Dilogous Administrators:
How Missouri Synod Administrators are Subverting Lutheran Education and Ministry at Home and Overseas
Rev. Gregory P. Schulz, D.Min., Ph.D.
The Lutheran School of Theology, Kenya
In national politics, there is an administrative state; in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) polity, there is an administrative church. In national politics, administrative state is a way of identifying government agencies and institutions that are a law unto themselves, untethered from the authority of the Constitution of the United States in how they function. In LCMS polity, administrative church is a way of identifying synodical agencies and institutions that are a law and gospel unto themselves, untethered from Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions in how they function.
The administrative church of the Missouri Synod (not to be equated with the Lutheran Church of the sixteenth-century German Reformation as articulated in the Lutheran Confessions) is made up of administrators. By “administrators” I mean those who have the title of “president” (district presidents, university presidents, synod president; presidents of this and that LCMS agency or institution), as well as full-time bureaucrats of the Missouri Synod with various quasi- or pseudo-ecclesiastical titles; Chief Mission Officer, for example.
My thesis is that the LCMS’s administrative church includes a preponderance of dilogous administrators who are subverting Lutheran education and ministry in the United States and are also exporting this subversion overseas in mission fields such as Sri Lanka and Africa. These dilogous administrators (I will unpack the biblical Greek adjective shortly) have been doing great harm at home in our Concordia universities and are doing great harm abroad in Lutheran schools of theology. To reiterate, they have been subverting Lutheran education and ministry. Whether intentionally or unintentionally – their intent is utterly irrelevant for my thesis, since I am not looking at hearts but going by their words and actions – the administrative church of the LCMS is wreaking global havoc via an especially pernicious hypocrisy, namely, by means of their wholesale verbal duplicity, for example, their disingenuous usage of terms such as “ecclesiastical supervision” and “Lutheran schools.”
While providing evidence of the obvious harm they are doing to the mission of the Lutheran Church, I will also demonstrate how these administrators have been tactically degrading the textual authority of the pastoral epistles – 1 Timothy, specifically – in doctrine and practice, in defiance of St. Paul’s admonition, “to guard what has been entrusted to you [that is, to Timothy], avoiding irreverent and empty speech and contradictions from what is falsely called knowledge.” I will also show how the apostle’s related warning applies to every dilogous administrator in the LCMS: “By professing it some people have departed from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20-21) and what should be done about this ecclesiastical catastrophe.
“That damnamus bylaw”
I have analyzed and documented the subversion of Lutheran education stateside in the book Anatomy of an Implosion, where I detail the conditions, that is, the culture and anatomy, that produced Concordia University Wisconsin’s (CUW’s) adulterous affair with Woke Marxism. The following bulleted appendices from Implosion relate to the present essay on dilogous administrators.
For the time being, think of dilogous (1 Timothy 3:8) as the logical fallacy of equivocation, but greatly amplified. “To equivocate” means to use similar-sounding words in order to trick people into believing your false narrative. If I want to trick you into believing that women are never rational, I could concoct a three-sentence argument such as this: 1. Only man is rational. 2. No woman is a man. 3. Therefore, no woman is rational. The lie or fallacy embedded in the argument is that “man” in the first statement means the same as “man” in the second statement, but it does not. In (1) man means “member of the human race,” while in (2) man means “male, not female.”
The LCMS has been through this before; therefore, these administrators are utterly without excuse. Equivocation was a mainstay of the LCMS crisis of Seminex 1.0, as Kurt Marquart wrote in Anatomy of an Explosion. “Theology had fallen into a confusion of tongues. Old words were used in new and vague sentences. Even liberals on occasion felt threatened by the all-enveloping double-talk.” In the Missouri Synod of the early twenty-first century, equivocation has been greatly amplified and indeed weaponized largely by the current administrative church of the LCMS. Here are examples from the unresolved and unrepented Woke Marxist explosion at Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW).
- Appendices K-L regarding the administrators neglect of Scripture, of the Confessions, and its failure to provide any due process whatsoever;
- Appendix M: The Eighth Commandment, concluding paragraphs from Martin Luther’s Large Catechism;
- Appendix R: Reply to the President-Provost “Agreement Memo;” and
- Appendix S: An Essay, Cur Verbum Verba, to the First Annual Convention of Luther Classical College concerning the initial appearances of this administrative tactic of verbal duplicity.
