Rebellion in the Pew, or a Stone in the Shoe?
You may have heard about the alarming findings regarding the LCMS by the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Study. Pew’s numbers indicate that:
28% of our members either don’t believe in God, or are unsure of His existence,
25% of our members don’t believe in hell, or refused to answer,
50% of our members believe homosexuality should be accepted,
50% of our members favor same-sex “marriage,”
54% of our members believe abortion should be legal in all, or almost all, cases,
46% of our members do not believe there are absolute standards for right and wrong,
18% of our people do not believe that humans have evolved.
These numbers are sobering for a church body that has a clear, official biblical position on all of these issues.
This has caused a firestorm online. There are folks who are saying that the problem lies exclusively with our pastors, that they are all worthless and apostate, that our synod leadership is hopelessly and irredeemably woke and liberal, and that the LCMS laity needs to jettison the clergy, and really the synod, and go it alone.
Others have called the findings of Pew into question, based on sample sizes and research methodology. But it’s hard to argue this, considering that most of us are not experts in demography and sampling. But we do have someone from the LCMS world who is: Lyman Stone.
I recommend his review of the Pew findings. As an expert in this field, he does question the methodology - as well as the findings - of this research. Stone sums it up like this: “The Pew Religious Landscape Study says my denomination has gone lib. They are wrong. We are based. Their sample is gonzo.” His article is entitled: “Are Lutherans Growing? Shrinking? Liberal? Conservative? Three Surveys Disagree.” And he presents the data in such a way that you don’t have to have a PhD in mathematical modeling to understand the findings.
I encourage you to check out both the Pew findings and Stone’s response.
Lyman Stone is an impressive guy. I have not met him, but hope to. His retort to President Kieschnick on the Unite Collective Leadership podcast was masterful:
He is neither a spear-carrier for the LCMS administration, nor a knee-jerk critic. I do believe he is an objective voice of reason, whose word we can trust, based on his own expertise and years of study of the LCMS and of the larger conservative and confessional Lutheran subset of American Christianity.
He is also a leader in the natalist movement.
So, yes, we need to be wary about incursions of the world’s progressive agenda into our conservative Lutheran church bodies, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into being black-pilled. And while I do see more progressivism than I would like to see in the LCMS, I do also see a felicitous trend among the younger generation toward biblical, confessional, and liturgical traditionalism, a serious embrace of marriage and family, and social and theological conservatism.
Lyman Stone’s voice is not to be ignored.