The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has announced a planned restructuring, or as the press release put it “a new design for the churchwide organization.” Budget realities have particularly forced the hand of the ELCA’s leadership here, with approximately 18% of ELCA churchwide staff losing jobs. Seeing people lose jobs is never good, but unfortunately financial considerations may not leave much choice for the ELCA.

Many will advance theories as to why this has come, and why this comes now. Not a few such theories will be highly charged, given the ELCA’s recent policy changes on clergy and same-sex relationships. It cannot be denied that those decisions at the 2009 Churchwide Assembly (CWA) have some impact. Somewhere around 250 congregations have completed the voting procedures to leave the ELCA (which is around 2% of congregations in the church body). There have been other congregations which have stopped sending monetary support toward the synod and churchwide organization budgets. And there have been individuals leaving or decreasing their offerings as well. Some may well claim that this is the primary cause. But coincidence is never itself reason to suggest causation. And since there are other reasons for a decline in giving, and the number of congregations leaving the denomination has so far been quite small, I do think looking elsewhere is in order. The general situation of our continuing economic doldrums is probably the single largest factor, especially since this time has been the deepest and one of the longest periods of economic decline since the Great Depression. This is superimposed upon a long term trend of declining giving evident the ELCA, and indeed in mainline denominations in general.

A Model Problem

There is another factor in the restructuring and unfortunate layoffs that should also be considered. This is one in a string of changes in structure and job losses in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s offices. I’d like to suggest that the downward trend in giving to denominational budgets and the economic turmoils exacerbate the root problem: the ELCA (and other denominations) has been overstaffed from the beginning. Indeed, this may be a problem going back to the churches before the formation of the ELCA in 1988. During the 20th century, there has been a tendency to professionalize the church, resulting in a large staff instead of a host of parish pastors and lay members being the primary functionaries of the process of governing, administering, and carrying out the work of the church body even on a non-local level. What we may be seeing is the consequences, brought to bear by significant circumstances and trends, of an unsustainable organizational structure.
Do we, for example, really need a staff of multiple people devoted to worship in our denominational offices? I’m not so sure. Now, I place a very high value on the church’s worship life, and on our liturgies. Worship and music should be planned and executed with great care. I also have nothing against the work that the churchwide worship staff has done. But we do have teachers in our seminaries and colleges, skilled staff in the publishing house, and talented pastors and musicians in our parishes that can provide guidance on worship matters, plan worship at denominational events, and provide resources for worship. Certainly, when in the midst of a major project like creating a new hymnal, a staff dedicated to that work makes sense. But on an ongoing basis? I’m not so sure. Yet that is precisely what we have. (It should be noted that I have no knowledge of the disposition of the ELCA worship staff in this restructuring, nor am I trying to pick on this particular area. It seems like a good illustration in which the church has abundant resources in many places.)

Now might be a great time to make a significant correction in the model of how a denomination, and in particular the ELCA, functions. Now might offer a real opportunity to move toward a greater reliance on the members of this church, both lay and clergy, to do things from creating and maintaining programs and useful materials to more mundane and routine governance and record keeping tasks. Alas, I fear that instead of changing our model, we will continue to see the current model shrink and concentrate.

A Deep Design Flaw

Whichever direction the ELCA may go and whatever model it might follow, I find significant flaws in the proposed structure for the ELCA’s churchwide offices. It gives short shrift to a couple of significant functions of the ELCA as a denominational entity (including one that I would consider an essential and core function of a denominational structure). It seems out of step with the ELCA’s stated priorities. And it brings a couple of types of functions together under one umbrella that could potentially raise issues of the purpose and actual or perceived integrity of those tasks.

Besides making the connections of individual Christians and local congregations concrete (for I would say that neither individuals nor congregations can truly be church independently without real, concrete, and organic connections in and to communities beyond themselves), perhaps the two most central functions and purposes for creating church bodies is to provide for mission toward the wider world and for pastoral ministry and the preparation of pastors. The first of those is maintained at a key and significant level in the new ELCA structure, for a Global Mission unit survives as part of that plan. But the second gets swallowed up in a wash of other categories and does not have its own structurally significant placement immediately below the bishop. The plan de-emphasizes this essential task, and I find that troubling.

Oversight of ministry, the seminaries, and the candidacy process certainly isn’t going to go away. The description of the Congregational and Synodical Mission unit speaks of “leadership development” and “fostering relationships with educational partners.” But neither of these necessarily means pastors and seminaries.
“Leadership development” could mean just about anything and might even be thought of as not really dealing with pastoral ministry itself at all, but looking toward developing lay leaders within congregations and synods. There isn’t anything wrong with that. Indeed, it could well be considered something many of our congregations, and the ELCA as a whole, very much needs. Further, if this rubric includes matters of pastoral leadership and support for pastors, I’m leery of the language. We’ve had a tendency to speak of pastors as “ordained leaders” or providing “pastoral leadership.” We certainly need pastors to be leaders, but we need them to be pastors first. When we start to speak of them primarily as “leaders” and what they do mostly as “leadership” we start to approach their role in a mostly secular frame that happens to be placed within a religious context or works with religious content. Instead of such a framework, we should remember that pastors are ordained for ministry, specifically the public ministry of Word and Sacrament. We need pastors to preach and teach the Word and to administer the sacraments (in all that entails, broadly, in the life of the church). And we need that to be held as a matter of great importance. Further, if we are to have pastors, we need to prepare them for ministry. This is why we have seminaries and it is important to have denominational oversight and coordination of this preparation. But here seminaries (and our colleges as well) are relegated to being called “educational partners” as if they were not integral and necessary aspects of the church, but something to which the church is only loosely connected.

