Missouri Synod Lutheran Beliefs

1. Who the Missouri Synod Is

The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod is a confessional Lutheran church body in the United States, founded in 1847 by German immigrants and governed as an association of self-owning congregations with its headquarters in the St. Louis area. The synod is the second largest Lutheran body in the country after the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and it is the largest that holds to biblical inerrancy, male only ordination and closed communion. Its formal name is usually printed with a long dash between the words Church and Missouri, and the body is known almost everywhere by its initials, LCMS.

Two immigrant groups made the synod. The first were Saxon Lutherans who left Germany in 1838 because they judged that rationalist preaching and state supervision of the church in Saxony had made confessional Lutheran life impossible at home, and who settled in Perry County, Missouri, and in St. Louis. Other Old Lutherans emigrated in the same decades from Prussia, where a royally imposed union of Lutheran and Reformed congregations was being enforced, and some of those founded the Buffalo Synod rather than the Missouri Synod. Their original leader, Martin Stephan, was deposed within a year of landing, and leadership passed to a young pastor named C. F. W. Walther, who became the synod's first president and the shaping theological mind of its first generation. The second group were Franconian pastors and colonists sent to Michigan by Wilhelm Loehe of Neuendettelsau to serve German settlers and to preach among the native peoples of the Saginaw valley. The two groups organized together in Chicago in 1847 as the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States.

That founding story explains a great deal about the synod's temperament. A church body formed by people who crossed an ocean rather than accept a church life they judged doctrinally compromised will treat doctrinal agreement as the condition of church fellowship, and it will be slow to enter agreements whose wording can be read two ways. The LCMS has carried that instinct for nearly two centuries, and it accounts for the practices that outsiders find hardest to understand: closed communion, the refusal of joint worship with churches it is not in fellowship with, and the rejection of ecumenical texts that other Lutherans have signed.

The size and shape of the synod today

The LCMS reports baptized membership under two million, spread across about six thousand congregations and thirty five geographic districts, together with two seminaries (Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne), a system of colleges and universities, Concordia Publishing House, and the international radio and media work of Lutheran Hour Ministries. Membership has fallen substantially from its peak in the early 1970s, a decline the synod discusses openly in its own convention workbooks.

Membership, congregation and district counts above follow the LCMS's own annual statistical reporting, published by the synod's Office of Rosters and Statistics. The ranking of the LCMS as the second largest American Lutheran body rests on comparing that reporting with the ELCA's own published statistics, and the description of it as the largest inerrantist Lutheran body in the country rests on the same comparison with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod's reporting. Totals change yearly, so treat the figures as approximate and check each body's current report for exact numbers.

How this page relates to Lutheranism as a whole

This guide covers one American synod. The doctrine that the LCMS shares with all Lutherans, the shape of the Book of Concord, the worldwide picture of Lutheran churches, and the Catholic assessment of Lutheran justification in general are treated in our guide to Lutheran beliefs and the Lutheran confessions, which is the place to start if you want the tradition rather than the synod. What follows here is what makes the Missouri Synod distinct: its inerrancy position, its communion practice, its refusal of the Joint Declaration, and its two twentieth century splits.

2. What the Missouri Synod Believes

Missouri Synod doctrine is stated in Article II of the synod's constitution, which every member congregation and every rostered church worker accepts. Article II names two standards. Scripture is the written Word of God and the only rule and norm of faith and practice. The Book of Concord of 1580, the collection of Lutheran confessional writings, is accepted as a true and unadulterated statement and exposition of the Word of God. Everything else the synod teaches follows from those two sentences.

The Book of Concord, subscribed without reservation

Lutherans distinguish two ways of subscribing to their confessions. A quia subscription accepts the confessions because they agree with Scripture. A quatenus subscription accepts them insofar as they agree with Scripture, which leaves room to judge later that some part of them does not. The LCMS requires the first. Its pastors pledge themselves to the whole Book of Concord: the three ecumenical creeds, the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and its Apology, the Smalcald Articles, the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, Luther's Small and Large Catechisms, and the Formula of Concord of 1577. A Missouri Synod pastor who came to reject the Formula's teaching on the Supper would be understood to have abandoned his pledge.