In each of these appendices you will see evidence of the pervasive double-talk from various university, district, and synodical administrators. Appendix R shows that this equivocation extends to contradicting 1 Timothy 2:12 because a female provost is usurping authority to teach and to have authority over an ordained pastor. This double-talk, or equivocation, subverts theological education as surely as it subverts the so-called “reconciliation processes” and “ecclesiastical supervision” in today’s LCMS. “Reconciliation processes” is doublespeak for “ways to punish and quash confessional critics and dissenters.” “Ecclesiastical supervision” is a churchy synonym.
This churchy equivocation is not a mistake; it has become the weapon of choice of recent district presidents in the districts that house CUW and its failed Ann Arbor franchise campus. It has become administrative strategy for coverup covering a multitude of transgressions, both ethical and doctrinal, an untethering from Scripture and the Confessions worthy of Orwell’s 1984, if his Big Brother were a church instead of a state. In Chapter Four of Implosion, I explain some of the doctrinal consequences of their widespread duplicity of language regarding Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions this way:
The cringe toward Woke Marxism at my Concordia university has included a studied ignorance of sacrosanct texts regarding Christ’s Church and its Gospel ministry. For example, there appears to be a studied ignorance of Saint Paul’s apostolic texts on the office of the ministry in Ephesians 4 and in his pastoral epistles such as 1 Timothy 2 and 5 as well as of the Formula of Concord. This cringe-and-drift maneuvering is a lamentable mission drift from what the Formula calls “our public common writings” (Formula, Of the Comprehensive Summary, Foundation, Rule, and Standard, paragraph 1).
This studied ignorance is evident in:
(a) CUW’s process by which the Board of Regents elected the new President;
(b) CUW’s transgressions of the Scriptures and our Lutheran Confessions in so–called “reconciliation processes”; and
(c) CUW’s doctrinal innovations regarding the Lutheran teaching and practice of Church–and–Ministry in the current anatomy / culture / educational philosophy of the university.
The doctrinal deviations mentioned in (c) include, for example, the university’s administrative defiance of 1 Timothy 2:12, where the apostle Paul writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man…” My former Concordia university has for the past two years had a female provost in authority over its faculty. A provost is the most senior academic authority in a university, the top administrator in charge of all teaching and of evaluating, hiring, and firing faculty, including pastors and theological faculty. CUW is not the only Concordia to “reinterpret” and equivocate the Scriptures in this way. No doubt, synodical, district, and university administrators involved will respond, “But the university president has ultimate spiritual authority, so it’s fine.” However, if you accept such “reasoning,” it would have been fine for women in Paul’s century to teach and exercise authority since apostles such as Paul had ultimate spiritual authority; therefore, such rationalizations are contrary to God’s Word.
While so-called Lutheran church bodies and synods around the world are defiantly authorizing women to teach and to exercise authority over men while moving to defrock confessional Lutheran pastors who oppose them, administrators in the LCMS are doing the same thing as those other defiant synods, while referring to the Concordias who are being defiant as “steadfast Lutheran institutions” run by “compassionate theologians.” This is what ecclesiastical implosion looks like.
CUW, it turns out, was not only “the flagship university of the Concordia University System.” In hindsight, it was also the tip of the iceberg of the emerging administrative church in the LCMS. Keep in mind, doctrinal oversight of the Concordia universities rests, at least in theory, with the Concordia University System (CUS) and its president, with district presidents, and with the synod president. Untethered from Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions – this is the definition of the administrative church. (Yes, disengaged or inept regents and cowed Lutheran faculty may also be implicated, but they are not the topic of this essay.)
In the first chapter of Implosion, I exposed my former university’s studied ignorance and functional defiance of the Formula of Concord, the norm and rule for education in all Lutheran schools and churches since the sixteenth century. Like CUW, the CUS, district presidents, and the synod president have ignored the Formula of Concord. To go by its administrators, the LCMS is no different from the Lutheran churches of the Netherlands that officially reject the Formula. These administrators have not “rejected and condemned” their universities’ defiance of 1 Timothy 2:12 (and of Paul’s extended biblical reasoning in the context of this prohibition) in the case of female provosts or the university’s daliance with Woke Marxism.
