At the 2007 LCMS convention a resolution entitled “To Keep Unity of Spirit in Bond of Peace” passed with nearly 90% in favor. It rather innocuously directed circuits of the synod to share in a common Bible and study of the Lutheran Confessions called “Faithful and Afire” prepared by various leaders within synod. Not terribly newsworthy. In the course of the debate over the resolution, however, an amendment was proposed to “acknowledge theological differences.” That amendment failed with 49% of the vote. All of which led one commentator to observe that, since the vote to show our unity was split nearly 50/50, the disunity at the very least is a divide between those who think we are unified and those who do not.

All of these memories of the last convention came back to me recently as a non-LCMS friend asked me to try and explain the political alignments within my church body. The usual false dichotomies—contemporary worship versus liturgical worship, missional versus doctrinal, liberal versus conservative, congregational versus synodical—don’t do justice to the complex reality that is the church-political LCMS. The real picture in Missouri is one that oftentimes finds individuals who share similar outlooks on the stereotypical divides supporting opposite candidates in the church-political world. Just because two pastors both wear chasubles on Sunday morning doesn’t mean that they will align themselves on the same side of Missouri, either church-politically or theologically.

At the risk of oversimplifying things myself, this article is my attempt to try and explain the complex world of Missouri, and why a friend is not always a friend, and an enemy is sometimes an ally. Of course there are a goodly number of folks who don’t fall into any of these categories[i] and make up Missouri’s center. But in the end, politics in Missouri isn’t driven by them. It is driven by the extremes.

One starting point for discussing church-political Missouri is to see who supports the incumbent president, Gerald Kieschnick, and who his opponents are. Here the alliances on both sides can seem nonsensical to outsiders, as people with opposing viewpoints work for a common candidate. The Kieschnick coalition includes two main groups: those who might be labeled as low-church evangelical Protestants, and those who view themselves as high-church evangelical catholics.

The low-church evangelicals include a wide spectrum of theological viewpoints, from Missouri’s charismatic group Renewal in Missouri (rim), to those who support church growth-focused contemporary worship, to those who have a strong missional emphasis in the way they believe the local parish should best be organized. While they affirm the Lutheran Confessions, the Confessions are often in the background of their mission and ministry. For their evangelistic and missional outreach, they often turn to American evangelical Protestantism, so their primary sources and model leaders come from contemporary evangelical sources. Their position however, is not completely alien to Missouri’s history. Their historical father in Missouri is Guido Merkins, one of the first to attempt the megachurch model in the LCMS in the 1960s. Despite their embrace of many American evangelical Protestant perspectives, these churches by and large maintain distinctive marks which separate them from wider evangelicalism. A Missouri charismatic is a far cry from a Bronx storefront Pentecostal church in its leadership, worship, and focus, and it is not unusual for charismatics and church-growth contemporary parishes in Missouri to celebrate the eucharist weekly.

The high-church evangelical catholics in Missouri who are a part of the Kieschnick coalition tend to be evangelical catholics who have a strong ecclesiological focus. Liturgy and the sacraments are seen as being in service to the church, not as prescriptive boundary lines for what constitutes the church, but rather as tools for both expressing and fostering the unity of the wider church catholic. It is not surprising, then, that these evangelical catholics tend to have strong ecumenical commitments, often pushing the boundaries of Missouri’s comfort level in terms of ecumenical and societal engagement. They view the Lutheran Confessions as a catholic confession of faith that was designed not to divide the church, but to argue for the inclusion of the Lutheran position within the church catholic—indeed as a catholic confession par excellence. They are careful to distinguish between the Confessions and later dogmatic interpretations of the Confessions. Their historical fathers are, among others, Arthur Carl Piepkorn and Berthold von Schenk.[ii] A Missouri high-church evangelical catholic is not bound to the peculiar Missouri forms of worship, either. They were the pastors of Missouri congregations which purchased the Lutheran Book of Worship instead of Missouri’s own hymnals because their concern for having truly ecumenical creedal texts and a reinstitution of the full eucharistic prayer[iii] trumped whatever “doctrinal weaknesses” were thought to be in the lbw.

