This is Keith, and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. This is our 45th episode. And for our intro segment on this, this episode, we want to talk about what we want to do for our 50th episode, which is coming up. That's almost two years of us producing this podcast, since we produce it every two weeks, which is a sort of a feat that I don't think we thought we'd get to, Keith.

Certainly not. I did not anticipate going more than a year and let alone, you know, I honestly, I thought we'd met maybe 10, maybe 20 episodes and then we would have run out of things to say. But, you know, put a couple of preachers on the air together and I guess talking is not as hard as we think it is.

Well, and honestly, we wouldn't do it if folks weren't listening. So we really appreciate your. Your feedback. We get a lot of emails and things these days, so really appreciate that. So what we thought we'd do for our 50th episode coming up in a few weeks is an ask us anything thing. So what we're going to do is get some questions. If you've got questions about, about the show, about us, even little things about the elca, we may punt some of these into bigger episodes, but we'd be happy to answer these little things. So we'd love for you to email, call, message us on socials, any of those things. You know, send a carrier pigeon if you manage it with any questions you've got, and we'll. We'll try to put a show together around that.

Yeah, we've. The reason, I think that we've made it nearly 50 episodes already is that we've had people ask good questions and give us suggestions for topics for people to interview for, things about the church and what it is and what it could be. And that's, I think, what's partly what's kept us going.

Yeah. And so now for this episode, we've got a rather long interview with Dr. Mark Granquist from Luther Seminary. This is our third installment of the history that leads up to the formation of the ELCA. This takes us from basically the last 100 years from, say, 1925 to 2025. This is a rather good talk about stuff that's much more contemporary, and so a lot of folks will know some of the things that happened in this, and some of it maybe not so much. So here is Dr. Mark Grandquist.

So we are back today with Dr. Mark Grandquist from Luther Seminary to speak with us again about the history of Lutheranism. You know, we began this two. This is the third of three episodes we had, one that examined sort of the, the Reformation up until I think it was about the 19th century. And then we went from there up to the early 20th century. And now today we're going to look at roughly the last 100 years or so from about. Well, right about 1925 to 19 now. 2025. So right about the last 100 years. So. Dr. Mark Rehnquist, thank you so much for coming back to be with us again.

Well, thank you for inviting me.

Thank you. So when we left off, we had just, you know, finished talking, right, about the, the sort of turn towards modernism, if you will, in American history and how the Lutheran Church related to that. And so I, I think I could just invite you to, you know, pick us up from there and let's just see where things go.

Sure, sure. The 1920s were a very interesting time for Lutherans because it was a time of tremendous change. The, the crisis point had been the First World War. Up up until the First World War, a lot of the 19th century Lutherans were still working and singing and praying in their immigrant languages. They were hyphenated Americans, Swedish Americans, German Americans, finish Finnish Americans. And they, they were very much concerned with gathering in as many of the immigrants as they possibly could remember. Immigration didn't, Immigration was actually peaking until 1914, and then it all came crashing down. And so they fully expected that immigration would pick up again, and it didn't because the government shut down immigration. Then there was also the pressure during the First World War to become Americans to speak English. And so from 1918 to 1930, there was a very rapid transition, a linguistic tradition transition from using the immigrant languages. I mean, the, the East Coast Lutherans had been using English for a long time, but the, the bulk of the, the Lutherans, the Midwesterners, they were still using their immigrant languages. By 1930, those languages were dead. Really. I mean, it's, it's, it's a fascinating turn, and that means a whole bunch of different things. First of all, how can they justify being separate from each other if they're all using English? The languages had been a major part of the identity of those smaller Lutheran synods, and some of them were actually pretty large. And so that was the question. The other question is, how do you do Lutheranism in English? And it sounds like a funny, it sounds like a funny line at this point, but, you know, translation is an art rather than a, as a science. And how do you translate the nuances of literature, Lutheran confessional theology and worship into. Into English? The first, I gotta say the, the first. The first attempts were pretty wooden. So. So which did tremendous change.

Which did they start with? The theology or the, or the worship? The academic side or the sort of person in the pew side?

They were doing it both at the same time.

Okay.

Yeah. And it was. If you can, you can imagine it was. Some people will remember the worship wars of the 80s and 90s when, you know, the contemporary worship versus traditional worship and everything, and how people got upset about that. Well, you can imagine how, how the language transition played in congregations. I mean, it was war. It was war. You know, there's one old guy who said. He said he was asked whether God understood English and. And he thought about it for a while. And he thought about it for a while and eventually said, yeah, well, God understands English. God just doesn't like it. So you got all these changes going on. And then, of course, American society is changing. All the Roaring Twenties and then the Depression and then the, the Second World War. It was a period of time when, when a lot was changing and people felt like, you know, as they always do with change. Right. Like it's going too fast. I don't like this. I can't wait for it to happen. You know, I mean, you just imagine the social dynamics of that.

I was talking with someone fairly recently in an interview setting. He spoke of his work context, and he said, where I work, there's two things you can always rely on that they can't stand for things to say the same, and they can't stand for things to change. And I think that's true in a lot of different contexts. Can I ask you. I remember from one of our previous episodes, you were talking about, as withhranism began spreading geographically in the US that again, people are, you know, by and large staying in these cultural groups, but they're, they're moving in in the country to where the land is. And so we end up with. With sort of these pockets, some rather large pockets, some smaller ones of Lutherans in various parts of the country, predominantly in, you know, kind of the. The mid Atlantic and the, the. Perhaps the northern half of the Midwest.