Apart from how to win friends and influence church people via verbal duplicity, CUW did not learn anything from its explosion over its subversive efforts to install a Woke Marxist woman president in 2021-2022. The deck chairs were reshuffled and the name of the university’s Woke reporting system was changed, but that was it. Except for the implosion of CUW’s Ann Arbor campus and a noteworthy downturn in its Mequon student body, faculty, and staff, although not, of course, in its equivocational administrators.
Pastors, professors, and church members across the denomination expressed concern publicly and privately to church leadership. Local, regional, and national church councils expressed disapproval of CUW’s actions and opposition to identity politics, also known as leftist racism and cultural Marxism. Concordia also maintains a “bias reporting system” known for harassing students and professors for their speech. After The Federalist reported on the system last year, its name appears to have been changed (April 3, 2024).
Only the names have been changed; not to protect the innocent, but because equivocation has become a way of “doing business” in such administrative matters. This further indicates that “in LCMS polity, administrative church is a way of identifying synodical agencies and institutions that are a law and gospel unto themselves, untethered from Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions in how they function.”
But it is not only Concordia University Wisconsin and the Concordia University System that have untethered themselves from Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions. Our administrative church has exported its modus operandi of confessional duplicity and amplified equivocation manifested in the case of CUW out into the mission field, where it has also been subverting Lutheran education and ministry.
The stateside crisis in Lutheran education was also the tip of the iceberg regarding the preference of presidents and other administrators for their own man-made bylaws over the divinely authoritative texts of Scripture – a kind of hyper-hypocrisy carried out via their use of trustworthy theological terminology “in a new and vague sense.” Ignore the Lutheran Confessions; then equivocate the Lutheran vocabulary. This has become the administrative strategy.
In addition, substituting the words of administrators for the Word of God has been globalized for use in the mission field. This added level of equivocation, is the almost inevitable move of replacing Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions with synodical bylaws in practice. This too was in evidence in the administrative church’s mishandling of the CUW mess.
Consider the less-than-Lutheran manner in which the LCMS president addressed the eruption of Woke Marxism at Concordia University Wisconsin. In the text of the synod president’s May 2022 letter to the regents and senior administrators at Concordia University Wisconsin, the LCMS president barely mentioned God’s Word. He did not deploy a single passage from the Bible, our Confessions, or Lutheran doctrine. There was a perfunctory mention of “resources based upon the inerrant Scripture” and “biblically conservative institutions,” but not a single point from Holy Scripture. Instead, he made his case – such as it was – exclusively on the basis of bylaws. Once he was satisfied that those who defied the bylaws had been brought to heel, he was done. He called for repentance, but only for “repentance for Bylaw violations and adoption of worldviews and agendas.” This use of repentance, as you can see from his own text, is equivocal. It appears to be a word from the first of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and our Book of Concord, but it has nothing to do with contrition and faith; only with coming into line with the administrative church’s bylaws. His oft-mentioned fist-pounding, it would seem, is not to recall regents and others back to the Scriptures and the Confessions, but to adherence to synodical bylaws. The synod president’s letter is accessible in full in Appendix H of Implosion.
Thus, the administrative response to the religious and educational catastrophe at CUW brought to light the administrative church’s way of relating to Lutheran education and ministry overseas. The administrative method is to replace in practice the authoritative texts of the Bible and the creeds and Lutheran Confessions with their bylaws. In this way, biblical and theological vocabulary is made super equivocal. This tactic is not merely equivocation – as subversive to human fellowship as that fallacy is – in practice , it is duplicity with God’s words and God’s Word. It aims to subvert God’s fellowship with us human beings. It is duplicitous, and it is Roman Catholic. Inevitably and predictably, duplicity with God’s Word leads to the replacement of God’s words with someone else’s words – which leads to canon law, to bylaws, to bylaws as canon law.
In Lutheran churches and schools, equivocation / verbal duplicity is the warm oven in which the leaven of false teaching ferments (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). It produces a chemical change in a Lutheran school, church, or church body.