Justification by grace through faith

The synod teaches that God justifies the sinner freely, for Christ's sake, through faith, without works of the law. Justification in this account is a forensic act: God declares the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ's obedience and death imputed to him, and faith receives that verdict rather than earning it. Good works follow necessarily from faith as fruit follows from a living tree, and they contribute nothing to the verdict itself. LCMS theology also stresses objective justification, the teaching that God has already declared the whole world righteous in Christ's resurrection, with subjective justification being the reception of that verdict by faith. Not every Lutheran body states it that way, and Missouri does.

Law and Gospel

The distinction between Law and Gospel is the synod's central interpretive rule, and Walther's lectures on the subject, published as The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, are still assigned in its seminaries. Law is every word of God that commands, accuses and kills the sinner's self confidence. Gospel is every word that gives Christ freely to the terrified conscience. A Missouri Synod preacher is trained to ask of every sermon whether the two have been rightly divided, because mixing them turns the Gospel into a new law and empties the comfort it was meant to give. Catholics reading LCMS material will meet this distinction constantly, and understanding it removes a great deal of confusion about why Lutherans hear certain Catholic sentences as threats.

Baptism and the means of grace

Baptism in LCMS teaching works forgiveness of sins, rescues from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe the promise attached to it, the language of Luther's Small Catechism. Infants are baptized, and the synod teaches that infants can and do believe as a gift of the Spirit given in the washing. Baptism, the Lord's Supper, absolution and the preached Word are together called the means of grace, the concrete places God has bound himself to deliver forgiveness. That sacramental instinct puts the LCMS much closer to Catholic teaching on baptism and what it accomplishes than most American Protestant bodies stand.

Confession and absolution

Private confession and absolution are retained in the LCMS as available and commended, without being required. The Small Catechism includes a form for it, congregations often schedule it, and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession treats absolution among the sacraments. In practice most LCMS Lutherans confess corporately at the start of the Divine Service and hear the pastor absolve them, and individual confession is used less often than the confessional writings envisage. Catholic readers will recognize the theology of the keys in the LCMS position, and the difference from the Catholic practice of sacramental confession lies in the obligation, the enumeration of sins and the connection with penance rather than in the power to forgive.

3. Biblical Inerrancy and the Brief Statement

The Missouri Synod teaches that the Scriptures are verbally inspired and without error in everything they say, including their statements about history and the natural world. The classic synodical text is the Brief Statement of the Doctrinal Position of the Missouri Synod, adopted by the synod in convention in 1932, which affirms that the Holy Spirit gave the biblical writers the very words they wrote and that Scripture contains no errors or contradictions of any kind. The synod repeated and sharpened the position in A Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles, adopted in 1973, which set out how Scripture is to be read and which historical claims must be held as historical.

What inerrancy commits the synod to

Several concrete positions follow, and LCMS teaching states them plainly:

• Adam and Eve were real, historically existing persons, and the fall recorded in Genesis 3 was a real event.
• The six days of Genesis 1 are natural days, and the synod rejects theistic evolution as an account of human origins.
• The miracles recorded in both testaments happened as narrated.
• Jonah, the flood, the exodus and the historical narratives are to be read as history.
• The books of Scripture were written by the authors the texts and the tradition assign to them, so partition theories that divide Isaiah or date Daniel late are rejected.

The Catholic position on the truth of Scripture

Catholic teaching also holds that Scripture is inspired and that it teaches without error, and it frames the claim differently. The Second Vatican Council's constitution Dei Verbum 11 states that the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error the truth that God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. Catholic exegetes read that clause as locating inerrancy in what the sacred authors assert, in the literary form in which they assert it, which allows the creation accounts to be read for what they teach about God, creation and the human person without requiring them to be a chronological report. Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus (1893) and Pius XII in Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) had already taught that the biblical writers described the natural world as it appears, and that literary genre must be identified before a passage can be judged true or false.

The disagreement is real and it is narrower than it looks. Both bodies confess that God is the author of Scripture and that Scripture does not deceive. They differ on whether every assertion in every genre must be read as a factual report. The Catholic account of the origin of the world and of the human person is set out in our guide to what the Church teaches about creation, and the wider question of how the Church reads the sciences is covered in our guide to faith and science. What the LCMS and Rome share against the liberal Protestant reading is the conviction that Scripture is God's own word and that its truth is not up for revision.

Sola scriptura and the shape of authority

The LCMS holds Scripture as the only rule and norm, and it accepts the ecumenical creeds and the Lutheran confessions as normed norms, faithful summaries subordinate to the Bible. The Catholic Church holds that the Word of God comes to us through Scripture and Tradition together, entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church. That is the structural difference underneath every specific dispute on this page: when the two bodies read the same verse differently, they have no shared court of appeal. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and Scripture works through the Catholic case, and our guide to how the Bible was assembled covers the canon question that sits behind it.

