This is Keith and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. Well, we've got a great response that's been coming through on Reddit, so we want to talk a little bit about that real quick. We've been getting comments on the ELCA subreddit. If you're not familiar with Reddit, that's Reddit.com slash r slash ELCa. And there are a bunch of ELCa Lutheran folks that talk about topics. There's some interesting topics there. Like someone was looking for a congregation in the Minneapolis area. They brought up a map and my goodness, it's hard to choose from all those dots. Anyway, I've been bringing up this podcast, and probably most of our listeners come from there, I'm guessing at this point. And we've gotten some feedback and some suggestions, and we really thank you for that. And we've got a ton of suggested topics. But it's important to note, I want to say that what we're trying to do with this podcast is to lay a foundation for further topics. So we're going to introduce the ELCA to some folks that have never heard of this before or have heard the name and don't know what it means. And we're trying to look at all the things that we talk about from a perspective of someone who's new to the denomination or someone who's a casual observer, maybe from outside. And so I really appreciate all the discussions that happen on Reddit. I think they're very honest, and there are a lot of good people talking about things that are very important to them, and everyone is treated pretty respectfully, and that can be an unusual thing on Reddit. And I really appreciate that. Certainly any kind of forum this past week, of course, we're recording well before you're going to hear this, but there was a question from a, a username is, I believe, user a, amen a. We're not sure if that's pig Latin or what, but the question was, what's the deal with church membership in the ELCA? And then there was some additional stuff there, but that's the key part to it. What is membership like in the ELCA? And that's a pretty important topic to me right now because this past Sunday I just joined my congregation. I've been participating with this congregation for nearly two years, and I was asked a few weeks ago whether I wanted to be a new member. And I said, sure. And so on that Reddit post, I commented and I answered quite a bit. And so that really brought this topic up for me, and something I think we should talk about. So as we move into our main topic here, that's what we're going to talk about. Membership. So, Keith, what does it mean to be a member of the ELCA?

Yeah. So to be a member of the ELCA, you are a member of an ELCA congregation? Every congregation has their own constitution, and while they all vary a little bit, they're primarily based on what's called the model constitution for congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which I think we've got a link to that we.

Do in the episode.

Yeah, yeah. So that if anybody wants to see what one of those might look like, it's available there. So you're a member of the congregation when your constitution says you are. Is there any more to it than that?

Well, I think it varies by congregation. We know for sure that church membership is for baptized members of the church. Sometimes it requires that you be of a certain age to be a full voting member of the church. So most congregations allow kids who are confirmed to be voting members. But adults don't necessarily have to go through a catechism class or confirmation. Sometimes churches will require that new members go through a new membership class just to go through the basics. One important part is that you must desire to be a member. I think that's just key for membership of anything. But I was kind of wondering, are pastors always members of the churches they are pastors of?

By and large, yes. If you are what's called a, called pastor to a congregation, like I am at the church that I serve at, I am a member of this congregation. Interim pastors who are only there for a short amount of time may or may not be members of that congregation. And then you've got pastors who are in different roles in the world, like college or seminary professor or hospital chaplain or military chaplain, and their roles may or may not have an actual congregation attached to them. So they might be a member someplace else. But, yeah, basically, most pastors are members of the congregations that they're serving. And even if you're a pastor who's not serving a congregation, in order to still be considered a pastor in the LCA, you have to be a member somewhere.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah. So would somebody want to join the congregation? What would be in it for them?

This is kind of the difficult part. Right. Because what does a church do for a member that it doesn't do for everybody else? Isn't that kind of the point of the church to do good stuff out in the world? And so if we restrict it just to members, that's not a very churchy sort of thing, I would think. But that said, the church organization itself is a legal entity, and so the government requires that we have members, like if we have an LLC, a limited liability company, that would have what the state calls members, and those are the people who own it. And so in a way, when you become a member, you own it and so you get a vote. Churches generally, and I'm pretty sure this is true everywhere, require that in order to hold office in your church. If you're going to be a president of the church council, if you're going to be a committee chair perhaps, or the secretary of the church council, any of those things that you would need to be a member. And so to hold office, you would have to be a member. One thing that we can't discount is that you do get personalized offering envelopes in most congregations. And so you get your name on it, you get a number assigned to you so they can track your giving. Now, that's less important. Now, I'm going to say most of the people in my generation and younger are more used to electronic payments. And so an envelope doesn't work very well over the Internet, but it's still a piece of that. And it's convenient to have an offering envelope. If you want to have your certain offering designated a certain way, that envelope gives you a chance to do that. And we do that electronically too, but it's still the action of putting something in the plate. And the other part is, we mentioned the constitutions. The link that we've got goes to the model constitution and for the ELCA and Synod constitutions. And what those constitutions for the synod and the congregations, I'm sorry, for churchwide, for ELCA, they say that in order to vote at synod assemblies and the churchwide assemblies, you must be a member of a congregation, and so you're picked as a representative to go. But congregation can't pick someone who is not a member. So, Keith, why does the church want people to be?