Bylaw 3.8.3.1 is Exhibit One. This evidence for the LCMS’s administrative replacement of the Scriptures and the Confessions regarding Lutheran education and the office of the ministry, is available in the concluding pages of the monograph Seminex 2.0, The Foundational Heresy that Propelled the LCMS from Explosion to Implosion. In this extended passage, MS is a synonym for administrative church.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. The MS of the LCMS is attacking, dismissing, and shunning steadfast Lutherans (a) on the basis of its own bylaws which, in the day-to-day interactions of synodical officials with Lutheran pastors and parishioners, replace the authoritative texts of the Scriptures and the Formula, (b) while exercising its “right to read these texts in a way that has to be constantly reinvented” (Derrida).
For example, consider this bylaw and the way it is currently being used by the MS.
“3.8.3.1 The Board for International Mission is charged with developing and determining policies in support of mission and ministry in foreign countries for the Office of International Mission (Bylaw 1.2.1 [n])…liaison with the colleges, universities, and seminaries of the Synod…international schools…Upon the recommendation of the Office of International Mission, the board shall serve as the only sending agency through which workers and funds are sent to the foreign mission areas of the Synod, including the calling, appointing, assigning, withdrawing, and releasing of missionaries (ministers of religion–ordained and ministers of religion–commissioned) and other workers for the ministries in foreign areas.“
This bylaw is not based on the authority of Scripture and the Confessions, despite the preamble of qualifications in the 2019 Handbook, where bylaws begin on page 20. No doubt the synodical reply from those in the various mission boards will be, “Our authority to act as the only agency to allocate funding, to call or release missionaries, and so on, comes from the synod in convention.” But this is an especially offensive ad populam fallacy. Divine calls are not based on democratic voting but on the Word of God, as it is written and on our Confessions. This is because those Confessions are, in turn, under the sole authority of the written Word.
This damnable bylaw (the Latin word in the Formula’s mandate to condemn false doctrine is damnamus) is currently being used by synod officials to invalidate the divine call of the director of our Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya and to obliterate any non-compliance with LCMS administrators in Sri Lanka, no matter the cost. The harm to our former partner church there and to a faithful and dedicated LCMS missionary besides is well documented. In addition, synodical members of various mission boards and the Concordia University System have been communicating with the pastors of parishes that faithfully support the Lutheran School of Theology, urging them to see to it that their congregations and their parishioners stop supporting the School and stop inviting our director to preach in LCMS congregations.
The MS’s conduct in “developing and determining policies in support of mission and ministry in foreign countries” has caused great harm to called missionaries and indeed to mission work worldwide. In Africa, where it is estimated that almost half of the souls on the continent speak French, MS oversight has degraded the number of French-speaking Lutheran missionaries from 12 to one in the last decade or so. The one remaining missionary, in great demand in many African countries as a powerful preacher and the primary teacher of Lutheran doctrine, is the director of the congregation-funded and accredited Lutheran School of Theology. When an African academic I know heard this thing, he remarked on the racial prejudice of the MS for opposing the one theological school he knows about that plans to hand over its curriculum and facilities to faithful African Lutherans in fulfillment of its mission to “form African Lutherans to teach the faith.”
(Anatomy of an Implosion and Seminex 2.0 are available worldwide on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Christian News, etc.)
Every other sentence in the bylaws, it seems, reminds everyone that all these shenanigans and all this verbal duplicity are being done with the blessing or under the authority of the synod president. In my circle of pastoral friends, we call Bylaw 3.8.3.1 the Get Rid of James May Law. He is the divinely called pastor and director of the LST in Africa. Among other things, this bylaw alone is proof of the lengths that a synod president and other administrators will go to get rid of faithful and successful missionary pastors whom they fear, envy, or just don’t like and cannot bring under their thumb. It is also a Get Rid of the Divine Call bylaw and a glaring instance of racial prejudice.