4. Seminex: The Walkout of 1974

Seminex is the name of the seminary formed in 1974 when most of the faculty and students of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis walked off the campus and continued teaching elsewhere in the city, and the episode is the reason the LCMS looks the way it does now. The dispute was about the historical critical method. Through the 1960s a substantial part of the St. Louis faculty had adopted critical approaches common in European and American biblical scholarship, treating some narratives as theological compositions rather than reports and questioning traditional authorship. Conservative pastors and laity regarded that as a denial of the synod's confessed position on Scripture.

How it unfolded

Jacob A. O. Preus II was elected synod president in 1969 on the conservative side of the argument, and he ordered an investigation of the seminary faculty, publishing a report on their doctrinal positions. The 1973 synodical convention in New Orleans adopted A Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles as the synod's doctrinal standard and declared that the faculty positions identified in the investigation were false doctrine. In January 1974 the seminary's board suspended the president of the seminary, John Tietjen. In February the majority of the student body and faculty declared themselves in exile, formed Concordia Seminary in Exile, and were housed by neighbouring institutions in St. Louis.

The consequences were permanent. Congregations and pastors who supported the exiles left the synod and formed the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches in 1976. In 1988 that association merged with the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The LCMS, having lost the faculty and the parishes that had pressed the other way, settled decisively into the confessional and inerrantist position it had adopted, and it has not moved since.

An earlier flashpoint worth knowing

In 1945 a group of forty four LCMS pastors published what became known as the Statement of the Forty Four, protesting what they saw as legalism in the synod's practice, particularly the refusal of joint prayer with other Christians and the treatment of synodical resolutions as binding doctrine. The statement was withdrawn from public discussion within a few years, and the questions it raised, about how much agreement church fellowship requires, kept returning. They returned in the split with the Wisconsin Synod in the 1950s and 1960s, and they returned in the Seminex years.

5. The Real Presence in Missouri Synod Teaching

The Missouri Synod teaches that the true body and blood of Christ are truly present, distributed and received under the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper. The Augsburg Confession Article X states it, the Formula of Concord Article VII defends it against the Reformed, and Luther's Small Catechism puts it into the words LCMS children learn: the Sacrament of the Altar is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ himself for us Christians to eat and to drink. This is an emphatic and objective doctrine of presence, and it is the point where the LCMS stands nearest to the Catholic Church. The doctrine of the sacramental union as Lutherans in general hold it, together with the full Catholic reply, is worked through in our guide to Lutheran beliefs and the Lutheran confessions. What follows here is the synod's own way of stating the case and the practice that goes with it.

Sacramental union, and what the phrase means

Lutherans call the relation between the elements and the body and blood the sacramental union, and they describe it with the phrase "in, with and under the bread and wine". The bread remains bread and the wine remains wine, and the body and blood of Christ are given with them by the power of Christ's word of institution. Two consequences follow that Catholic readers should note. First, the LCMS teaches the manducatio indignorum, that unbelievers who eat receive the body and blood to their judgment, precisely because the presence depends on Christ's word rather than on the faith of the recipient. Second, the synod declines the term consubstantiation, which is often used for the Lutheran view by outsiders and which Lutherans reject as an attempt to explain a mystery they refuse to explain.

Why the synod rejects transubstantiation

The LCMS objects to transubstantiation on three grounds, and each should be stated as the synod states it. Scripture does not teach that the substances of bread and wine cease to exist, and 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 continue to call the element bread after the consecration. The doctrine imports a philosophical apparatus of substance and accident that the words of institution do not require. And the definition makes an explanation of the mystery binding on consciences, where the Lutheran confessions ask only that the words be believed as they stand.

The Catholic answer is that transubstantiation names a fact rather than explaining a mechanism. The Council of Trent, in its thirteenth session in 1551, taught that by the consecration a change takes place of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of Christ's body and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood, and that the Church fittingly calls this change transubstantiation. The word states what has happened, that what is there is now Christ and no longer bread, and it leaves the manner of the change unexplained. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the whole doctrine in paragraphs 1373 to 1381. Our guide to the Real Presence and the Eucharist works through the scriptural and patristic case at length.