Yeah.

Is there, is there any spread from that in this period? Is, Are there, are there Lutheran churches or synods forming where there had not been any in the country?

That happens after the Second World War.

Okay.

With the, with people being dispersed all over the country. It was going to be an explosion of Lutheranism in the Sun Belt in Florida, definitely not so much in the Gulf Coast. Texas. There had always been Lutherans there, but there were more now, but especially in the Southwest and California, Arizona and California. I mean they were opening Lutheran congregations in the 50s and 60s, left and.

Right, and, and that matches general demographics. People are generally moving to those areas.

Absolutely. Yeah. Again, they're, they're forming sort of, these are all Midwesterners or East Coasters and they're all forming their little, I mean, they're replicating their home. You know, they're having ludifist dinners in Arizona. I don't know if they use, I don't know if they use tortillas or not instead of love sub. I mean, you know, so yeah, they are moving, they are definitely spreading. Lutheranism is moving into places where it had not previously been.

So when that happens, then is there a standardization, I think of McDonald's? Right, McDonald's. Its key to growth was that it was uniform across from one restaurant to the next. And so if you stop in one, one town at McDonald's, you get the same thing as you do 20 miles down the road or something. Is there an element of that going on?

Absolutely. I mean the, the 20th century, especially the mid 20th century, just in everything was, there was standardization, it was larger and larger groups, you know, the scale, the economies of scale, other sorts of things like this and centralization. Okay. Before 1930 there were very little, what you would recognize as, shall I say, church headquarters, you know, it was usually run by committee of pastors or things like that. And there was a part time pastor who also was the head of the, the synod, but with the growth in size, that wasn't possible. But also the ideology of centralization, centralization was good, you know, everybody doing the same thing. And so that was the mantra of these new newly merged, large centralized Lutheran denominations. And you know, your, your analogy of McDonald's is, is spot on. Each, each new church, especially the new ones, were franchises, all right? And you used the, all that, you use the denominational materials, you use the Sunday school curriculum, you used the, the stewardship program, you used all those sorts of things coming out of the, of church headquarters. They would have these big national programs that would be, that everybody would be. And of course the pastor who wanted to get ahead showed that he was the, that he was playing ball. Right? And so if you walked into a Lutheran church, you use the same hymnal, you say, use the same order of worship, you've walked into a Lutheran congregation in Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine, it would Be the same.

So just one comment, because I use the word him. And of course, at this point, they all are hymns, pastors are all, are all men that we'll come to the, we'll back. Come. Come to that shift later. But also, is it fair to say that this same kind of trend in standardization and, and this, this toeing the line, is this, you know, roughly contiguous with other faith traditions as well, other denominations in the country?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And, and this is, this is the period of, of the major Protestant mergers. Right. And, and just use, see the number of times they talk about, use the word United. The United Church of Christ, the United Presbyterians, the United Methodist Church, on and on and on. There was a, at point in the early 60s where they thought they would bring all the mainline Protestant groups together in a single. In a single thing. Well, that collapsed pretty quickly, but still the, the, the mantra was merger. Bigger is better. We can have more of a voice. And so Lutheran spent most of the 20th century outside of Missouri merging, and Missouri spent most of the 20th century not merging or avoiding mergers or whatever you could call it. They didn't want to be marginalized, so they hung around on the, on the sides and, and you know, they wanted to be included, but then they wanted to be included on their own terms.

So 1950, say, how many Lutheran denominations are there.

Recognizable of a reasonable size? Yeah, you have the, the United Lutheran Church, the old Colonial Lutherans, mainly in the east coast and south, and they were about about 1.7 million. All right. Missouri Synod, on the other hand, was about, about the same size. And in the middle, you had eight churches in what was known as the National Lutheran or the American Lutheran Conference. And these were the Norwegians, the Swedes, a couple of Danes, the Finns, a couple of Germans, kind of.

And so they are predominantly the northern Midwesterners.

Yeah, Midwestern. Oh, yeah, just. Okay. You had two large ones in, in the, on either side, and then in between, these eight were roughly about the same size as, as Missouri and the ulca.

Okay.

Okay, so you, you can divide the Lutherans into about thirds. About what, what would that make it? About 5.266 million? Something like that. Okay.

You said that's about the 1950s.

Yeah, right after the war, then they're starting to, to. The vision is to bring all the Lutherans together. This was the vision of Henry Muhlenberg in the, in the 18th century to bring all one. One Lutheran Church for all Lutherans.

But it sounds like it's more practical because now they're using the same hymnals and the same hymns and, and the same liturgy. Because I'm guess when Fortress becomes our sort of common publishing house or maybe.

Well, that doesn't happen until the UL, the ELCA in 1988. But. Okay, but they, they bring out. They did bring out a common hymnal in, in the early 1950s for everybody but Missouri. And, but even that didn't grease the skids on the merger. The mergers got complicated, and we ended up with two mergers rather than one. We had the LCA in 1962 and the ALC in 1960. Okay. And.

And each of them, I could give you.

We had. If we had five hours, I could tell you.

Sure.

The alc, the lca, they each had their own publisher. I forget which was which, but one of them was Fortress Press and the other was Augsburg. Right.

Fortress was the lca, Augsburg was the alc. Right.