To the growing evidence for my thesis that the synodical administrators are subverting Lutheran education at home and overseas, see the debacle over “ecclesiastical supervision” created by LCMS in Sri Lanka, as reported by Christian News in February 10, 2025 (bold italic print added for emphasis):
Without responding to any of the points made in the letter from the Sri Lankan council, Steven Mahlburg replied with two letters – again on CELC letterhead, using the CELC seal, indicating that the LCMS is in charge, not the Bishop, and threatening further disciplinary action if the LCMS is not obeyed. First he wrote to the CELC bishop Arulchelvan on a letter dated Sept. 29, 2024, demanding renewal of his visa: “Please note that the signature requirement is urgent and we cannot wait for the next council meeting. If this signature is delayed, it can have a lot of negative consequences for everyone, including disruption of the operations of CELC. Your letter amounts to a refusal to comply with directions from our leadership – you have also stated that you will comply with our instructions only if your demands are met. We trust that you are not trying to threaten or blackmail me into complying with your demands. Please be assured that the leadership of the LCMS is keenly observing this situation and there will be consequences for any disruption of the organization.”
Second, Mahlburg wrote to the CELC council, in a letter dated Sept. 30th, 2024, dismissing the concerns that they expressed in their letter, rejecting their request to discuss matters as a group, and requiring the Sri Lankan pastors and evangelists to meet him one by one, in a clear effort to divide the Sri Lankans. In his own words, Mahlburg Stated: “I categorically deny the various allegations and accusations made against me in your said letter.”
Then, asserting the authority of the LCMS to exercise discipline over the partner church, including the bishop, he wrote: “The leadership of LCMS does not wish to take any strict measures to maintain order and discipline without affording all parties involved an opportunity to discuss and resolve differences amicably. It is for this purpose that we have scheduled meetings individually…”
In addition to the Sri Lanka report, see the official Lent 2025 letter from the African Lutheran bishops and board members of Lutherans in Africa and The Lutheran School of Theology (LST) in Kimuka, Kenya, which I have attached at the end of this essay. In both the reporting on the disaster in Sri Lanka and in the text of the letter from the African Lutheran bishops, those with eyes to see and ears to hear will perceive the paternalism, colonialism, and extortion wielded by LCMS administrators against Lutheran pastors and bishops in Sri Lanka and Africa. These administrators are untethered from the authority of the Pauline and pastoral epistles. They are speaking and acting in open defiance of the apostle Paul, who tells Christ’s church, “An overseer, therefore, must be above reproach…self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a bully, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not greedy” (1 Timothy 3:2-3).
There is a reason for the anti-apostolic conduct of these administrators. It is the predictable outcome of the preponderance of dilogous administrators cultivated in the Missouri Synod during the last generation or so. Elsewhere, I have written at some length about the foundational heresy for this wretched and ungodly state of affairs (see Seminex 2.0, The Foundational Heresy that Has propelled the LCMS from Explosion to Implosion.) Now, though, it is time to explain what it means to identify these churchmen as dilogous administrators.
Dilogous administrators
At one level, MS administrators are being paternalistic and colonialistic toward Lutheran pastors in Sri Lanka and Africa, as is evident in their manhandling of the “partner church” pastors in Sri Lanka and the Lutheran bishops in Africa.
At another level, they are projecting their own inadequacies and insecurities onto pastors and missionaries by exercising their so-called “ecclesiastical supervision” against authentic and intrepid Lutherans, missionaries such as James May and Edward Naumann, for example, who risk life and health to preach and baptize, who do not quit the mission field when demoted and defunded, and who are clearly beloved and emulated in Christ’s Church.
But in biblical terms, the problem is the doctrine and character of these administrators. In a word, the problem is that they are being dilogous. Modern English translations tend to render dilogous – used nowhere in the Bible except in 1 Timothy 3:8 – as “double-tongued,” suggesting that the problem is merely hypocrisy. But “double-tongued” would be diglossos.
Those who are dilogou are hypocritical, to be sure, but they are not hypocritical in the sense of pretending to be something that they are not; rather, they are hypocritical in regard to the means of grace. Their very character, as demonstrated in their habitual misuse of the divine gift of language, is antiscriptural, antilogos, antichrist, while they are claiming to be overseers and bishops, deacons and servants of Christ in His Church. Their way of overseeing and serving is dismissive of the Logos, Christ, and His Word. They regularly dis the Word and words.