What follows in practice

The Lutheran account of the presence is tied to the sacramental action of eating and drinking, so the LCMS does not reserve the consecrated elements for adoration and does not hold Benediction or eucharistic processions. Practice on the remaining elements varies among congregations, with reverent consumption or return to the earth being common, and the synod has no doctrine that binds the presence to the reserved host. The Catholic Church holds that Christ remains present as long as the eucharistic species subsist, which is why tabernacles, adoration and processions exist. A Catholic and an LCMS Lutheran can therefore agree that Christ is truly present at the altar and still disagree about what to do with the ciborium afterwards, and the second disagreement follows directly from the first.

The question of orders

Behind the eucharistic discussion sits the question of ministry. The Catholic Church teaches that the Eucharist requires a priest ordained in apostolic succession, and the Second Vatican Council's decree Unitatis Redintegratio 22 states that the ecclesial communities separated from the Catholic Church at the Reformation have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness, above all because of the absence of the sacrament of orders. The LCMS holds that the office of the ministry is divinely instituted and that a rightly called pastor administers the sacrament validly, without holding the historic episcopate to be necessary. That difference is why Catholic discipline cannot treat an LCMS communion service as a Catholic Mass, a point our guide to holy orders and the Catholic priesthood develops.

6. Closed Communion: Who May Approach the Altar

The Missouri Synod practises closed communion, admitting to the Lord's Supper those who are members of LCMS congregations or of church bodies in altar and pulpit fellowship with the synod. Visitors are asked to speak with the pastor before the service. The synod's own literature often uses the term close communion, which carries the same practice with a warmer accent, and both terms appear in synodical documents and parish bulletins. The 1986 convention resolved to maintain the practice, and it remains the official discipline.

The reasoning, in the synod's own terms

Three arguments carry the practice. The first is confessional: receiving the Supper together is a public confession that those who commune hold one faith, so communing with someone who denies part of what the synod confesses states something untrue about the state of the churches. The second is pastoral, drawn from 1 Corinthians 11:27 to 29, where Paul warns that anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. If the body and blood are genuinely present, admitting a person who does not believe they are present exposes that person to harm, so the restriction is an act of care. The third is the unity argument of 1 Corinthians 10:17, that the one bread makes the many one body, which the synod reads as describing a unity that must already exist rather than one the sacrament creates among the divided.

What this means for a visiting Catholic

A Catholic attending an LCMS service will normally not be communed, and a Catholic should not seek to be. The parallel runs both ways. Catholic discipline restricts the Eucharist just as firmly: canon 844 permits a Catholic to receive from a non-Catholic minister only where the Catholic Church recognizes valid sacraments, which it affirms of the Orthodox Churches and does not affirm of Lutheran ministry, and it permits a Catholic minister to give the Eucharist to a baptized non-Catholic only in specific cases of grave necessity where the person seeks the sacrament on their own initiative, manifests Catholic faith in it, and is rightly disposed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1400 states plainly that eucharistic intercommunion with the ecclesial communities of the Reformation is not possible.

Catholics who find LCMS practice cold should notice that it is the same instinct their own Church acts on. Both bodies hold that communion states a unity that does not yet exist between them, and both decline to state it falsely. The disagreement between Rome and Missouri concerns which body has authority to define the faith being confessed.

Where LCMS practice varies

Practice on the ground is not uniform. Some LCMS pastors apply the discipline strictly and announce it from the chancel, others handle it through a conversation and admit visitors who can confess the Real Presence and their own need of forgiveness, and the synod's conventions have repeatedly discussed the gap between the stated discipline and parish reality. Anyone visiting should ask the pastor rather than assume, which is exactly what the printed invitation in most LCMS bulletins asks visitors to do.

7. Why the LCMS Rejected the Joint Declaration

The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification was signed at Augsburg on 31 October 1999 by representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, stating a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification and declaring that the mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century do not apply to the teaching presented in the Declaration. The Missouri Synod is not a member of the Lutheran World Federation, took no part in the signing, and publicly declined to accept the text. Its rejection is one of the clearest markers of what separates the LCMS from the ELCA and from most of world Lutheranism.