Because, you know, like every other organization, we measure ourselves by numbers.

Unfortunately, that's.

It's somewhat. I mean, there are moments of tangibility in this conversation, but there is a lot of intangibles, too. Some of the tangibles are joining a congregation gives, because it is something for us as Lutherans that you do in the context of worship. There are other people there. All right, so you're not received as a member, like at a little private ceremony in your home. You're doing this in church on a Sunday morning or a Saturday night, whenever the service is. And so the rest of the congregation gets to recognize you, say, wow, you're a new person. I now know your name. We welcome you here. We are glad to have you with us. It also sometimes helps to clarify the difference between someone who is a visitor, even a frequent visitor, a regular visitor, and somebody who is considered more of what you might say, a committed part of the congregation, committed part of the community. One of the things that the lutheran church teaches is that we have a doctrine known as the priesthood of all believers, that it's not just pastors and deacons and church professionals who do the ministry of the church. It's Everybody. Every member of the congregation is in ministry in some way that might be volunteering in worship in some way. Maybe you are a lecter. You read a lesson. Maybe you are a member of the choir. Maybe you are a musician in some capacity or an usher. Maybe you volunteer in the food pantry on another day of the week. Maybe you help out tutoring kids in the youth center on Tuesday nights or something like that. But it also means that the ministry of the church is done outside of the church also. So if you volunteer at the library or at the hospital, if you teach in your profession, in schools, that is your ministry, that is using the gifts that God has given you to make the world a better place in big ways and in small ways, being a member of the church helps to sort of formalize that and name it and claim it. So there's a famous quote from an episcopal bishop from the mid 20th century named William Temple, and he was famous for once stating that the church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members. And that's an interesting thought, because I think it does also highlight the importance of membership in the ministry of the church. Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. So churches are, we want people to become members not just because of the annual reports that we fill out, where we record numbers of people who have joined, people who have died, number of marriages and deaths and confirmations and baptisms that we've done, and numbers of people that have joined the congregation, numbers of people that have left the congregation, but because the work of the church is done by its members. Yeah.

It is kind of important to have those reports, though. It's important for us to know how the denomination is doing year to year. How do we feel now? Those numbers haven't looked great for a long time.

Yeah. And it's interesting that some of these questions get tied up in the fact that not only are we a religious organization in the United States, we are legal entities. Right. The ELCA is a legal entity. Each of its individual congregations are legal entities in the states that they occupy.

And if you read the constitution for the ELCA, you'll see it reference as the corporation and the corporation of the synod and its order and structure.

Yeah. So part of the reason why it's important that we know who our members are is because legally speaking, we have to. Like any other nonprofit organization, you got to know who your members are because they're the ones that vote and make decisions on how the organization does its work.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Why would somebody not be a member of a.

You know, sometimes you just don't feel like. Keith and I have talked about how some people just, they. Maybe they got burned bad by their last congregation. You'll see that a lot with maybe folks that, that are called exvangelicals, high commitment churches that require so much. The last thing they want to do is to put their name down as a member and suddenly be on committees again.

Right.

Sometimes that's the key to getting you onto a committee, is becoming a member. And so that's a completely valid reason not to join. And our congregations need to be understanding of that. I think some folks attend multiple churches. I think of my parents, they attend a church and then they go other places as far as hours away because a relative is at that church that Sunday or something. And so they would maintain membership at one church, but they would go to, maybe each month they might go to three or four other churches just because of the things that they do. Historically, seniors might keep a membership in a congregation. One reason is a congregation that they're a member of. Say, if they're here in Michigan, we've got snowbirds that go down to Florida for five or six months. And so they will go to a church down there, but they won't become a member of that and they'll maintain their membership here. Or if they're looking at locating down to Florida permanently, they will make that transition by moving their membership there and just attending when they're up here with the rest of their family or if it's offered having an auxiliary or an associate membership. And congregations can have that as a sort of a second tier of membership. So there are lots of reasons why people don't become members. It's fine. It doesn't really hurt the congregation not to have members. But a lot of times I think the congregations like to know that you actually like what's going on and want to participate more fully. And so that's a lot of times why congregations are maybe a little pushy on being members.

Yeah. And then sometimes the reverse can happen, too. You can have a church, somebody who's attended a church for a long time, and somebody will ask them, well, why aren't you a member? And they say, well, nobody ever asked me.

Exactly. That's happened to me before, and it's also happened to me that nobody's asked me. But I got put on anyway, and so I don't think that's not good church order, but it has happened in my experience, so it's possibility.

How did becoming a member at unity go?