What dilogous churchmen are doing is refusing to abstain from “irreverent, empty speech and contradictions from what is falsely called ‘knowledge.’” And here is the apostolic linchpin: “By professing it, some people have departed from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20-21). This is the deep, James 1:22 hypocrisy of the false teachers who are so invested in deceiving others that they have deceived themselves about their own faith. It is hypocrisy that fools not only other people but also oneself. In this case, it is deceived administrators deceiving other people in the church by foisting their ecclesiastical “knowledge” on them.
I have read somewhere that Paul’s use of dilogous may be an apostolic neologism (a unique, brand-new word) meaning “two speeches,” indicating that the problem is would-be deacons who would speak one way to one group of people, a different way to another group, and thereby deceive religious people everywhere into believing that he was orthodox. You can fool some of the people all the time if you are dilogous. Thayer’s Greek lexicon renders Paul’s adjective this way: “double in speech, saying one thing with one person, another with another (with intent to deceive).”
This is relevant to my thesis and is very important: We must note well that dilogous pastors / bishops / deacons or administrators in Christ’s church are positively prohibited by Saint Paul in 1 Timothy 3:8. Therefore, it is vital for us to unpack both elements of this compound word, which would be di-logos in its noun form.
First, then, the logos in dilogous is simultaneously a reference to Christ Himself, the eternally divine and incarnate Logos (John 1:1 and 14), to the Scriptures or the efficacious logoi of the incarnate Logos Himself (John 5:39), and to the divine gift of logos or language (logos, from lego, is Greek for “language” in general). For how this works, be sure to see what we can call “The First Principle of Lutheran Thinking” in Article 4, the Justification article of the unaltered Apology of the Augsburg Confession: “God cannot be treated nisi per Verbum, except through the Word.” Verbum is Latin for logos.
Secondly, the di in dilogous recurs in the Greek word diploos, meaning “treacherous or double-minded,” and in the English word duplicitous, meaning “deceptiveness, character, or practice of speaking differently of the same thing or acting differently at different times or to different persons” (see etymon online). Double-mindedness results from being double-logos-ed. There is one authority and one logos, Christ and His Word. Equivocating Christ’s words, the biblical text, is to be di-logous. 1. Anyone who equivocates with God’s Word is dilogous (definition). 2. Whoever is dilogous is prohibited from serving as a pastor, bishop, or deacon (1 Timothy 3:8). 3. Therefore, whoever equivocates with God’s Word is prohibited from being a church worker (conclusion).
Why the apostolic prohibition against dilogous church workers? Because being di-logous leads to being anti-logos and deviating from the faith (1 Timothy 6:21).
There are examples aplenty from LCMS administrators of verbal duplicity, using old Lutheran doctrinal words in new and vague senses. See the attached letter from the African Lutheran bishops to see how this applies to the term “ecclesiastical supervision,” for example. Consider what it means that the synod president praises the current group of Concordia presidents as “the best academic and theological leaders we have had,” although not one of them is a pastor, much less a “theologian of the cross” as defined in our Heidelberg Disputation, and most have never been professors, do not have academic degrees, etc. etc.
Dilogous administrators have made an Olympic sport of “reinterpreting,” that is, equivocating passages of the pastoral epistles, particularly 1 Timothy, in practice. Here is a partial list.
- 1 Timothy 5:20, “Publicly rebuke those elders who sin publicly…” — A bona fide professor and pastor publicly rebukes university leaders who publicly promulgate Woke Marxism at a Lutheran university is prosecuted for “violating the 8th Commandment,” on the basis of synodical bylaws and not on the basis of Luther’s biblical theology in his Large Catechism on the 8th Commandment. This is what LCMS administrators refer to by way of the fallacy of equivocation as “the reconciliation process.”
- 1 Timothy 2:12, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.” — Concordia universities that have women as provosts, teaching and exercising authority over men, including pastors and theology faculty, including one, CUW, that connived for over a year to install an academically unqualified woman as president and spiritual shepherd. These universities are identified equivocally by district and synodical administrators as “faithful steadfast Lutheran institutions.”