What the Declaration actually says

Represent it accurately before responding to the LCMS objection. The Declaration states that by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts and equips and calls us to good works. It then works through seven disputed areas, including human powerlessness before sin, justification as forgiveness and as making righteous, the relation of faith and grace, the sinfulness of the justified, law and gospel, assurance of salvation, and the good works of the justified. In each area it states a common confession and then sets out the distinct emphases each side retains. An Official Common Statement and an Annex were adopted alongside it. Later, the World Methodist Council in 2006, the Anglican Consultative Council in 2016 and the World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2017 associated themselves with it. Our guide to the Joint Declaration and what it actually settled takes the text itself apart article by article, and this section stays with the Missouri Synod's reasons for standing outside it.

The Missouri Synod's objection

The synod's Commission on Theology and Church Relations evaluated the text and judged it inadequate, and the substance of the objection runs along four lines.

• The forensic point. Lutheran doctrine holds that justification is God's judicial declaration that the sinner is righteous for Christ's sake, with renewal following as a separate work of the Spirit. The Declaration's language about justification as both forgiveness and making righteous allows a reading in which the verdict rests partly on the renewal, which the synod regards as a surrender of the article the Reformation turned on.
• The condemnations. The Declaration says the sixteenth century condemnations do not apply to the teaching as presented in the Declaration. The synod's response is that the condemnations were aimed at positions the Council of Trent actually defined and that Trent's canons on justification, including its anathemas against those who say the sinner is justified by faith alone and that grace once received cannot be increased by good works, remain in force as Catholic doctrine.
• Deliberate ambiguity. A consensus stated in words that each side can read in its own sense is a verbal agreement. The LCMS holds that unity in doctrine requires agreement in the thing itself, so a text designed to be signable by both sides without either changing its position does not produce the unity it announces.
• The rest of the disputed ground. Justification is bound up with the authority of Scripture, the sacraments, the ministry and the papacy, and the synod argues that an agreement on one article while the others stand open cannot bear the ecumenical weight placed on it.

The four points summarise the published position of the LCMS's Commission on Theology and Church Relations and of the synod's officers at the time of the signing. Read the commission's own documents at the synod's website for its full argument, and read the Joint Declaration itself, published by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation, before judging either side.

The Catholic reading of the same text

Rome signed the Declaration while affirming that the differences it names remain differences. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's response of 1998 stated that a real consensus had been reached on basic truths and that points still needed clarification, particularly the Lutheran formula that the justified person is at once righteous and a sinner, and the sense in which good works have merit before God. The Annex addressed those points, and the signing followed. Catholic teaching holds that justification is a real transformation of the person by grace, that it is entirely unmerited at its beginning, and that the good works which follow are themselves God's gift and are truly the believer's own. Our guide to faith, works and how they fit together lays that case out, and our guide to what the Church teaches about salvation sets it in a wider frame.

8. The Fellowship Split With WELS

The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod suspended church fellowship with the Missouri Synod in 1961, and the two bodies that agree on inerrancy, the Book of Concord, male only ordination and closed communion have been out of fellowship with each other ever since. The dispute was about the doctrine of church fellowship itself, and the fact that two conservative synods split over it tells you how seriously confessional Lutheranism takes the question.

The Synodical Conference and how it broke

The Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America was formed in 1872 as an alliance of confessional Lutheran synods, with Missouri and Wisconsin as its largest members and the Norwegian body that became the Evangelical Lutheran Synod among the others. Through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s the LCMS moved toward doctrinal discussions and cooperative arrangements with other American Lutheran bodies, including joint military chaplaincy and cooperative work, and toward eventual fellowship with the American Lutheran Church, which it declared in 1969. Wisconsin regarded those steps as unionism, the practice of joint religious expression with those in doctrinal error. The Evangelical Lutheran Synod suspended fellowship with Missouri in 1955, Wisconsin followed in 1961, and the Synodical Conference itself broke up in the years that followed.

The doctrinal issue, stated fairly on both sides

WELS holds that church fellowship is a single, indivisible thing. Prayer fellowship, pulpit fellowship and altar fellowship are aspects of one reality, so any joint expression of faith with another Christian body presupposes complete doctrinal agreement. A WELS Lutheran will decline to pray publicly with a Christian outside that agreement, and will explain the refusal as honesty about the state of the churches. The LCMS distinguishes levels and settings: it holds altar and pulpit fellowship to require full doctrinal agreement while permitting cooperation in externals and some joint prayer with Christians it is not in fellowship with. Both bodies believe they are applying Romans 16:17, where Paul tells the Romans to watch out for those who cause divisions contrary to the doctrine they have been taught, and they disagree on how far the instruction reaches.

The two synods have held doctrinal discussions since, without restoring fellowship. The LCMS terminated its fellowship with the American Lutheran Church in 1981, which removed the immediate occasion of the 1961 suspension without resolving the underlying question.

Where the LCMS does hold fellowship

The Missouri Synod is in altar and pulpit fellowship with a set of confessional Lutheran churches around the world, including the American body called the American Association of Lutheran Churches and a number of overseas partner churches, and it belongs to the International Lutheran Council, an association of confessional Lutheran church bodies that stands apart from the Lutheran World Federation. Members of those partner churches are welcome at LCMS altars. Members of the ELCA and of WELS are not, for opposite reasons.

9. Church, Ministry and How the Synod Governs Itself

The Missouri Synod is an association of congregations that keeps its authority advisory, and the congregation is the locally decisive body. Each congregation owns its property, calls and dismisses its own pastor, and holds membership in the synod voluntarily. Synodical resolutions bind congregations in matters where they have surrendered their right of self government by joining, and the synod's ordinary means of enforcing doctrine is the roster: a pastor may be removed from the clergy roster, and a congregation may be expelled from membership, which is the limit of the sanction.

Walther on church and ministry

The doctrine behind that polity was set out by C. F. W. Walther in The Voice of Our Church on the Question of Church and Ministry, published in 1852 and still the synod's reference point. Walther taught that the Church in the proper sense is the assembly of believers, that the keys are given by Christ to the whole Church, and that the office of the public ministry is divinely instituted and is conferred through the call of the congregation. The position was worked out against two opponents: against the hierarchical view of Johannes Grabau of the Buffalo Synod, who held that the ministry stands above the congregation, and against the view associated with Wilhelm Loehe that ordination confers the office independently of the call. The LCMS has argued about the details of Walther's doctrine several times since, and the framework has held.

Ordination and the roles of women

The LCMS ordains only men to the pastoral office, citing 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 and the created order of Genesis 2, and it holds the position as scriptural doctrine rather than as custom. Women serve as deaconesses, teachers, directors of Christian education, missionaries, church musicians and administrators, and the synod resolved in 1969 that congregations may grant women the right to vote and to hold congregational offices that do not involve the exercise of the pastoral office. The Catholic Church reserves priestly ordination to men on grounds it states differently, resting on Christ's choice of the Twelve and the constant practice of the Church, most recently in John Paul II's 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and it likewise distinguishes ordained ministry from the many offices open to women.

Conventions, districts and the office of president

The synod meets in national convention every three years, with delegates elected from circuits of congregations, and the convention elects the synod president and adopts resolutions. Thirty five geographic districts handle regional oversight, each with a district president who functions in some respects as a bishop functions elsewhere while carrying a different title and a narrower authority. The Concordia University System, Concordia Publishing House, the Lutheran Church Extension Fund and the mission boards operate under the synod, and Lutheran Hour Ministries, which has broadcast The Lutheran Hour since 1930, is a recognized service organization rather than a synodical department.

Catholic readers comparing structures should notice what is absent. There is no bishop with jurisdiction over a congregation, no ordinary who can remove a pastor from a parish, no universal primacy, and no magisterium that can settle a disputed question by an act of teaching. Doctrinal disputes in the LCMS are settled by convention votes, by the Commission on Theology and Church Relations, and where those fail by division. Our guides to the papacy and the office of Peter and to Catholic and Protestant differences take up the underlying question of authority.

10. Worship, Creation and the Last Things

Missouri Synod worship is liturgical, following the historic western order of service with confession and absolution, the Kyrie, the Gloria in Excelsis, the readings, the creed, the sermon, the preface, the Sanctus, the words of institution, the Agnus Dei and the distribution. The Lutheran Service Book, published in 2006, is the current hymnal, and it carries several settings of the Divine Service along with the historic daily offices of Matins, Vespers and Compline. A Catholic walking into an LCMS Divine Service will find the shape of the Mass almost entirely familiar, with the canon and the offertory prayers absent and the hymnody far heavier.

The worship wars inside the synod

The synod argues internally about contemporary worship. One party holds that the historic liturgy carries the doctrine and should be kept, and it points to the Augsburg Confession's own claim in Article XXIV that the Mass is retained among the Lutherans and celebrated with the greatest reverence. Another party favours contemporary music and less structured services on missionary grounds. The disagreement is real and it runs along lines that will be recognizable to anyone who has followed liturgical arguments in the Catholic Church, which our guide to the Mass and its structure touches from the Catholic side.