And so in the, in the merger of the ELCA or the merger that created the elca, those two publishing houses merged as well and became Augsburg Fortress.

Okay. Yeah.

So the Missouri Synod at this point, are they like. How would you describe the Missouri city at this point? Are they their own independent, you know, with one body that happens to be. Is it roughly contiguous with Missouri in this moment? Is it bigger than that?

It's a national. It's a national church. You know, even, Even in the 19th century, it was the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri and other states.

Okay.

And Missouri is, It's, it's, it's, it's heyday. Well, you look at golden eras or something like that, but in the 50s and 60s, it was a very prominent religious player on the American scene. They had a lot of really sharp people and still do. But I'm just saying, you know, but there was always this sort of internal divide within Missouri of which eventually they, they named the, the moderates and the conservatives. I don't know that those terms really help all that much. But the question was, how much do you have to do to be in fellowship with other Christians, other Lutherans, how much agreement? The other groups, the groups that eventually became the ALC and lca. And then ELCA said, look, we'll never engineer a merger if we have to have a doctrinal agreement on absolutely every point. Let's, let's agree on the, on the, let's agree on what's the important things. And then the details, you know, we'll work with the details. Missouri's standpoint has always had always been and still is that you have to have absolute agreement in doctrine before there can be even church fellowship, you know, exchange pastors and, and other kinds of things like this. And, and to their credit, they are consistent about this, right? You may like it, you may not like it, but, but they, they have been very consistent upon this. But there was a, in the 50s and 60s, there was a sort of an undercurrent of, of people, some people wanting to, to, you know, the moderates wanting to get more, want more relationship with other American Lutherans and the conservatives who were very, still very suspicious. And in the 60s, the, the moderates were more or less in control in Missouri. They had the, they had the, the Semin, the St. Louis Seminary and the President that actually in 1967amajor thing happened which was the formation of the Lutheran Council in the usa, which brought together four cooperative work, not fellowship, but cooperative work, lca, ALC, and the Missouri Synod. That's what caused, for example, that's what caused the, the strictly confessional Wisconsin Synod to break with Missouri. So the first, first time. Now that wasn't a merger, it wasn't fellowship, but it was, you know, we're, we're moving in the right direction here. We're going, we're going together kind of thing like that.

And then, and then we have, we've talked about, about ordination of women and that seems to be the big triggering event that, that broke that up, at least that Missouri Synod left that partnership.

Well, it's, yeah, there are lots of different issues, but in the late 1960s, this LACUSA sponsored a theological working group on the question of women's ordination. And you know, lachuza was very careful. They didn't want to say that they were going to tell any of the three member denominations what to do. And, and, but they came out with this report that was really, I think, fairly balanced, actually. You know, this and that and other kinds of things like that. And the ALC and the LCA adopted the recommendations of the report and the, or, or the, you know, they, the report basically said that there's nothing to stand in the way of a Lutheran denom from ordaining women. It didn't say you have to, to be Lutheran you have to ordain women or something like that. They were very careful about that. And, and so the ALC and LCA said yes, Missouri said no, although. So the other thing that happened in 1969, which was very strange, there was a, a convention of the Missouri Synod in which a very conservative Lutheran j A o Price was elected president. But they also, in 19, the same convention declared pulpit and altar fellowship with the American Lutheran Church. The ALC that was on Missouri had never done that before and they knew that the ALC was going to start ordaining women. So now you had the possibilities of a ALC woman pastor now being able to preach from the pulpit of a Missouri Synod church.

Can I ask why the ALC and not the lca?

The LCA was considered to be too liberal. There were some, some historical relationships between the ALC and the Missouri Synod.

Okay, so there are already some smaller differences of opinion between these bodies. Oh yeah, that, yeah. Okay.

But then of course, things got very conservative in, in Missouri. Now it's, it's interesting enough that the, the conventions in 19, the, the Missouri Senate conventions in 69, 73. The conservatives won, but not by much. It was a generally a 55, 45 split. Okay. The cons, but the conservatives very quickly took institutional control and that's what led to the, the problems at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

And that is a story I didn't learn about until I was well headed to college and I went to Wartburg Seminary and I saw a mural and someone explained to me that it was about Seminex. And I got a five minute explanation of what happened, which turns out isn't anywhere near enough time to explain what it is. But then I also found out my pastor at my church was there in 74 and I've run into maybe 10 other pastors that went through that experience. So it, it had a much stronger impact on, on the church that is the ELCA now than, than I think most of us younger folks had any idea.

There's a whole history there to be written.

Yeah.

And it's. Okay, so, so let me go back and, and then I'll get to that point. Okay.

Yeah.

Feel free to take more than five minutes.

Yes.