- 1 Timothy 3:2a, “An overseer must be above reproach, sensible, respectable…” — LCMS administrators work to defrock LCMS missionaries and pastors, on the basis a bylaw written for the purpose of defrocking missionaries and pastors who do not follow their bylaws – all the while claiming that they are concerned with “ecclesiastical supervision.”
- 1 Timothy 2:3b, “An overseer must be…able to teach” — This is a biblical reference to the teaching of Christ and His Word, not to teaching math, economics, English, and so on. The Formula of Concord defines ability to teach in Lutheran churches and schools as the capacity both to articulate “this we believe, teach, and confess” according to Scripture, and “this we reject and condemn” as false doctrine, according to Scripture. How many “overseers” in our Concordia universities or in administrative positions have demonstrated the aptitude to teach as spelled out in the pastoral epistles?
The massive scale and the synodical normalization of dilogous / verbal duplicity toward huge swaths of Scripture and settled Lutheran doctrine is what sustains the subversion of Lutheran education and ministry worldwide. The audacity of administrators claiming for themselves the right and power to act as “the only sending agency through which workers and funds are sent to the foreign mission areas of the Synod, including the calling, appointing, assigning, withdrawing, and releasing of missionaries (ministers of religion–ordained and ministers of religion–commissioned) and other workers for the ministries in foreign areas” is verbal duplicity to the nth degree. It is equivocation and ambiguity as administrative methodology. What are the true words, the biblical and Lutheran words regarding the ministry? Luther and our Confessions are crystal clear and unequivocal:
This doctrine has as its purpose that every minister of the Word of God should be sure of his calling. In the sight of both God and man, he should boldly glory that he preaches the Gospel as one who has been called and sent. Thus the king’s emissary boasts and glories that he does not come as a private person but as an emissary of the king…To glory this way is not in vain but necessary; for he does not glory in himself but in the king who has sent him and whose authority he seeks to have honored and elevated.
(LW Vol. 26, page 16)
Those who are dilogous do not belong in the office of the ministry of the Word of God. The essence of the administrative church – its untetherdness from Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions, the norm and rule of God’s authority in our lives – subsists on a diet of duplicity, verbal duplicity. Dilogous Missouri synod administrators use language in whatever way they find expedient at any given time. They do not see themselves as ad-ministers (“servants to ministers”); instead, they consider themselves supra-ministers (“above ministers”) who are above the law and the gospel. By their bylaws, ye shall know them. So too by their condescension toward bona fide ministers and missionaries. This is the administrative church’s stock in trade: duplicity in handling the Verbum and the verba by which God communicates and fellowships with us sinful human beings. Neither the apostle nor the Holy Christian and apostolic Church tolerate this in overseers / bishops / pastors.
“You shall not pastor!”
So, what shall we do? The administrators who make up the administrative church are duplicitous, but the apostle Paul is not. “Deacons, likewise [that is, like overseers / pastors / bishops (it is the same office under three names) ] should be worthy of respect; not dilogous, not drinking a lot of wine, not greedy for money, holding the mystery of the faith with good conscience. They must be tested first…” (1 Timothy 3:8-10).
I have demonstrated the biblical meaning of dilogous and the far-reaching ecclesiastical consequences of having an administration with a preponderance of dilogous administrators, such as we have in the LCMS. I have also demonstrated that this is not an isolated, analogous phenomenon but a systemic feature of the Missouri Synod’s administrative church.
These former pastors and supra-ministers who are subverting Lutheran education and ministry on the basis of bylaws and thus equivocating with the vocabulary of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions must repent unequivocally. That is, they must seek confession and absolution and bring forth the fruits of repentance. The fruits of repentance include their resignation from the Gospel ministry. They are not fit to be either administrators or parish pastors. They are a threat to the flock.
In conclusion, we faithful and confessional pastors and members of the Lutheran Church urgently remind you dilogous administrators to heed Paul’s concluding admonition to repent by ceasing immediately your “irreverent and empty speech and contradictions from what is falsely called knowledge. By professing it [as you have been doing!] some people have departed from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20-21). We are concerned about what your dilogous professing says about your faith. But we are exceedingly concerned about what your conduct is doing to the faith of precious souls in Africa, Sri Lanka, and indeed in our Lutheran schools and churches worldwide.
