Overall it looks like good and faithful work on the part of the LCMS.
The number that concerns me is the number of LCMS pastor's children who have left the LCMS for another church or who no longer worship at all. I know of no study that has tracked this number. I do know a significant number of LCMS pastors in different parts of the country for whom this is a reality.
Marie Meyer
The loss of pastor's kids mirrors the loss of youth in the LCMS generally. I'm 32, and at my parish nearly all of the young people of the congregation who are that age and live around here have dropped out of church entirely, in most cases. It seems to me that my generation did not have an adequate defense against an aggressive secularism that we encountered in college. My own opinion is that there is a lot of sentimental piety in the LCMS that is not sturdy enough to bear the weight of real life, let alone the attacks on christianity in college. We needed to be able to understand better how Christianity stands up against secularism intellectually, and we needed a piety that was self-consciously countercultural and not able to be compartmentalized. I think kids today absolutely need this. Like early Christians were aware that they were really not part of the world, we need to teach our children not paranoia, but to know realistically that they are likely to face hostility outside the church in many arenas.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Karl. About a year ago when my family arrived at our new congregation here in Illinois, we visited all the Bible classes on Sunday morning and discovered that most of those attending were older---lots of gray hair. After discussing the matter with a lay Bible class teacher who invited me to teach a class, we settled on a team led class. We then focused on inviting parents of the school aged children at our congregation over this summer/fall.
Since then our class has gone from a handful to about 20 persons per week. Largest class was 24 persons. A total of 40 persons have attended the class in the last few months, new visitors in our Bible Study run from late teens up to folks in their fifties. Thankfully, we have not drawn many people off of the existing Bible classes, which was something I thought might happen.
We've invited everyone who attended---even those who came only once---to a pitch-in dinner at our house tomorrow night. I told the class last week, "We aren't asking for money. We aren't signing you up for anything. We're just getting together to enjoy each other's company and we'll have a closing devotion." I think we have about twenty folks coming so far. We'll see how it turns out.
I would encourage you to use targeted and intentional invitation with the younger ones (the ladies at our church office put together a list for us). Don't make it a guilt trip. Don't ask for money. Focus on spiritual matters, praying about what's important to them. It seems to be working for us so far, thanks be to God.