The point of attack, Price's point of attack was the leadership and the faculty at Concordia Seminary who were pretty much mostly moderates and by taking control of the board of the seminary and other sorts of things like this, eventually tried to get the, to throw out the, or was going to throw out the president of the seminary, John Tgin. Okay. The, most of the students and most of the faculty were supporting Tgin and at a certain point they chose to walk out of the seminary and form their own what was called Christ Seminary in Exile or very popularly Seminex. Okay. Now that happened and then it went. The, the seminary was formed first as a temporary, at least initially as a temporary kind of thing. And the, the the denomination was formed around the seminary because you got to have just somewhere to sell your pastors, right? And so the Association Evangelical Lutheran Congregations was formed a couple of years afterwards. The of the walkout. Now they really expected, well, you can think of 45, 55 split. You know, they sort of expected that they would get, you know, maybe upwards of of a million people leaving Missouri Synod to form to this new aelc. It didn't work. Most of the moderates stayed in the Missouri Synod and figured out they're just going to work with the system. And only about 100,000 came out of Missouri into the AELC. It. It was, it was, it was a denomination that really just was not. It wasn't feasible at this point. At that point. But you see, the thing think of AELC was top heavy with pastors and seminary professors and college professors and leadership. And they had all had to go somewhere and AELC had no, you know, they couldn't employ all these people. In fact, seminex was barely hanging on. And so what they did is they dispersed these people to Chicago, to Wartburg, to other sorts of places to. And so the career of all of these Missouri exiles is, like I said it. Somebody really needs to study it. The impact that had on the new. Eventually on the new elc, a.

Yes.

Was very large and I would say disproportionate.

Now, the congregations that switched, were they geographically in particular areas or were they.

Split out pretty wide all over the country?

Yeah, yeah.

And how many graduates did seminex produce? I mean, they existed for what, 10, 15, 20 years?

Oh, no, not, not no more than, no more than six or seven. I mean, they. I was at, Okay, I was at LSTC as a student, as a special student in the early 1980s. And Seminex was still there, but it very quickly got absorbed eventually into. Okay, the other thing, the. I want to say another thing about Missouri. All right, Missouri was. Missouri was like this family on steroids, okay? And especially the clergy. They're huge. I mean, clergy dynasties, you know, people who were, you know, families where there were, you know, 8, 10, 12 uncles, cousins, brothers, sons who were pastors, right? And this destroyed a lot of those families because people went one direction or another. And, and, you know, I mean, I've heard the, the stories and people are literally, sometimes were literally in tears because of the divisions that it caused in the, in their, in their families. And, and, you know, we never take that, we never take that into, into account.

It really is like the, you know, some of the Families in the border states. Beginning of the civil war.

Yeah, yeah. Divorce. Divorce. And so, I mean, there have been some, you know, when you think about the people who came out of Missouri, Yaroslav, Pelican, Martin, Marty, a lot of really cream of the crop, American religious leaders and intellectuals. Yeah.

Yeah. The pastor that confirmed me was a seminex graduate, so I was one of the associates at my first call. And, you know, as, As a student at Trinity Seminary, I studied homiletics under Paul Harm. Paul Harms, who was part of the faculty walkout. Right.

And then, of course, Missouri had to rebuild. You know, they, you know, is. And so it's been tough on Missouri. It's been tough on Missouri to, To rebuild the seminary and everything else like that was there.

Are there, Are there any ways in which the purge, if you want to use that term, was helpful to them or was it really just their. They're stuck having to start over? Was there like a sense of consolidation of power or, you know, finally the people that stay get their own way?

Well, this wasn't my idea, but I, I can understand it, all right? But I've heard people who have, who have said eventually that the walkout was a mistake because it allowed Price and his people to, to. To. To get control of the seminary. You know, if they had stayed. I, I don't know what history is always, what if, you know, you know, what if you know, you know, this had happened or that had happened. You never really know. But some people have said that it allowed the Missouri, it allowed Price and his team to rebuild the seminary in the way they wanted it without having to try to messy eviction of the students and the faculty and everything like that? Because a lot of the faculty lived in houses there. Seminary owned houses.

So, so did that move the seminary to the, to the more conservative side then? Did, did the.

Well, yes, I mean, definitely. Let's put it this way. I mean, they're much, they were much more careful, the, the moderates. And, and your. Missouri has always said that the moderates were really liberals in disguise. And if you follow the career of some of the, of the people who left Missouri, you can, you can understand that language. But remember, this was this late 60s, early 70s. I mean, you guys were just born then, but this. You, we, you think we're, you think we're polarized now. Imagine what America was like in the late 60s and early the early 70s.

Oh, sure we are.

We are much less polarized now than we were back then.

So, so this is my assessment at this point is that because, because the, the, the tipping point at, at the St. Louis Seminary, because it, it happened before there was a plan for what to do necessarily? Well, there was a plan for the students and for the faculty, but they hadn't brought congregations with them at that point, so they didn't have a plan on what to do after the walkout. And so it took a couple years for the denomination to be formed to try to absorb this. And just knowing how Americans work, once that initial thing happened, people sort of gradually, they settled back into their old habits and, and said, well, it's too big of a risk to go off on this new thing, so we're going to leave our congregation where it is and we're going to avoid these, these seminary graduates because, you know, the structure we're in doesn't want us to, to take them. Does that seem about right?

That's about right. I mean, just remember that it's very difficult. Church divisions are very difficult, and especially for pastors. You know, I sometimes joke, and I'm not always sure it's a joke, but sometimes the, the only thing that's keeping the church together is the church pension plan.

Sure.

All right. Pastor. Pastors worry about their pensions. They worry about mobility. You know, can I get a call? You know, can I. Should I just. And Missouri was structured in a rather congregation, congregational way that, you know, that Missouri can't come in to a congregation and, and tell it what to do. That, that's, that goes back to the beginnings of the Missouri Synod. So, so then they can, they can push the seminarians around all they want and the, and the, but they can't. There's a lot less that they can do to. If, you know. And the idea is basically I keep my, keep my, I keep my congregation happy and then I, you know, I'll be okay. And the further I can keep St. Louis away from me, the better. And then there's also a lot of ELCA pastors that say that, too. Sure.