Creation

The LCMS teaches that God created the heavens and the earth in six natural days by his word, and it rejects evolution as an explanation of human origins together with any account that places death before the fall. That position is stated in the Brief Statement of 1932 and repeated in later synodical resolutions, and it is taught in the synod's schools. Catholic teaching allows for evolutionary development of the body while holding that each human soul is immediately created by God, that Adam's sin was a real act of the first human beings whose consequences all inherit, and that the world is created out of nothing and is good. Our guide to creation and what Genesis teaches sets out the Catholic reading, and our guide to original sin and its transmission covers the doctrine both bodies are trying to protect.

The last things

Lutheran eschatology in the Missouri Synod is amillennial, and the synod rejects the millennial schemes common in American evangelicalism. Article XVII of the Augsburg Confession expressly condemns the teaching that before the resurrection of the dead the godly will take possession of an earthly kingdom and suppress the ungodly, and the LCMS holds that condemnation. The synod therefore teaches no rapture of the Church before a tribulation, no thousand year earthly reign, and no timetable of prophetic events. It teaches one visible return of Christ, one general resurrection, one final judgment, everlasting life and everlasting condemnation.

Catholic teaching agrees on all of that. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 676 rejects the millenarian expectation of a triumph of the kingdom within history, and the Catholic Church has never taught a pre-tribulation rapture. On this ground a Missouri Synod Lutheran and a Catholic stand together against a great deal of what is sold as Bible prophecy, and our guides to the rapture and where the idea came from, the millennium of Revelation 20 and the end times as a whole set out the case in detail.

Saints, Mary and prayer for the dead

The LCMS honours the saints as examples of faith, keeps many of their days on its calendar, and declines to invoke them, holding with the Augsburg Confession Article XXI that the saints may be remembered and imitated while Christ alone is to be called upon as mediator. Mary is confessed as the mother of God, ever virgin in the language of the confessions and of Luther, and she is not asked to pray. Prayer for the dead is not practised in the synod, and purgatory is rejected as unscriptural. Our guides to the communion of saints and why Catholics ask their prayers and to purgatory and final purification give the Catholic case on both points.

11. LCMS and Catholic Teaching Compared

The table below sets the two positions side by side on the questions people search for most. Every row states the LCMS position as the synod states it, then the Catholic position.

Catholic positions in the table follow the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the decrees of the Council of Trent and the documents of the Second Vatican Council. LCMS positions follow the synod's constitution, the Book of Concord as the synod subscribes it, the Brief Statement of 1932 and published synodical resolutions.

12. Where Catholics and the Missouri Synod Stand

Catholics and Missouri Synod Lutherans hold a large common inheritance and no formal agreement. Both confess the Trinity and the two natures of Christ in the words of Nicaea and Chalcedon, both baptize infants and hold that baptism does something rather than symbolizing something, both confess a true and objective presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar, both retain absolution, both keep a liturgical order descended from the western Mass, both reject the prosperity gospel and the prophecy timetables, and both hold marriage to be the lifelong union of one man and one woman. That is a great deal to hold in common in the twenty first century.

What still divides

The divisions are the ones this page has worked through: the rule of faith and whether Tradition and the Magisterium belong to it, the shape of justification, the papacy, the sacrament of orders and therefore the validity of the eucharistic ministry, the invocation of the saints, purgatory and prayer for the dead, and the number of the sacraments. Catholic teaching regards the Lutheran communities as ecclesial communities in which many elements of sanctification and truth are found, joined to the Catholic Church by baptism and by faith in Christ, and lacking the sacrament of orders and full eucharistic communion (Unitatis Redintegratio 3 and 22). The LCMS regards the Catholic Church as holding the ecumenical creeds and much true doctrine while teaching error on justification and papal authority, and its confessional writings use severe language about the papacy that the synod has not withdrawn.

Practical guidance

If you are Catholic and marrying, working with or arguing with a Missouri Synod Lutheran, four points will save a lot of wasted heat. Read the Augsburg Confession before responding to anything, because it is short and it is what they actually confess. Do not attribute consubstantiation to them, since they reject the term. Do not treat closed communion as a personal insult, because your own Church restricts communion for the same reason. And do not assume that the ELCA position on any question is the LCMS position, because on most contested questions it is the opposite. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what unity requires covers how the Church approaches these conversations, and our overview of the main Christian denominations places the synod in the wider map.

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