+++
Note: I am Professor of Theology and Academic Dean at The Lutheran School of Theology, Kenya. At the time that the African Bishops developed this letter, I served as their secretary. At the same time, Rev James May, my director, and I were leading the bishops in a study of 1 Timothy and its applications to the confessional Lutheran churches in Africa. I have taken the liberty of not including the names and signatures of our Lutheran bishops because, as one of the bishops explained in so many words, he was concerned that he and his pastors would be subjected to retribution by the LCMS, as happened to the bishops and pastors in Sri Lanka.
Monday of the Fourth Sunday in Lent, 2025
Dear brother, President Rev. Dr. Lucas Woodford,
We, the African Lutheran bishops and board members of Lutherans in Africa and The Lutheran School of Theology in Kimuka, pray that you will take to heart this written response to the many questions you have posed and plan to ask us about, one by one, in your remote video interviews this week. We recognize that this is an effort by the LCMS to discredit our divinely called director of our Lutheran School of Theology and to interfere with the work of Lutherans in Africa.
Our director, Rev. James May has told us that you are his friend. Therefore, we believe that these questions are not your questions, and this effort to discredit Rev. May, a faithful Lutheran pastor and missionary, is not your wish. We pray that you will listen to us and put a stop to this effort by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod to control the kingdom of our Father in heaven here in Africa.
On December 19, 2024 Rev. Kevin Robson, Chief Mission Officer of the LCMS, summoned our director to his office, where he told Rev. May, “I have contacted my people on the ground in Africa, and they do not know these bishops,” referring to us.
In fact, LCMS President Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison has met and spoken with each of us. Each of us is either already in fellowship with the LCMS or has formally requested fellowship.
This is our question for you: How is it that the LCMS Chief of Missions is not speaking the truth? You should know that we are ministers of the Gospel in Christ’s Church. We believe and confess the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions. We in Africa are also the Church that gathers around Word and Sacrament. We remind you of the Lutheran teaching, “Wherever the Church is, there is the authority to administer the Gospel. Therefore, it is necessary for the Church to retain the authority to call, elect, and ordain ministers. This authority is a gift that, in reality, is given to the Church. No human power can take this gift away from the Church. As Paul testifies to the Ephesians, when ‘He ascended . . . He gave gifts to men’” (Ephesians 4:8). In this same passage, we also confess, “So wherever there is a True Church, the right to elect and ordain ministers necessarily exists.” This is what we confess with all true Lutherans in Power and Primacy of the Pope, under The Power and Jurisdiction of Bishops (67).
And yet, through its social projects, the LCMS has been marginalizing us confessional Lutheran pastors and bishops. The LCMS Chief is choosing to listen to men who bring disgrace to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and are Lutheran in name only. They are men who seek to divide the true Lutherans in Africa for their own greed and are double-tongued (1 Timothy 3). The LCMS has been listening to politicians and not to faithful servants of our Lord, not to those of us who teach and live according to Dr. Luther’s catechisms and the Word of God.
You will understand that we wonder, “Why should we continue to work so hard to be in fellowship with the LCMS?” We are teaching our pastors to be faithful to the Word and to our Lutheran Confessions. What is the LCMS trying to do to faithful African Lutheran pastors and African Lutheran students with the words and actions of leaders such as Chief Rev. Robson?
In Christ our Lord, we call on the Lutheran people and dear brothers in the ministry in the LCMS to support the Lutheran School of Theology, our director, our confessional Lutheran faculty, and the African Lutheran bishops and pastors. We see this Lutheran School of Theology as our Wittenberg University, the place where faithful Lutheran pastors are being trained so that African people will have faithful and truly Lutheran pastors. We invite all our Lutheran brothers and sisters in the United States, Australia, and the world to pray and then to support this vital work of “forming African Lutherans to teach the faith.”
Our brother, President Rev. Dr. Lucas, we invite you to come and see for yourself what great things the Lord is working through His people, such as Rev. May at the Lutheran School of Theology. Please stop listening to the ideas of others. “Come and see” the work of our Lord in this place, as the Gospel says.