Right. I was actually just going to say there's a lot of ELC and bishops that say that, that there's not a lot that they can do in, in congregations.

They can't. They can't. I mean, if you look at the, if you, if you look at the actual juridical power of an ELCA bishop, they have virtually none. Which is. The only thing they can do is sign or not sign a call. That. Which is the, which is a power. But, but I would, I would say then, too, that Seminex let put the ball in motion to the formation of the ELCA in 1988. A number of reasons. First of all, the AELC was not stable. And so it was, it was not being able, it was not as a denomination, it was not able to function as well as it needed to. The second thing was, is it destroyed the idea? A lot of people in the 60s, they thought Missouri would come around. And finally, you know, they basically said, look, waiting for Missouri is not, it's not, not going to happen. And so then, so that, that starts the ball rolling and they're saying, well, why should we have ALC and LCA and aelc? Let's, let's do that.

So I have two go ahead. Questions. The first, and I don't know which order you want to answer them in. The first is, so the, the seminex movement in a simplistic sense is sort of the externalizing of the, the conflict that had up to that point been inside the Missouri Senate. So they, they took it out and created an us and them. So the first question I have is, is, is there a similar internal movement? You said that some of these congregations and other leaders chose to stay. Was there an attempt to push back against this conservative movement inside the Missouri Synod? And if so, to what extent did it prevail or, or not prevail? And then the second question is, do you, you know, I struggle with, you know, we, I feel like we paint Jao Price as a bad guy. And I'm not, I've always been curious, like, what, what was his motivation as a, as a person, as a churchman? What did he hope to accomplish with this? And, and, and to what extent did, do you think he felt successful or not?

Well, yeah, let's take the first one first. And I don't know. I never met him, and so I would be kind of cautious about, about that. He was consistent, all right? He didn't, he didn't blow with the, he didn't, he wasn't a politician in that sense that, you know, kind of wanting to make everybody happy. All right? He was a politician in the sense of, he knew how, how to work with power. All right? I, I, I don't, you know, personally, I, I don't know what else to say about him in that sense except that, that, you know, he was not a, he, he felt that, that the, that the confessional nature of the Missouri Synod was in, in danger. And he did what he thought he needed to do to make sure that it remained a purely confessional Lutheran church. That's that's where I would go on that one. What was the other?

Was there a, Was there an attempt inside the Missouri Senate to push back against. And I guess a tangential question to both of those is, you know, was this going to happen either way? Did, did. Was the election of J O Clois like the catalyst for where the change in the Missouri city came from? Or was that just more of a.

Symptom, if you will, causality in history? Is, is it really tough to, to.

Sure, you're out. I, I appreciate that.

There have been, there have been. I mean, there are tensions within the Missouri Synod as there are within the elca. There have been more. There have been some groups that have. I don't know what the status of they are. They never, they, they never. People will say that, for example, the prior Missouri Synod president, a man named Kishnik, was more on the moderate side of things and that the current one, Harrison, is more conservative. How, what do you, how you figure those scales? I really don't know. You know, there was this big, there was this big internal upset in Missouri when this, at 911 at a memorial service for the 9 11, this district president of the Missouri Synod was up on the stage and was he praying with them or not? You know, it's like a whole nother story. But. So there have been tensions, but not organized ones that I know of.

Okay. So we get to this point, we've got this smaller group of Lutherans that have, I would imagine the AALC folks had a lot of energy from, from that split. They, they took some initiative and, and that doesn't go away easily.

And a lot of phobias.

Sure.

I mean, when you, when you're burned by one church organization, you're not going to set yourself up to be burned by another.

Sure.

And so the AELC in, in my reading, struggled with a lot of trust issues.

Sure.

TGen became the first ELCA bishop in Chicago and didn't last very long there. I don't know why he left his bishop post in Chicago to go to, to Texas. But, you know, you know, once you've, been, once you've been pushed around by denominational bureaucrats, you're not likely to, to, to want to stay. But you know, of course, then this leads to the elca, and the elca, of course, is formed in relation to this and that. The interesting thing about the formation of the ELCA in 1988 was this new process for bringing it together. The old church mergers had been brought about in the proverbial smoke, filled back rooms with the denomination. The people who ran the denomination knew what they were doing and they, you know, they could, they could hammer out somebody like Franklin Clark Fry, who was the president of the ulca. He knew how to, how to get things done. And, and there were a whole generation of, of people that did that. The process in the, in the 80s was specifically designed not to be that kind of process. It was going to be representative. You're going to bring in these new voices, you're going to bring in a new generation, you're going to bring in women, you're going to bring in people of who are not white, you're going to have quotas and other sorts of things like that. So when the ELCA was formed, it was formed with a lot of grand ideas, all right? For unfortunately the, the denominational leaders sometimes knew what they were doing. And when the ELCA was formed, it was formed with, it was way over organized, it was top heavy with, with a superstructure. And they decided to sort of shove under the carpet for later consideration three very divisive issues. The question of the nature of the ministry, the question of ecumenical relations, and worst of all, sexuality. They did not solve those. They said the new ELCA can do that. What that condemned the ELCA was to a decade of upheaval. And the other thing is that that structure, that superstructure also meant that they were woefully under capitalized. They, their, their, their economic projections, their revenue projections were somewhere out of Alice in Wonderland. And, and so the church was immediate. The new ELCA was immediately thrown into a series of crises, economic crisis, and then all the other things that they had to solve.

