Rev Gregory P. Schulz, DMin, PhD
Professor of Theology and Academic Dean
The Lutheran School of Theology, Kenya
Shauen Trump, a self-identified “Pastor” and synodical director of some sort, wrote last month in an official LC-MS publication about an urgent need for more Lutheran missionaries in Africa. Trump is known as a promoter of LC-MS church growth and social gospel initiatives such as Project 25, initiatives often associated with concerns about corruption here in Kenya. Trump’s opulent and self-serving “ministry” is a public scandal to many, pastors and congregants alike, in Nairobi. He was an official speaker at the 2019 LC-MS Convention.
He is dismissive of real Lutheran pastors and congregations. Just ask around. He is known as a Big Man in our region of Africa because he uses LC-MS money to fund and to defund African bishops to do things “the LC-MS way” (in opposition to what Christ and His churches demand of real pastors in 1 Timothy 3). Of course, when you ask around, you will need to determine whether you are communicating with an African Lutheran bishop who is coveting, or already in thrall to, American money from Trump (1 Timothy 3:4-5).
For example, just two weeks before Trump’s article in the October 17, 2025 Lutheran Witness, African Lutheran pastors and bishops meeting in Nairobi, just on the other side of the Ngong Hills from The Lutheran School of Theology, after asking if they could join us at the LST for “good Lutheran preaching,” as they put it, thanked us warmly for arranging for a bus to bring them to campus. Two hours later, they notified us that they could not come because Shauen Trump threatened their funding if they were ever to step foot on our campus or associate in any way with The Lutheran School of Theology.
In ecclesiastical terms, Shauen Trump, who is in fact not a called and ordained servant of the Word as your congregation’s pastor is, has been acting as President Matthew Harrison’s synodical bagman in Africa. (For more, see my essay linked here.)
The administration of the LC-MS, under the leadership of its multi-term president, Matthew Harrison, has successfully weaponized the biblical and Lutheran teaching of the divine call, and now they are shamelessly calling for more called and ordained missionaries to place themselves, their families’ welfare, and their ministry under the capricious, willful, mere human authority of the LC-MS; but clearly not under the divine authority of Christ’s Word and in line with our ordination promise to preach and teach according to the Scriptures and Lutheran Confessions.
Here is what Harrison and LCMS administrators such as Trump have been doing. First, they appropriated to themselves the divine call by which we pastors are pastors. According to the apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 4, the ascended Christ Himself – not the LCMS leadership, or any synodical officer or committee – “gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints…” Over and against the Scriptures, here is the false doctrine-and-practice that the LC-MS administration has adopted for world missionaries, as expressed in the church body’s bylaws.
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 (LCMS Bylaw 3.8.3.1)
(For Robert Preus’s condemnation of precisely this departure from Christ’s Word and from Lutheran doctrine regarding the divine call by the Missouri Synod, see Disputation Concerning the False Doctrine and Practice of LCMS Articulated in Bylaw 3.8.3.1.)
Second, the Harrison-Trump strategy for years has been to ostracize and slander Rev. James May, a premier missionary in Africa and missionary founder of The Lutheran School of Theology, an internationally credited and robustly confessional Lutheran institution of higher learning with 100% direct support from Lutheran congregations. Read the LCMS Bylaws for yourself and you will see that the LC-MS rewrite of the doctrine of the divine call was authored in such a way as to transfer the authority of the divine call from Christ and the Scriptures ultimately to the LCMS president. Interestingly, my brother pastors speak of Bylaw 3.8.3.1 as “The Get Rid of James May Bylaw.”
For more details on the consequences of this two-part strategy for the LC-MS administration’s manhandling of real pastors – that is, pastors who are called and ordained servants of the Word – particularly those who are are also world missionaries, please see again my essay “Leave us to Our Poverty.” You will read there how two of our most faithful and articulate LC-MS Lutheran missionaries of the past fifteen years, Dr Edward Naumann, hounded out of Sri Lanka by LC-MS mission officials, and Rev James May, Director at The Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya, have been relentlessly ostracized and slandered by LC-MS administrators overseas and stateside.
The LC-MS administration’s point of attack has been against their divine calls – which come, remember, from our ascended Lord; not from synod presidents, district presidents, or any other church officials. For more of the deep background on the LC-MS drift away from God’s Word and the Lutheran Confessions to “that damnable Bylaw 3.8.3.1,” see the essay, Seminex 2.0, The Foundational Heresy that has Propelled the LCMS from Explosion to Implosion.
This plea for more missionaries in Africa is not credible, given what we call in rhetoric the ethos or character of those involved. Trump does not form African Lutherans to teach the Gospel in Africa; he is a false pastor. Neither do the LC-MS administrators who fund Trump and other pseudo-missionary work with our LC-MS mission money and well-intended bequests. The need for Lutherans in Africa is indeed great; however, this plea is false advertising. It comes not from a love of Christ and precious African souls, but from self-aggrandizement and a manifest addiction to influencing and even extorting African Lutherans via American money. By their fruits you will know them.
Therefore, I invite you, our brothers and sisters in the States and elsewhere, to join in the fervent petitions of faithful Lutherans in Africa and around the world, that our Heavenly Father will “break and hinder every evil will and counsel which will not let His kingdom come.” We have been praying that God would lead the LC-MS officials such as Matthew Harrison and all the promoters of LCMS Bylaw 3.8.3.1, and bad actors such as Shauen Trump, to repent. However, those of us who in fact have divine calls, and have in fact been put in place by God to form African Lutherans to teach the Gospel, student by student and precious African soul by soul – we invite you to join us in praying about these individuals who are impenitently devoted to colonializing the kingdom work in Africa, “Let ruin come upon him unexpectedly, and let the net that he hid ensnare him; let him fall into it – to his ruin” (Psalm 35). Trump and the LC-MS administrators with their boatloads of (our) money need to decrease so that the kingdom of God may increase in Africa.