loves his Grandfather’s Church and sees his mission as leading that church to face the same old enemies in a new and changing world.

 In the other corner there bustles the Coalition of Those Dissatisfied with Your Grandfather’s Church. These are the folks who support one or more of the following, but usually not all: open communion, praise bandy worship, women’s ordination, a flexible view of doctrine and practice, a missional outlook, an ecumenical outlook, and new for 2023: those enamored with critical race theory.

 This Coalition of the Dissatisfied, like the Borg, has been learning from each electoral defeat and adapting. In 2013 they took the year off: Harrison was elected first in 2010 and the Missouri Synod is never going to give a President less than 6 years.

 In their first try at a competitive election in 2016, the Coalition of the Dissatisfied tried to run a popular former speaker of the Lutheran Hour and sitting seminary president. Harrison was reelected with nearly 57% of the vote. 

 In 2019, they tried something else: a popular district president from a large district in the heartland of the Synod. Our final analysis of the question, “What is the 2019 election for President of Synod about?” boiled down to three points:

 * Ministry. Finish the 2016 convention’s work of ending the anti-AC XIV lay ministry program via training, ordination, and attrition of those who refuse to be called and ordained vs. Make the Synod Michigan when it comes to lay deacons. [2023 update: In 2016, there were 331 LLDs, today there only 11 which are still being phased out after 104 were ordained and the rest….well, is “attrited” a word?]

 * Overall direction of the Synod. Self-consciously confessional vs self-consciously American Evangelical. [2023 Update: steady as she goes. The norm in Synod publications is liturgical worship, pastors in clerical collars, teaching the Catechism, being Confessoinally Lutheran.]

 * CSL. Who do you want to pick the next president of Concordia Seminary St. Louis? [2023 Update: Mission Accomplished with President Egger.]

 From a political perspective, the 2019 Coalition of the Dissatisfied ran a great campaign in both the nomination phase and especially in the voter registration phase. In the end, they outperformed their nominations by 96%, but Harrison still held on with 51.76% of the final vote.

 A sitting seminary president got clobbered, a sitting district president got very close...who is left for the Coalition of the Dissatisfied to run? How about a former CUS school president who is well-known for leading the explosive growth of that institution?

So the 2023 election is shaping up a lot like the 2019 election in this regard: the Coalition of the Dissatisfied is once again afraid and/or unable to make the election about anything overtly theological. They will not campaign on reinstating Wichita 1989. They will not openly state a desire to overturn closed communion or a male-only clergy roster. They can’t: their coalition is too theologically diverse. Instead, they will stick to platitudes about being “evangelical” and “loving” and trust that each faction of their coalition will interpret those words according to their own lights.

 In 2023 the Coalition of the Dissatisfied will once again make this election about executive leadership: look at how successful our candidate made his institution! Enrollment went up! He can do that for the institution of the Synod, too!

 There is no doubt that CUW-AA expanded in enrollment during Pat Ferry’s tenure. But what kind of growth was it? Does expanding the number of paying customers translate to growing baptized membership? What percentage of students at CUW are LCMS? How many of the paying customers converted to Lutheranism while at CUW?

 So one issue will be the meaning of growth and decline in the context of a college and our Synod as a whole.

 The second issue: the governance and future of the Concordia University System. Who owns it? What’s its future? Are these Synod’s schools or are they destined by be “historically Lutheran” colleges under exclusively “local” control? Key here will be each candidate’s response to Austin’s attempt to file divorce.

 The third issue is closely related, and more explosive: critical race theory and the leftward tilt of academia in general. CUW and Pat Ferry’s tenure there is ground zero for this one.

 And fourth: Personnel is Policy.

 We will return to each of these issues in future articles. For now, make no mistake: who sits in the President’s chair matters a great deal.