More On Lutheran Converts

Yesterday we blogged about the findings of the 2023 Lutheran Religious Life Survey, a study of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod conducted by Lyman Stone. (Downloadable here.)

According to that data, the “confessional” congregations (characterized by a strong emphasis on doctrine and liturgical worship) are getting more converts (whether new Christians, from other churches, or from other Lutheran churches) than the “missional” congregations (characterized by church growth techniques and contemporary worship).

I wanted to delve into some of the details that the study uncovered:

“Confessional” Lutherans are more likely to report being converts than“ Missional” Lutherans, much as “Traditional” Lutherans are far more likely to report being converts than “Mix” or “Contemporary” Lutherans. However, there are some distinctions by type of convert.

The vast majority of converts from non-Christian backgrounds end up in “Traditional” LCMS churches, and
about 3 times as many self-identify as “Confessional” than as “Missional,” a much bigger disparity than
LCMS members generally. In other words: converts from outside of Christianity disproportionately end up in
“Confessional and Traditional” churches within the LCMS. That said, overall prevalences are low: only about
2-4% of LCMS members are converts from non-Christian backgrounds.

“Confessional” or “Traditional” LCMS churches also have a greater density of converts from other Lutheran backgrounds, such as ELCA or WELS. “Traditional” LCMS churches have almost twice times as many converts from other branches of Lutheranism than “Contemporary” LCMS churches. Throughout the LCMS, perhaps 10 to 20% of members are converts from other Lutheran church bodies.

However, converts from other Christian bodies besides Lutheranism are more evenly distributed. At around 8% of total LCMS members, these converts from other Protestant bodies, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy do not display a strong association with any LCMS subculture.

The takeaway from these figures is straightforward: converts make up about 32% of self-identified “Traditional” or “Confessional” Lutherans, vs. about 15-25% of other Lutherans. This difference is driven partly by higher rates of conversion. (pp. 11-12)

Looking at patterns of growth and decline, Stone concludes, “Put bluntly, growing LCMS churches are those that appeal to potential converts through sound doctrine and correction of error, and shrinking LCMS churches are those that appeal to converts through personal friendships and romantic ties” (p. 27). (“Romantic ties” refers to marrying into the church.)

Stone’s data undermines another piece of conventional wisdom about evangelism and outreach:

In terms of understanding why the people who convert to the LCMS do so, many of the classical accounts of “relational evangelism” fall flat. Mentors and friends do not appear as key figures in conversion. On the other hand, romantic ties, a sense of historically rooted community, and the pursuit of sound doctrine all appear as key factors in LCMS conversions. Romantic ties are a common component of conversion into the LCMS, yet are strongly associated with congregations seeing numeric decline: the LCMS cannot marry its way to growth.

On the other hand, churches with a greater density of converts who identified doctrinal reasons for conversion, or churches with more distinctively “Lutheran” approaches to liturgy, are showing greater resilience in the face of general synodical decline. (p. 38)

Another issue this report looks at is attitudes about race. Stone didn’t ask flat out, “Are you a racist?” Rather, Stone asked a series of questions to see if respondents held to various assumptions about “racial hierarchies.” He found belief in racial hierarchies “uncommon,” with fewer than 5% of Missouri Synod consistently believing that some races are superior to others. And most of those are among LCMS members who seldom go to church (pp. 29-31).

Photo: Faith Lutheran Church (LCMS), Sioux Falls, SD by Runner1928, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons