The State of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
A portrait of a denomination in steep decline.
There are basically two families in white Protestant Christianity - evangelicals and mainline Protestants. For every major denomination there is one version of each. Among Baptists there are Southern Baptists (evangelical) and American Baptists (mainline). For Methodists, there’s the Free Methodists (evangelical) and the United Methodists (mainline). Among the Lutherans, there are also two major groups - the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (evangelical) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (mainline). That group, the ELCA, is what I wanted to focus on in this post because I spent a couple hours compiling a bunch of their annual reports into a spreadsheet.
What emerges from those statistics is unfortunately a common refrain for me now - a denomination in steep decline.
In 1988, three Lutheran groups (the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches) merged to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The ELCA is one of the Seven Sisters of Mainline Protestant Christianity. The story of the ELCA (and Lutherans more generally) is one deeply linked with immigration. Lutheranism was a religious tradition that was brought to the United States in large numbers by people leaving countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland for opportunities across the Atlantic.
These immigrants managed to land in large numbers in the Upper Midwest because the climate and agriculture of places like Minnesota and the Dakotas resembled the same conditions that they were used to living in Scandinavia. When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was chosen to be Kamala Harris’ running mate in 2024, he suddenly became the most prominent member of the ELCA. Here’s a county level map of the concentration of Evangelical Lutherans in the United States.
When I said that the ELCA was concentrated in the Upper Midwest, I wasn’t kidding. It’s like I dropped a blob of blue paint on Minneapolis-St. Paul and it splattered in the surrounding region. I think it’s fair to say that the Twin Cities are the epicenter of the ELCA, although their denominational offices are actually housed in Chicago. You can see that there are some pockets of the ELCA in Texas, the Carolinas, and in the Tri-State area, but they pale in comparison to the number of Lutherans that live in fairly close proximity to the Canadian border.
But what about ELCA's future? Well, it is a mainline denomination and every single mainline denomination is demonstrably smaller today than they were just a few decades ago. That is most certainly the case with the evangelical Lutherans. I managed to compile records dating back twenty years and when it comes to members in the ELCA, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs.
In 2003, ELCA reported they had about 5 million baptized members. Of that 5 million, about 3.7 million had been confirmed in the church. For those who aren’t familiar with this denomination, the ELCA practices infant baptism and many Lutheran families have their children take part in the sacrament in the first few months of life. Confirmation is a different process entirely. It’s usually undertaken when a child is in their early teen years and it consists of a period of instruction where young people learn about the history, theology, and structure of the ELCA. Then they decide whether they want to more completely commit to their church. The Catholic Church has a process that is somewhat similar.
But both the number of baptized and confirmed people in the ELCA has declined at an unprecedented rate. A quick glance at the trend line shows a pretty steep drop in this number between 2009 and 2010. The reason was that at the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly, the denomination began to move toward a position of affirmation for people in same-sex relationships. This led to about 250,000 members leaving ELCA's membership rolls. One thing that jumps out to me is that the drop in baptized members is much larger (2.2M) than the decline among the confirmed members (1.5M). Now, the gap between the two figures is 600,000. Back in 2003, it was twice as large.
For a denomination that is facing this kind of decline, I’ve found that a very helpful metric is the ratio of baptized members to individual churches. A denomination, of course, doesn’t want to have a ratio that is incredibly high. A church with 2000 members may appeal to a certain kind of person, but it’s more difficult for churches like that to build strong relationships between the folks in the pews. But on the other hand, you don’t want a really low ratio, either. Churches need members, especially those who drop a nice donation in the collection plate as it passes on Sunday morning. Every house of worship has the same basic problem - they have to pay the light bill and the upkeep costs of the building, along with ministries to serve the community.
As the ELCA has lost members, has it closed churches at a similar rate? It doesn’t look like that’s the case.