President Gerald Kieschnick Has Earned Re-election
Gerald B. Kieschnick was
first elected President of The Lutheran Church –Missouri
Synod in the 2001 Synod Convention. He is now finishing his
ninth year in office. The key question for the 1,200
delegates at the 2010 Synod Convention in July is, Does he
deserve a fourth term? Or, to rephrase, can someone else do
a better job for the next three years?
Absolutely President
Kieschnick deserves re-election. There is no other nominee
who brings his level of experience leading one of the
largest Protestant church bodies in American in the
difficult times we are facing.
Sometimes a church body
leader can function mostly as an office holder, keeping the
institutional wheels turning. It is a position of great
honor, and under more placid circumstances it can be held
that way by a person content to bless whatever the larger
body in all its parts is doing. But, in contrast, this is a
time for a true leader like Jerry Kieschnick–someone who
purposefully tries to mold the larger body into greater
cohesiveness and ignite new mission energy for meeting the
challenges of a new age.
The last nine years have
hardly been serene for the LCMS—or, for that matter, any
church body. In so many parts of the country the context
for ministry has shifted – some would say dramatically –
with far less support for conventional church life,
especially among children who no longer follow in their
parents’ Lutheran footsteps. Internally, another round of
divisiveness played itself out in LCMS politics in the 00s.
Consider how President
Kieschnick has exerted powerful leadership in church
politics, in building church unity, in reducing
inefficiencies and in spearheading new mission.
Church Politics
The LCMS politics for the
00s were set on September 11, 2001 with the terrorists
attacks in New York and Washington D.C. How should our
church body respond? That was only ten days after Gerald
Kieschnick assumed the presidency. As his ecclesiastical
supervisor with pastoral instincts, he encouraged Atlantic
District President David Benke to participate with prayerful
compassion in the subsequent Yankee Stadium event.
Your reading of the nine
years of politics since then and the vote this July depends
on whether you were proud to have your church body and its
loving concern on the world stage that day or whether you
considered this participation an embarrassing betrayal of
our doctrinal uniqueness. Best guess is that about 20% of
LCMS pastors felt betrayed. Best guess is that 99% of lay
members were proud.
That 20% went into attack
mode for the next six years, often with aggressive action,
even lawsuits, against the President personally.
Repercussions can still be seen in the website blogs of the
20% urging vote for Anybody But Kieschnick. How would you
respond if you were church body president? Many of his
enthusiastic supporters urged the President to draw
boundaries to exclude those who were so unhappy with Synod’s
considered positions. Gerald Kieschnick’s response was to
patiently reach out through inclusive, even-handed
procedures and to avoid reprisals.
Here is
the question for 2010. Do you want a Synod President whose
major qualification seems to be readiness to draw even
tighter boundaries than we by consensus already have? Or
would you rather have a president with proven ability to
subordinate his ego and to let the will of the majority work
its
Delegates can judge that
ability and experience by how President Kieschnick led the
delegate regional meetings and how he will administer the
decision making before election of Synod President. Will
any of his presiding decisions give cause to prefer a
different leader?
Unity Building
How do you build unity in a
church body that badly fractured about 35 years ago and that
still has a minority, younger now, who think their elders
are not sufficiently faithful to Scriptural doctrine in
Lutheran formulation? At a minimum you keep highlighting
where there is a conservative unity in doctrinal
fundamentals that is indeed remarkable among historic
Protestant church bodies. President Kieschnick has done
this well and often, leading us to rejoice that we have
unity in the problems tearing other denominations apart and
distracting them from mission.
And you keep attention
focused on working through the areas of disagreement. One
is determining how to relate to other church bodies with
which we are not in full doctrinal fellowship. At issue is
not doctrine itself but symbols of how to practice
distinctiveness. This issue had been worked extensively
through due process in the 1990s by the Commission on
Theology and Church Relations, of which Texas District
President Gerald Kieschnick was chair. The conclusions were
overwhelmingly accepted at the 2001 Synod Convention at
which Kieschnick was elected Synod President. Who then
could be better prepared to interpret the will of the Synod
in the tragedies the following September 11? As the Church
Fellowship Study reported, ultimately in areas of
uncertainty charity should prevail. Is not this the
necessary path of churchmanship over against carrying
grudges?
Another remaining dispute is
strange to find in a church body that proudly claims
fidelity to the Lutheran Confessions, including the Formula
of Concord’s statements on adiaphora especially in worship.
This is the insistence on the part of some that there is
only one legitimate Lutheran worship practice. At President
Kieschnick’s request, conferences have been held, some big
ones with expenses covered by grants. Yet a small minority
insists their practice is the only way. Would some other
president be better at preserving the importance of a full
subscription to the Lutheran Confessions?
