Elections, the Finale (Hopefully)

If people are interested in a different kind of election, I offer for your consideration what the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod does. For those who are not aware, the LCMS is a conservative denomination. It has a congregational system and supervising districts (as we do), rather than central control by bishops as most other Lutheran groups do.

For their national President, the procedure is as follows: Circuits (our sections) elect delegates to the tri-annual convention, one lay and one clergy. Not every church or minister can attend as voting delegates. The circuits also have the right to make nominations for national office. The districts likewise are allowed to nominate candidates.

These nominations are gathered at headquarters. Each one nominated is contacted to see if they wish to run. The candidates are then allowed to put together documents outlining their qualifications and positions. Before the convention meets, a booklet is mailed out with all the business to be conducted and includes these candidate statements. (Also, the number of districts and sections that place a person's name into nomination is given.)

This would place an expectation upon any office-holder who did not expect to run for re-election to announce his or her intent quite a ways in advance so that others could be nominated.

The mechanics are simple enough. We would just need to decide the details.

Now I have a caution. I find the Missouri Synod Lutherans to be very heavily politicized. There are (and have been for many years) organizations within the denomination taking political positions on their future and direction. The recently un-elected president, Jerry Kieschnick, was considered to be part of the liberals and the new president, Matt Harrison, was the darling of the conservatives. (For the record, I have spoken to Matt Harrison several times when I was a student at Concordia. He seems to be a smart, good guy. I also knew that the would be president as early as 2006, though it took until 2010. I have never even seen Jerry Kieschnick.)

I don't mean the terms liberal and conservative in any way that reflects our political system or the Biblical theological world. For the LCMS, a liberal believes the church should be more like American evangelicals (less emphasis on liturgy, clergy robes and collars, and the confessions; more contemporary worship; among some acceptance of female clergy). The conservatives believe the church should be more like it was in the time of Luther (heavy emphasis on liturgy and the confessions; traditional worship; little contact with other denominations). I have generalized here and if any of my LCMS friends read it, they may take me to task. The point is that, although the divisions are put in theological terms, the biggest factional divisions are over church operations.

The politics are a bit ugly for my taste. There are newspapers and websites keeping these issues going and recruiting ministers and lay people to their particular side. As an outsider to their culture, I don't like it.

This is the biggest issue that keeps me from throwing my full support behind a nomination system that allows us to hear from the candidates. Though we have political things going on, our culture pushes those into the background. Overt politicking is frowned upon. I fear that a system like the Missouri Synod uses would inevitably lead us to blatant politics and factionalism. I'm not sure we would like it.

So I have shown you a method from another denomination. It can be done. What we need to decide is if we really want it.