It was interesting. The church, it worships about 20 to 60, I'd say, on Sundays. This last few weeks has been pretty heavy with attendance. I think part of it is that people go to church before the Lions games, and so by the time this comes out, I think we'll be up to Super bowl weekend. But with the lions in the playoffs, people are really praying a lot. So I think that's part of it. But we had 15 new members, even though sometimes we'll only have 20 people at church. And so 15 new members, a bunch of them were sick, and so that's unfortunate, but we had new families, we had couples. The pastor's wife was there becoming a member. We called our pastor back in the fall, and then there was me by myself. My family hasn't committed yet, but I'm there, so I got a certificate. Our pastor had shoulder surgery, she had a shoulder replacement, and so she couldn't sign the certificate. But it's still valid, and it's pretty funny. And I think the typical response to memberships for a lot of churches is, oh, I thought you were already a member. And I sort of got that sort of thing. I got a lot of handshakes with a wink, like, well, you've really been a member all this time anyway, right?

You've been around for a while. I've been around for a while.

I've done a lot of stuff. And, of course, the most important part of this is, after all of that, we had. Yeah.

Nice. What kind?

It was, you know, a nice swirl.

Yeah, I like a marble. I. I mentioned to you, Ben, before we started this episode, this is a topic that I struggle with kind of personally and pastorally. There's, like, an analogy that I use a lot that I think is a valid analogy, and yet it's only an analogy. It's only as good as the imagery that it calls up. And the analogy is to marriage. And say that you can visit a congregation and do almost everything, except there's a couple of things that we named earlier in the segment, like being a voting member of the congregation is something you have to be a member to do, but you can be in the choir. You can often help teach a Sunday school class or go on a mission trip, or volunteer in the food pantry or help out in whatever way you want, even if you're not a member of the congregation. But I think that just like marrying states a commitment by two parties that is in some ways perceived as being greater than simply moving into the same address. Joining the congregation is a sign of commitment, both on the part of the person joining and of the congregation, to love and support one another in this mutual work that we're engaged in. It goes back to that notion of the priesthood of all believers, that all of the members of the church are the ones engaged together in its ministry. And there's a commitment behind that, through good and bad and rich and poor, that I value as a person and as a pastor. But when somebody asks, well, my gym membership gives me these benefits, what does my church membership give me that's harder to quantify?

Voting every six months doesn't really get you much.

Yeah, that's it.

Well, one of the things that we do need to, I think one thing to keep in mind is that I would say the younger generations, we are generally resistant to joining. I think. I think that has to be said.

Although, Ben, to include you and I in younger generations is being, I think, a little overly generous, perhaps.

Well, I think Gen X sort of started the trend of not being members of things like Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, the Kiwanis, the Lions Club, the Masons, every membership organization in the country is declining, whether or not it is finely tuned to whatever. Even the boat clubs, the yacht clubs, the athletic clubs, the country clubs are also having that problem.

Yeah, absolutely.

When we talk about membership in the church, a lot of times what we look at is the decline of membership. And if we put that into perspective, everything, every kind of club is seeing a reduction. And so I think that's important. What's also important, though, is a catechism question.

Absolutely. So last week's catechism question was, again, looking at the ten Commandments. And the question was, which commandments focus on people's relationships with each other? And since the question before that had been which commandments focus on people's relationship with God and the answer to that question was numbers one through three. Well, that leaves numbers four through ten being the answer to which commandments focus on people's relationships with each other.

Yes.

What's our new question, Ben?

Our new question this week is, who wrote the small catechism? Okay. This is multiple choice, so even if you know the answer, if you've blurted it out loud, just erase it and listen for your letter. So was it Martin Luther King, Jr. That's A, B, Martin van Buren, C, Martin Luther, or D, Dean Martin? Now, make sure that you share that with us on Facebook, Instagram and threads, or apparently on Reddit, on the ELCA subreddit, and we will get you the right answer here in a couple of weeks upon our next episode. Yeah, but I think that does it. It's so great to talk about this. I think membership is a big issue and something that a lot of people have questions about whether or not they've become a member of a church or if they've been one for a really long time.

Yeah. It also is one of those things that really varies from place to place, denomination or tradition to denomination or tradition, and even congregation to congregation. It's fun to examine those differences. I think they make us richer.

Absolutely. Oh, I have one more announcement before we're done, and that is that I learned that I finished my last LlM class. It was sort of anticlimactic because I'd actually finished it back in November and thought I had one more to go, but I don't. And so I begin my internship right now. And so I'm pretty excited about that nine months of internship. And then I'll tell you when I'm done with that, and then I don't know what happens after that.

Well, will you know when it's done or will you have to keep going for a little while?

I'm going to set an alarm on my alexa.

Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Foat. You can reach us at [email protected] mainstreetlutherans.com. On the Internet or on the socials, as at Lutherans right now. That would be Facebook, Instagram. And the show is produced by folk media Productions. Until next time, go in peace. Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.