When planning for Synod Assembly 2026, the Synod Council considered a two-day assembly an opportunity to hold one or more workshops. Lay leadership quickly presented itself as a theme.
Any congregation that has entered vacancy in recent years has become aware of the clergy shortage. Well, maybe aware is too strong a word. They know that it is taking longer and longer to find suitable candidates; they may not see the spreadsheets I see, spreadsheets that show fewer and fewer graduates from our seminaries and more and more congregations asking for first-call candidates. They may not see the location preferences and restrictions of those first-call candidates, and they may not see the general increase in the number of congregations that cannot afford a full-time compensation package for a first-call pastor. Even those congregations simply looking for a pastor to supply on Sunday morning have encountered difficulty.
Shortage, however, is not an objective concept. Shortages are in relationship to something: demand. Given a static supply, a shortage only exists when demand exceeds supply. We don’t have enough clergy to fill all the pulpits that congregations would like to have filled. Well, let’s be clear: to fill those pulpits in the way in which congregations would like to have those pulpits filled. We do have enough clergy to fill all the pulpits for preaching on a weekly basis if congregations would worship at times other than Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. On the other hand, we need to be honest and ask how many preachers want to run from congregation to congregation throughout the week. See, it is complicated. It is not just about spreadsheets; spreadsheets are simple. It is also about human desire and expectations; human beings are not simple.
St. Johannes Lutheran Church was founded the last Sunday of December 1852. St. Johannes did not call its first pastor until 1 January 1924—seventy-one years (plus a few days) of not having a pastor under call. During that time, the faithful in St. Clara (and Leopold) in Doddrige County saw a pastor once per year (twice if it was a really good year). Often taking the train from as far away as Wheeling, WV, and then traveling nearly twenty miles by horse and carriage, pastors would come for a few days, lead a communion service, bless graves, confirm, baptize, and marry. More importantly, for the purposes of our conversations, what did the congregants do? They gathered every other Sunday for worship: the prayers were said, hymns were sung, Holy Scripture was read, a sermon was read from a book (three books over this course of time because they wore out two of them). They read their Bibles (and other spiritual books), they joined in family prayers, they recited their Catechism, they visited the sick (often with a meal being brought), they buried their dead, and they consoled one another with the Words of Christ. Seventy-one years!
At the end of the American Revolution, there were 7.5 pulpits for every one Lutheran pastor in this new nation. Knowing that the larger, well-heeled congregations could engage a pastor full-time, the math suggests that many congregations were dealing with a much worse ratio. If I remember correctly, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was at one point serving thirteen congregations simultaneously across multiple counties while traveling on horseback (but that was before the Revolution).
Even as the nation expanded, frontier areas always faced challenges. A friend recently shared that Tonseth Norwegian Lutheran Church, Erhard, MN, sometime after their 1888 establishment, elected its first pastor who was required to conduct 12 worship services annually, eight on Sundays and four on weekdays (thank you, Pr. Ryan Stoudt, for this historical nugget). Some parts of central Appalachia continued to reflect frontier conditions well after places west of the mountains boomed in population. Other communities have returned to those conditions following the collapse of the extractive industry economy.
So, demand is as subjective a concept as shortage. St. Paul’s, Aurora, is an example of demand being significantly different in that place compared to most of our other congregations, as Aurora has opted for the regular Sunday morning services of a pastor on a monthly rather than weekly basis (in addition to having other limited expectations for pastoral service).
I have mentioned to previous Assemblies that the number of congregations is decreasing at a much slower rate than the number of congregants decreases. This is often attended with challenges in the areas of fiscal and human resources. If the number of clergy is a fixed percentage of the total membership of the denomination, it stands to reason that the ratio of congregations to clergy will increase (n.b.: I did not just write “ratio of clergy to congregations”). In fact, the ratio of clergy (not counting retired clergy) to the total membership of the denomination is decreasing.
One way to put a pastor in every pulpit—that’s hyperbole—is mass merger, consolidation, and closure of congregations (in other words, decrease the demand such that the supply is adequate). That is not something the synod can do, as our polity leaves the existence of congregations largely in the hands of the congregations—you can all breathe a sigh of relief. Or can you? Just as much as the synod cannot close congregations (except in very rare cases), the synod cannot manufacture clergy out of thin air, and the synod can most certainly not compel clergy to work for less than a living wage in places they might not want to live.
So, a congregation that is in a challenged position with respect to securing clergy has a choice (more than one, actually). It can consider the economies and diseconomies of merger, consolidation, or multi-point cooperation in a bid to secure clergy, or it can consider how it will do what a congregation must do as a congregation without the benefit of full-time or regular clergy.
There was a time when we talked about empowering lay leadership in the terms of the priesthood of all believers (not infrequently reinterpreted through a quasi-erastian egalitarianism). Now, we need to talk about lay leadership in the way that frontier churches did. I almost used the term necessity, but necessity suggests that we do not have a choice. We have choices. If, however, we choose to maintain the pulpits we have, in light of the supply available, a new approach (which is actually the really old approach) to lay leadership will be in order.
This lay leadership is not just about worship—we tend to fixate on worship (for obvious reasons). Confirmation ministry and the cure of souls (spiritual care) needs to be part of the conversation. At the same time, more and more, I hear of congregations challenged in managing their temporalities, especially when it comes to finding treasurers, secretaries, and even council [vice] presidents. Consequently, the workshops will deal with these two areas.
I could lecture on history, sharing with you how our ancestors did it, but I suspect the last thing anyone wants is that. Instead, the workshops that we will be holding as part of our Assembly, inspired by the telling of stories of ministry from around our synod during my last report to you, invites those already doing it to share their stories. We’ll probably do better learning from each other and, from that, imagining for ourselves what is possible.
Caveat congregationes grandes: Large, fiscally sound congregations that currently have a pastor are not immune to the challenges posed by the clergy shortage. Vacancies happen, and during what will be longer and longer vacancies, lay leadership will prove critical.
✠ Riegel
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