Lutheran Church-Canada may now be the largest Lutheran denomination in Canada

Dear Reader,

If you are not part of Lutheran circles then you may not have seen the latest article by the editor of the Canadian Lutheran titled, “Is LCC now the largest Lutheran church body in Canada?”  To read the article click here: https://www.canadianlutheran.ca/is-lcc-now-the-largest-lutheran-church-body-in-canada/

In the article Matthew Block notes that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada’s (ELCIC) April 2024 membership statistics reported to the Lutheran World Federation  have their national membership at 40171 members.  That’s a massive 57.8 percent drop from their reported 2019 pre-covid membership in 2019.  While we in Lutheran Church-Canada strongly believe that the ELCIC have fallen away in a belief of the inerrancy of Holy Scripture through their adoption of the historical critical method or theory of reading Holy Scripture (they confess the Holy Scripture contains the Word of God while we in Lutheran Church-Canada confess all of the Holy Scriptures are the inerrant and infallible Word of God for all life and doctrine) this still should sadden us.  There are certainly many faithful Christians within the ELCIC.

This makes me reflect on the remark a son of one of my now deceased members said to me recently who is in leadership at a local ELCIC church.  I really like this man and think he has served the ELCIC congregation he is a member of very well.  We were chatting about if there was a pastoral shortage in the ELCIC and he mentioned that there are very few seminarians in the closest ELCIC seminary and then he said, and I’m paraphrasing as I do not remember his exact words, “Who would want to enter a dying field?”  Aside from equating the church of God a kind of field or industry, what stuck out to me was that he called the ELCIC dying.

As Matthew Block noted in the article, the Lutheran Church-Canada is also declining in membership.  I remember when I was a newly ordained in 2005 the membership of LC-C was about 60000 and there were some 320 churches.  Now, 18 years later as the latests published statistics are for 2023, LC-C’s membership is 44790, a 25 percent decline, and as of 2023 LC-C had 268 congregations.  LC-C’s membership decline used to be 1% per year but covid accelerated that.

What can we do as LC-C Lutherans in the face of decline in our synod?  First of all we remember that the church is always God’s church and not ours which our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded through His incarnation, atoning death, resurrection, ascension and the sending of His Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  This keeps us from pride or despair when our synod grows or declines.  But more practically as a denomination and in the individual congregations we are members of what we can do is continue to be steadfastly pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-family, encouraging one another, inviting non-Christian acquaintances to worship or to church fellowship events and donate as generously as we can.  These are some of the best ways we can support the synod we cherish.

Is it a big deal that LC-C is probably now the largest Lutheran denomination in Canada?  No, not really.  Maybe this gives us a little more influence on the Canadian scene as we can claim that title, but in God’s eyes all that matters is that we trust in His promises given to us in Christ, hold on to the Word of God as inerrant and authoritative, seek to live Christian lives, do evangelism, and seek to maintain the Word of God rightly preached among us and the administration of the sacraments according to our Lord’s institution.

In Christ,

Pastor Korsch