On the surface these two different strains of Missouri have little in common; and yet they have found a common church-political leader in Gerald Kieschnick. The obvious question is, why? At their core, both sides of the coalition are in their own way asking Missouri to broaden itself, whether in ecumenical and societal engagement or whether in diversity of worship styles. The one thing that draws each side to President Kieschnick is that he is the candidate who will leave them alone. They are the 51% who voted against acknowledging that there were theological differences, not because they didn’t see them, but because their conception of the church is such that they believe that diverse perspectives can in fact be beneficial for the church.

On the anti-incumbency side of Missouri are also two rather disparate groups: a low-church, repristinationist party and a high-church group. They too seem to have little in common beyond a dislike of the direction that the Kieschnick-led Missouri Synod is headed. When President Kieschnick says, “This is not your grandfather’s church,” there is general agreement among them that this is a bad thing.

The low church anti-incumbency group tends to have a strong congregational orientation. They have a vision of Missouri that is fixed on her history, or at least their own perception of it. They are suspicious of innovations within the church in which they grew up, whether it’s innovation from the catholic side (weekly communion, chasubles, etc.) or from the evangelical side (contemporary worship, evangelism, or church growth programs). They have an immense amount of pride in their identity not just as Lutherans, but as “old-school” Missouri Synod Lutherans. While they call themselves “confessional,” they tend to read the Confessions through the eyes of later dogmatic interpreters like Francis Pieper,[iv] so they consider divergence from these particular interpretations to be anti-confessional. They also tend to view the Confessions as a document of Lutheran independence. They trace their pedigree from Walther to Pieper to the Preus family (both J. A. O. and Robert). Liturgically, these are the congregations that worshiped with The Lutheran Hymnal—the 1941 synodical conference hymnal—to the exclusion of Missouri’s own 1982 Lutheran Worship. In recent years many of these congregations have begun using Missouri’s new Lutheran Service Book, which includes the liturgical settings from tlh.

The high-church anti-incumbency group also tends to be strongly congregationally based, or at the very least suspicious of synodical authority—circuit, district, or national. They have a close affinity with like-minded liturgical Lutherans in Missouri and have cultivated these contacts through internet blogs and discussion groups. They have a strong commitment to doctrine and how that plays out in the liturgical life of the church. To that end, they often view liturgical form as not being a matter of adiaphora but rather as a potentially church-dividing issue. For them, contemporary worship not only gives up the traditional worship form but actually hinders the doctrinal purity that those traditional forms carried. There is also a strong emphasis on fellowship boundaries, both in worship (closed communion) and in ecumenical and societal engagement. They describe themselves as confessional, viewing the confessional documents as a catholic confession of faith that draws Lutheran boundary lines rather than establishing a broad catholic consensus where a diversity of styles and doctrine can be tolerated. Their spiritual father is Herman Sasse. The Lutheran Service Book was a great movement forward for the high church anti-incumbency group in Missouri, in that a number of catholic practices were included in a Missouri hymnal for the first time.[v]

That these anti-incumbency groups within Missouri do not exhibit the same amount of unity as the Kieschnick coalition can be seen from the past few elections where attempts at a “united list” of candidates are often met with much disagreement as to whether their candidate should be from the low-church or high-church group. What unifies them is a sense that Missouri’s boundaries need to be defended from attempts at broadening, and that unity in doctrine or “in the gospel and all its articles”[vi] must be the basis for church unity. They are the 49% who voted to acknowledge differences that to them are not only real but possibly church-dividing.

What baffles most outsiders to Missouri is why the two high-church parties in Missouri are divided. If you go into a high-church parish on either side of the Missouri divide on any given Sunday, you will find worship that is similar in its liturgical and sacramental dignity. The difference would be indistinguishable to the eye.[vii] But style is not everything. The great divide between the high-church parties is a real divide that plays itself out in smaller ways.

