One of the many hats that I wear is as the leader of the Atlantic District team on our local trialogue with the ELCA Metro-NY Synod and the Archdiocese of New York. Given the significant changes in the American church political landscape over the past few years, the dialog determined to spend the first few meetings just reintroducing ourselves. Each tradition shared some of its history as church bodies and regional incarnations of church bodies, documenting developments over the years, and identifying challenges and pressing issues that their respective communions will face in the years ahead.  It was a rare and helpful opportunity for each tradition to describe itself in its own words.

I had always known how big Roman Catholicism and the Archdiocese of New York was. But to work with actual numbers was astounding. Arch-NY has nearly 3 million members. Comparatively, the whole of the LCMS has approximately 2.5 million members (the ELCA, 4.8 Million). What is surprising is that Arch-NY has only 371 parishes serving those 3 million members. By comparison the LCMS has just over 6000 parishes serving almost half a million fewer members! The numbers of ordained pastors/priests are equally disproportional, 1505 in the Arch-NY versus around 9400 in the LCMS.

I am still not entirely sure what to make of the numbers. It is hard to imagine the average 8000 members per parish receiving the same level of pastoral care that the average 400 members per parish in the LCMS receive (The ELCA has a similar average of 450 parishioners/parish), even if unlike most Lutheran pastors, the Roman Catholic priest doesn’t have competing vocational responsibilities as a parent or spouse.  And yet having a critical mass of parishioners allows Roman Catholics the luxury to fund social service, parochial education, missions, and other agencies in a way that Lutherans in recent years have not.  Due to their smaller size, a Lutheran parish must devote a comparatively larger percentage of their resources simply to pay pastoral salary, to cover church overhead, and to keep the actual physical plant operational.

At some point, the question must be asked – how large is too large for adequate pastoral care? But the question must also be asked – how small is too small to be good stewards of the resources God has given? Given their hierarchy and wider-church loyalty, Roman Catholics are able to ask the questions and restructure in ways that are at least seeking to balance critical mass and pastoral care. Given Lutheranism’s fierce congregational autonomy and even more fierce loyalty to the local congregation (and building) it is doubtful that such questions could even be asked, or possibilities for restructuring considered. This institutional paralysis in the face of growing organizational challenges, more than any other factor, may be the key contributor to Lutheranism’s continued slow steady decline in the United States.