Yeah. As a podcast we've talked about, I don't know we've directly addressed synods yet, but we talk about the national organization, churchwide organization, and we talk about the synods and the local congregations. But there was this layer in the middle, the regional layer, which doesn't seem to have much structure anymore.

No, because there's no money. Yeah, I mean there, there used to be a, there was a clear reason for the regions between the synods and the, and the national church. There were, there were supposed to be leaders in them. There was, you know, theological education was supposed to be worked through them. It was sort of an attempt to decentralize a little bit. And of course they were just expensive and, and very quickly faded out of any real. I mean they really more or less exist only on paper at this point.

Yeah.

Mark, for the sake of people who, you know, don't know this, I Won't name whether I'm one of them or not. But can you say a little bit about those three issues that they said they pushed under the rug just a sentence or two about, you know, what each one was. Was at that time?

Okay. I mean, the, the question of the ministry was, you know, traditionally Lutherans had believed that had held for 450 years that there was a single ministry. All right? You were called to a single office of Word at Sacrament. Now, from that office of Word and Sacrament, people were called to specialized calls like teaching and chaplaincy and other sorts of things like that. And lay leaders could be. They could. They could be recognized in many ways, but they were not. They were not pastors. Okay. Now, of course, the, The. The higher church folk in, in. In Lutheranism always pushed for the model of a threefold model of ministry, which would be, first you're ordained deacon, then you're ordained pastor or priest, and then you're ordained a bishop. Okay. And there was a strong element of what we call the Evangelical Catholics, who were Lutherans with a definite high church leaning, who wanted that very much of a threefold office of ministry. And so the National Convention spent several years hashing that out. Eventually, you know, eventually that they. Let's put it this way, the people who want the threefold office of ministry have never given up on it. And so they're. They're futzing around with the office of deacon, and they're, you know, the stuff about. What, you know about are the, you know, our bishops are not ordained, but what are they? They're consecrated or set apart. You know, there's always a lot of, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck. So.

Yeah. And yet, you know, the deacons that. That we've had on this show have made it very clear that they are not pastors in training.

Right.

They are. They are deacons.

And.

Yeah.

Are. Are you ordained to. Are you ordained to being a deacon? I see there's. There's a lot of futzing around with that second thing. All right. Ecumenical relations. Who do you. Who do you want to have ecumenical relations with? Some of the more moderate folks in the ELCA wanted to, you know, you know, go in one direction. The. The sort of evangelical Catholics and the others wanted to get, especially with the Episcopalians, but also with the, you know, if they could do it with the, you know, closer to the Roman Catholics, and they wanted the ELCA to look more like the Roman Catholics and the. And the Missouri and the Episcopal Church. And of course, that was leading up to this great big problem that we had with the ecumenical agreement with the Episcopalians that so convulsed the church in the late 1990s.

And that was the one that was, that was called to Common Mission was.

The second one of it.

Okay, that's right.

So, so, and so there was the question about who you wanted to be ecumenical with. And then third of all, you know, I don't have to explain what the sexuality issue was, was the question of, or the ordination of, of gay pastors. And that, and that, that hit the fan several times before and, and crashed and burned several times before it finally was adopted in 2009. And of course, what that that has meant then too is a, a major schism. See that, this, this actually the AELC was minor in terms of, of a walkout. I mean, it happened all at once and it was very dramatic and everything else like that.

Right.

But somewhere along, somewhere to the point, there are two new centrist Lutheran denominations, the Lutheran Congregations and Mission for Christ and the North American Lutheran Church, which now represent, I think maybe, I think maybe off the top of my head, 800 million, 800,000 Lutherans. So you compare to. It's, it's what, it's. But it's what I call a slow motion schism. It didn't happen overnight. It happened over 20 years and it's still happening. All right. And the, and the real catalyst was the sexuality study in 2009. How many congregations and people we lost? Well, officially, I think the ELCA's official records was that they lost, lost half a million members in two years following the second. But that doesn't, that doesn't take into account people who dropped out and, you know, you know, congregations just, it just, you know, people may have been still on the records, but they weren't, they weren't there anymore.

Yeah.

And a lot of the congregations that did leave were. Well, some of the biggest congregations were ones that left, which meant that you may have lost one congregation out of, you know, 150 in a Senate or something, but you might lose, you know, well above that in membership and money.

And money. And remember, those big congregations were like synods in and of themselves. They didn't need the elca. The ELCA to them.

Yeah, I, I was in the bishop's office. I was in Bishop Sauer's office in southern Ohio when, when one of the, those churches called in. This would have been 1,990 is and, and declared that they were starting their own seminary. And And Bishop Sauer was not someone to take news like that very well.

No.

And so, but yeah, those, those churches, I think those churches that had their own independence because of their numbers could, could afford to leave.

The interesting thing is that these, these two new Lutheran denominations have a sort of a barbell shaped curve. In other words, they've got a, A, a number of very large congregations and then they have a lot of small congregations. Yeah, this thing is sort of the mid sized congregations in the middle.

Yeah. So there we have. So our 1988 is. It's confusing whether, whether the ELCA comes together in 88 or 89.