One side views catholic liturgy as a means of maintaining a connectedness to the wider church catholic, through time and space, while the other views catholic liturgy principally as a means of ensuring commitment to a shared catholic doctrinal purity. At the root of this divide is a difference in theological worldviews. The evangelical catholics operate with what might be called a hermeneutic of trust, while the high church anti-incumbency group tends to operate with what might be called a hermeneutic of doubt. The evangelical catholics tend to function with an assumption that the Word works and therefore they are not afraid rely on God to do what God promises to do. On the other hand, Missouri’s other high church group believes that the Word is effective but functionally operates as if the Word needs to be protected. This in turn places pressure on them to take serious the responsibility of preserving the purity of the Word for others. Viewed in this way, it can be seen as a different conception of God, His Word, hermeneutics, and the like, which then creates a different view of the confessions, doctrine, and ecclesiology, despite a shared commitment to a historic high-church liturgy.

In church-political terms, the divide between the two high-church parties in Missouri has played itself out through years of mistrust. There is a fear among high-church evangelical catholics that their high-church brothers on the other side of the church-political divide will turn on them for not adhering to their own standards of what appropriate ecclesiastical boundaries are. Many of the individuals who filed charges against high-church evangelical catholic David Benke following the post 9/11 Yankee Stadium prayer service were themselves high-church Lutherans. The fear among some evangelical catholics is that with the wrong person in power, life could be difficult and opportunities for pastoral discretion will be eliminated. Just having high-church Lutherans in power is no guarantor of safety if they have a significantly different self-understanding of the nature and purpose of Lutheranism. In the end, many high-church evangelical catholics ally themselves with the low-church evangelical Protestants because, despite their differences, there is a promise that they will be left alone.

Ultimately, do the differences matter? It depends on who you ask. Historically, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod has never had an evangelical catholic president, and yet by most measurable standards (weekly communion, eucharistic vestments, restoration of the full eucharistic liturgy, etc.) the LCMS has made tremendous strides toward an evangelical catholic form for Lutheran worship over the past fifty years. But ask individual high-church Lutherans on either side of the church-political divide and the question of who is in charge is a significant one. Significant enough to form some strange alliances.

[i] It should be noted that there are far more low-church Missouri congregations on both sides of the church-political divide than there are high-church ones. Low-church Missouri congregations also tend to be larger. One would be hard pressed to find a high-church Missouri congregation with more than a few hundred in worship on a Sunday morning.

[ii] Historically, most LCMS members of the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, which publishes Lutheran Forum, have seen themselves as inheritors and guardians of this perspective.

[iii] The 1941 synodical conference-approved The Lutheran Hymnal included only the words of institution. The 1982 Lutheran Worship truncated the eucharistic prayers which were included in Lutheran Book of Worship after the LCMS pulled out of that joint hymnal effort.

[iv] Francis Pieper was the fourth president of the lcms (1899­–1911) and also served for a time as the president of Concordia Seminary–St. Louis. His three-volume dogmatics text Christliche Dogmatik, completed in 1924 and translated into English in 1953, is still the standard dogmatic text for the LCMS.

[v] While The Hymnal Supplement of 1969, which is perhaps to date the pinnacle of catholic liturgical renewal in Missouri, was an “Authorized Worship Resource” of the LCMS, it is rarely referred to or discussed in Missouri circles today.

[vi] For a discussion of the importance in Missouri history of the addition of the phrase “and all its articles” to article vii of the Augsburg Confession, see Philip Secker’s essay, “The Gospel and All its Articles,” in the Winter 2004 Lutheran Forum.

[vii] With the very noteworthy exception of the service of laywomen alongside laymen in the eucharistic services of the evangelical catholic parishes of Missouri. Missouri evangelical catholics tend not to restrict the service of laywomen from those positions that can otherwise be filled by laymen, so it is not unusual to see them serving in evangelical catholic parishes as lay readers, eucharistic gift bearers, assisting ministers, catechists, etc. For the high church anti-incumbency party, such service would be in opposition to their understanding of the orders of creation which undergirds their opposition to women’s ordination.