If budgets give clues to what is of primary value for an organization, structures and the language we use to describe them do too. And here we have a structure that does not hold that central ministry of Word and Sacrament as one of the matters of highest importance, removing it from that top level and deflecting it downward. It becomes one of many tasks, most of which are things that really get done not by staff at a denominational office but by congregations. And, it should be noted, that these things get done by ordained ministers of Word and Sacrament and those who are fed by that very ministry. Denominational staff will not enhance discipleship themselves. But pastors and the congregations they serve will. A churchwide unit won’t revitalize congregations, but pastors and the local lay leaders they work with will. Yet nothing is specifically said about developing pastoral ministry, preparing our future pastors, and supporting pastors and their needs so that the central task of the church, to feed God’s people by Word and Sacrament that we all might reflect God’s love into the world around us. There is something seriously skewed in this sort of structure.

Church in Society

A second significant function that comes up short in the new structure is the work of what was once done by the Division for Church in Society. This too gets deflected downward. At least this activity does get some specific mention by the ELCA’s press release on the restructuring plan. It notes that the Congregational and Synodical Mission unit will facilitate “the engagement of this church in advocacy.

Still, Bishop Hanson suggested that there were two churchwide organization priorities at the heart of the structural design process. One of them was “building the ELCA’s capacity for evangelical witness and service in the world to alleviate poverty, and the work for justice and peace.” This is exactly the work that has fallen under the Church in Society banner in the past. It is no surprise that this should remain one if the denominational priorities, as one of the hallmarks of Bishop Hanson’s tenure in the Presiding Bishop’s office has been his concern for what he calls the “public church” engaging the world, especially around matters of justice, peace, and poverty. This is no misplaced priority. Yet it is curious, to say the least, that one of the two identified priorities of the church should find itself not in an equivalent place in the church’s structure, but as one function out of many. One wonders if this really is one of the priorities in designing the new structure. In any case, the new structure isn’t giving any testimony to the stated importance of these matters within the ELCA.

Mission Advancement

My final concern is about the various functions that fall within the Mission Advancement unit. This unit will bring together both fundraising and various communications matters. I really think that these should be separate functions and teams. Since “advancement” is a common word used for an organization’s fundraising efforts, this configuration could raise some concern that church communications can be practiced with an eye toward funding and receipts. It already seems to me that the communications office is very interested in promoting good news (and some of that is a good thing to do, certainly) but not so interested in honestly and bluntly sharing problematic information without varnish. That is, they see their task as providing PR; as primarily about marketing and creating good public relations, rather than about simply communicating what is going on in the ELCA, warts and all. The Lutheran is better at this, but it could still use improvement on this score. Both the Lutheran, and especially the communications office would benefit from more frequently committing journalism.

I’m especially concerned with the placement of The Lutheran under the oversight of the Mission Advancement unit. It should be and remain largely independent within the ELCA, reporting to the Church Council or even directly to the Churchwide Assembly. How likely is it to be co-opted into a mere public relations tool? It’s hard to say, but placing it under this “advancement” umbrella makes it much more likely. It’s a danger, even if remote, that is best avoided.

Structure, Budget, and Priorities

“But,” you might be saying, “cuts needed to be made because the resources aren’t there to sustain the current configuration.” And you’d be correct. The unfortunately reality is that the budget and staff of the ELCA needs to be trimmed. And that will almost certainly mean changes in structure. That isn’t the source of my disappointment and concern. Yet it should be remembered that there is nothing that makes having 2 or 3 units instead of just one inherently more expensive, or one unit inherently more cost effective, for they can still have the same staffing and the same budget allocations as individual units as they might as part of a larger conglomerate unit.

Structure is actually important, because it says something about the priorities and importance certain tasks have. Work that falls deeper into the structure seems less important, and in time can seem less essential. Additionally, without a clear advocate in the right levels of the organization, some of these tasks could be shorted even more in the future because leadership on the unit level comes to focus on certain functions at the expense of others, despite the critical nature of those functions to the whole church or its particular goals. The priorities of the structure should reflect the importance of those tasks at the denominational level. I don’t think that the new structure does that.

Perhaps the explanation for that lies in a confusion of what sort of importance and priorities are being considered here. It seems that the structural design is applying a principle of what the church needs to be doing, meaning what the people of God in congregations need to be doing. This applies the wrong criteria in the wrong context. It must be acknowledged that what is very important for the church in that context does not necessarily mean that it is also important for the denominational offices to be working on those very things. And this is perhaps the broad problem with the plan for the ELCA churchwide organization. It reflects a continuation of a problematic model for the church, which has lead to the unsustainable structure and levels of staffing in the first place, rather than more fundamentally addressing the issue. The plan means more of the same, only on a smaller scale. There are certainly alternatives that don’t require us to throw out the denominational baby with the bathwater of unsustainable staffs and structures. And some of those alternatives may actually serve the church better and foster greater engagement with the church body among the members of the ELCA.

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