It starts in 88.

It starts in 88.

1-1-88. Because I was, I was ordained in the summer of 1988 and I was ordained into the ELCA.

Okay. I think. Did, did. Then the congregations voted on it. I forget how that process happened in the alc.

Yes, the congregations had to vote on it. The al. The LCA did not have that mechanism which has become a sore point. And I can't remember what the A had to do one way or another. But. Okay. And the interesting thing is that as you find that you, you now you've got the big two, you've got the ELCA and you've got Missouri. The, the ELCA especially came together at this point in time in which that whole question of centralization and, and, and you know, unification and you know, and uniformity and everything like that, American business, American, other groups had, had discarded that a long time ago. I mean, if you walk into any dozen Lutheran congregations in a major set, a major city, right, like say Minneapolis, you will find 12 very different worship styles, theological viewpoints, mission, all those kinds of things. Because, because basically what the, what the congregations have realized is that it's what you might call niche marketing. You know, there is a, there's a congregation in the Twin Cities that, that I don't know if they still do, but they used to advertise themselves as the alternative to alternative worship. Yeah, but in, in a. To. How do you, you know, in a world of McDonald's, how do you stand out? Well, you don't. You, you do something different. You do tacos or you do subs or you do, you know, whatever it is. You know, so, so the, the, the, the church got unified, the ELCA got unified, but let a thousand flowers bloom. Because no, you know, virtually me. Nobody uses that. You know, this is, The Augsburg Fortresses is tearing their hair out because nobody uses their curriculum anymore. You know, where they could always, you Know, they could. Every year they brought out a new curriculum and everybody would use it. Now. No, that's not the. Yeah, that's not the way it is.

Well, and not long after that, we'd get the beginning of the emergent church movement and all that too. So there are all sorts of influences that sort of tear at that, that Right. Set.

So, but, but in other words, what. Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll use this as a, as a, as, as a figure for this. All right? The good part of this. Good, Pat. Good, bad or otherwise. Okay. It used to be that these, you know, for example, a congregation back in the 19th century would see that there's a group of Lutherans over here that weren't being served. And so the pastor went over there and, you know, tried to get them together and they supported them. And there were these pastors that, that developed satellite congregations, like 8, 10, 12 congregations around a mother church. Right. Mission was done by the pastors. All right? Setting up new churches and everything like this in, in the briatic, in the beer, bureaucratic centralization, congregations were done, Were planted by. And what they did, they planted hundreds, thousands of new congregations in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, but on a very strict basis. And you walk into a, you know, they even sent you the plans, the architectural plans for your first unit, your second unit and everything else like that. And you used, you used the hymnal, you used the Sunday school curriculum. You, you used, you supported the denominational programs.

Right?

But now.

Yeah, Calvary Ben, where you and I met, was, was one of those buildings.

Yeah, sure.

Now, a student told me this about 10 years ago, and he said there was a congregation, a large congregation in Southern California that saw that there was an area that needed a Lutheran church. And they said that they would provide half of the operating budget for that, that new church start if six other congregations would support the other half. Right. And so the pastor went around to try to get that going, and the, the synod stepped in and said, no, you can't do this. It has to go through the channels. And that new mission start collapsed because now, you know, now I think the bishops would say, great, yeah, go ahead. But it's just, it's a change in culture, and that's a very difficult thing to do, is to change a culture. And the drawback is on that, that, that maybe mission doesn't get done. Right.

Right.

New congregations don't get forced formed. I, I don't know. You know, maybe, maybe the emergent church is a model Although I have my doubts about it, but yeah, I think.

It'S sort of spun out. I think it's, it's, it's declared its end, so. But there's, there's pieces of it still around us.

Oh, sure, sure. And so, well, and the big, the models know of the big mega churches with the satellite congregations all around them. I mean.

Right.

Lutheran Church of Hope in Des Moines, for example.

Sure.

So, you know, but some works and some doesn't and you know, there's always, you never can tell with these, with these things. I mean, we, we won't know what Covid did to American Christianity for 20 years.

I'd say.

20 years minimum. Yeah, yeah.

We're still reacting to the, the impact, that's for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think that takes us up to 20, 25. We have, we're about to install a new bishop here in a, in a few weeks and we've, we've got a lot of, a lot of things coming this way. We'll, we'll be re. Taking another look at our sexuality statements. We've, we've done the rewriting the language. We talked with Imran Siddiqui about that and it sounds like in three years we'll have a chat about some of the content. So these are issues that we haven't completely finished with.

The big question will be how directive the bishops and the synods can be in strongly urging congregations to take gay and lesbian pastors if they go too far, that direction. If, if they, if they, if they start interfering with congregational choice. You will see another mass, a mass, another mass defection from the elca. If it, if it appears that the synods will, will, will, will make this, or try to make this happen, it's not going to be pretty.

Yeah.

So just that, remember the interesting thing about the sexuality study and I just say this interesting thing about the sexuality study is that the ELCA has no position on question of sexuality, has no official position. If you read the ELCA study that was passed in, or the, the, the thing that was passed in 2009, it says some, you know, believe this way, some believe this way, this we're going to try to live together and kind of thing like this.

Right.

So it's always been a balancing point and conservatives or, or moderates in the, in the ELCA can say, well, the ELC does not have an official position, which it doesn't.