Delegates will have had full
exposure to the Kieschnick-guided, unity-building process
used in developing proposals for the better Synod structure
and governance. There has been provision for extensive
feedback at district conventions and at the regional
delegate meetings this winter. Feedback led to refinement
of proposals. How could there be a better process?
Will some other Synod
president be better at building unity? Over the years
President Kieschnick has preached in hundreds of
congregations, giving him a good feel for conditions in our
church body. Would some other president be willing to take
on such a tiring travel schedule to keep Synod in front of
congregations?
Re-organization
An officer-holder president
would let the organizational wheels continue to churn from
one financial crisis to the next. Only a leader would take
on the arduous task of building agreement on a streamlined
organization that changes how business was done in the
past. That is a very difficult task, but one all former
Synod presidents agree has to be done. Would some other
president develop a better plan for the financial future of
Synod? By the way, under the present administration the
LCMS has done much better at raising per member the funds to
support church-wide ministry than either the ELCA or the
Presbyterian Church USA (http://www.jesusfirst.net/2009feb02.htm).
Perhaps this Synod
Convention can take big steps toward lowering the price of
mistrust in Synod affairs. This applies not only to
overlapping structures that provide checks and balances but
also to the huge printing and mailing costs of sending
convention materials to every member of Synod. Being
scrupulous about notification process is important for trust
building. One mark of a good convention will be a high
enough trust level to authorize Synod administrators next
time to save tens of thousands of dollars by providing those
resources on the Synod website.
Would some other president
be better at building trust in the church body than
procedurally fair President Gerald Kieschnick? Why take the
chance?
Mission
Obviously the future of The
Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod lies in the direction of more
effective mission outreach. But perhaps the fundamental
issue for the delegates in July indeed amounts to whether
indeed mission is central.
The
decline in numbers of congregations, members and dollars is
apparent. We can adjust and downsize accordingly. Or we as
a church body can conclude that we need to do our God-given
job better.
Lutherans have always known
that mercy ministries are important and have a track record
second to none in church social services. Distributing
relief and human care resources historically given so
willingly by Lutherans is relatively easy leadership.
The LCMS also has a great
track record of mission outreach to German immigrants, their
children, and their grandchildren who moved off the farm and
out of the cities to the suburbs.
But we are not doing well at
all with the great-grandchildren who are by now fully
assimilated in the American culture. This means we can no
longer depend on Lutheran loyalties to drive our church
life. This means we have to get better at reaching out to
Americans of all cultures. This means we may have to change
some of our own inherited Lutheran culture to welcome and
include others. Such time of change also means that we have
to work extra hard at maintaining our doctrinal integrity
while adapting our cultural practices.
President Gerald Kieschnick
has been a very effective leader in stressing mission in our
church body, even and especially in a time of declining
dollars. We are past the time when gathering and forwarding
dollars to missionaries can do the necessary job. Pres.
Kieschnick has relentlessly emphasized that mission is
fundamental to every congregation and has tried to develop
the conditions that challenge congregations to do their job
more creatively and enthusiastically. He has highlighted
churches doing their mission well, not just in numbers of
members or attendees but also in spiritual growth and
service.
President Kieschnick is a
mission president who has led development of the Ablaze
program of Synod. Fundamental is highlighting witness
events—individual experiences witnessing Christ to another
person. Personal confidence to do such witnessing is not a
strength of our Lutheran culture. It has to be modeled, and
he is doing so from the top, in person and program.
With his encouragement,
Mission Services is finding new ways to put people out in
international mission fields. It is a time for new thinking
in many areas of our church life together. Can some other
synod president do that with more boldness, courage and
energy? Kieschnick has the proven track record.
How Much Change in a Time of Change?
Yet a time of change also
needs firm leadership in what cannot change in the doctrinal
integrity of the LCMS. Through his years a Chairman of the
Commission on Theology and Church Relations as well as now
nine years of ecclesiastical supervision for Synod, there
really is no other national level leader who knows the
issues as well and understands the boundaries better. In
such an intensive time of change, why change the synodical
presidency for someone less qualified and experienced?
Jesus First endorses Jerry
Kieschnick without reservation for an additional term.
Is any other nominee better
qualified to continue to build unity on the base of the
great majority of pastors and congregations, not just the
persistent small minority who insist theirs is the only way?
Is anyone else better
qualified with more energy to work the fair procedures for
the remaining steps of re-organizing Synod?
Are any of the other
nominees better qualified than Jerry Kieschnick to lead
congregations and districts into new days of effective
creative mission outreach to new people for all the right
Gospel reasons?
There is dissatisfaction
with President Kieschnick on the part of a vocal minority,
and that minority repeatedly shows a preference for staying
as we have been and for resisting mission as our church’s
top priority.
Given his outstanding
experience and qualifications in so many areas of church
leadership, a vote for someone other than Gerald Kieschnick
is inevitably a vote for less mission in the Synod. The
issue is as simple as that.
By David S. Luecke
Convention Delegate