Well, then I guess the question, one of the questions that remains then is how, you know, how, how broad can the spectrum be? And still hold together.

Exactly.

It's back to that same point of, you know, how, how much can we disagree and still, you know, be church together?

Are we devolving? I mean, structurally, Missouri has managed to hang together. It still has its moderates and conservatives, and there's a lot of tension, but they're still, they're still hanging together. The elca, like I said, these two new centrist groups have, have really, you know, have grown rather dramatically.

Well, Dr. Grandquist, it's been great to have you on the show again.

Thank you.

This being able to look at the roots of our Lutheranism and sort of see where the things that we're watching, our churches, you know, the things that our churches are doing and seeing where their roots go. They're not something we just came up with a few weeks ago. They come from centuries of dialogue and understanding and tradition. And I think that's always important to know where our feet come from, where they're rooted.

Can I just say one more thing?

Absolutely.

Historians are very wary about making any kind of predictions because they've seen historians in the past make predictions that were completely and utterly wrong. And most historians like their subjects dead and buried before the. They talk about him. So I mean, I, my, my, my particular view on where we are and, and the recent past, I could be completely wrong. And I, I just want to say that 50, 75 years, somebody look back and say, that fool Grand Quest. What did he, what did he think he was saying? Because I've said it about historians in the past myself. So.

Yes.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Yeah. And just a note, we'll put links in the, in the episode notes, but Dr. Groinkvist has a, has a book, Lutherans in America, A New History, that they can give you a deep down and detailed look at Lutheranism as it progressed through the United States and highly recommended.

So thank you.

So thank you for spending some more time with us.

Thank you for the time.

Maybe in another 50 years we'll do it again. Yeah, we'll talk about another 50 years.

Dig me up.

Absolutely. Thank you for. Yeah, not just this episode, but for the previous two as well. It's really been, I think, helpful to our listeners to have this, this overview of, of where we come from. Thank you for your time.

Well, thanks again, Dr. Granquist. This has been a great conversation that we've had over three episodes. We'll have links to the prior episodes in the episode, notes and links to Dr. Grandquist's book. Several books actually, about Lutheranism and different parts, Luther Seminary being one of those two. So as far as this conversation. Well, so normally at this point, we would start into our better know, a congregation or a synod, but this. This episode's pretty long already, so we're just going to wrap this up pretty quick, get some. Maybe just have some discussion among ourselves about. About this overall thing. The history of Lutherans in America has. Has really taken us from. From beginning to end, I think. You know, we started with the Reformation, so how much further back could we go? Right.

Yeah. Three episodes covering three pretty distinct but very long time periods is. Yeah, that's a lot to chew on.

Yeah.

This last one really seems to show that the 20th century and the earlier parts of the 21st century have demonstrated a lot of compromises in the history of what becomes the ELCA and the bodies leading up to it. And sometimes the compromise was to ignore the differences that we shared.

Yeah.

And that's kind of the growing pains that we're in right now, right?

Yeah. It's this tension that we're, you know, kind of constantly wrestling with as not just a denomination, but sort of the church at large. In a way.

This. This conversation's been reminding me of meeting folks from Canada. And there's a United Church of Canada, which is several denominations that merge together. Now, there's still a Lutheran Church of Canada, and there's still an Episcopal Church of Canada and things, but there's a lot of Presbyterians and what would be UCC congregations in Canada sort of merged together to form this bigger church. And I think there was a time when people in our mainline denominations thought we would all merge together and be one. And it's kind of a sign that we've got a lot of differences between us, that we even have a hard time holding a single Lutheran denomination together.

Yeah. Yeah. It's this constant tension that keeps coming up of what does it mean to maintain your identity? Is it holding on tightly to that which is uniquely yours at the expense of being in relationship with people who are not uniquely you, you know, who are uniquely themselves? And I. I think it becomes this. This kind of war of. Not war, but this.

This.

This tension, like I say, between, you know, the. The desires to remain together despite your differences, which I think has, you know, some. Some strong Christian roots. Right.

Yeah.

Or the notion of. Of. Of taking a stand and holding yourself separate from. From that which you hold to be too. Too different, too heterodox, if you want to. You know, do we. Do we pack up our ball and go home, or do we fight to try to stay united with people with whom we disagree.

Yeah.

And, and where does the, where does this the strength lie? Does the strength lie in, in staying together despite your differences? Does the strength lie in trying to bring people along from within who are not like you? Does the strength lie in taking a stand and trying to get others to come along with you or in walking away in order to maintain what you feel is core and inviting others to come with you or not, but still walking away? There's strength, pride, identity in all of those. And it's, it's tough sometimes to figure out which one to lean into.

Yeah. And, and I think it's important to know too that a lot of these things that, that are, these separations are more aren't theological problems, they're organizational problems.

Right.

A lot of times it's how much, how much power does the, the churchwide organization have versus the synod versus the congregations are three expressions of the church. And, and we have people fighting that out constantly. And, and sometimes people walk away on that. Not, not actually a scripture based or theologically based problem.

Right.

Sometimes it's something, something that's tinged with theology. But, but often it's, it's how much power does a certain layer of the church have over the other.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah.

All right. Well, we look forward to hearing from everybody to get ready for our 50th episode. You can use our contact information there or email [email protected] Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fot, and the show is produced by Phote Media Productions. Find all our contact information, links and a transcript in the episode notes. Until next time, go in peace, serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.