“Then he said to his disciples, “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”  

“For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.”  

I hope this finds you well.

This past weekend, I attended the gathering of the Minn-Dak Mission District of the NALC in Minnesota.  Dan Selbo, Presiding Bishop of the NALC, was also at the gathering.  He spoke of many things, but with no greater urgency did he speak for our church than of the need for pastors.

When I became an NALC pastor in 2016, our church body counted about 425 congregations.  Today that figure is 470.  That is encouraging – the NALC is a growing church body.  What is also true is that we, like virtually every Christian church body in America, are seeing fewer people enter the ordained ministry.  The trend in decreased enrollments in seminaries has existed for nearly a decade.   Moreover, the number of pastors, in their first five years since ordination, who leave the ministry for extended periods of time, or permanently, is also trending upward. Some say it’s now 1 in 10 who do so.

Bishop Selbo conveyed to our gathering that based on age alone, we have roughly three NALC pastors who will reach retirement age (usually measured as over the age of 59) in the next five years for every one pastor we have in our seminary system and planning for ordination.  Nationwide, it is estimated that between 20-25% of pastors of Protestant denominations are currently in retirement age  

When I first joined the NALC, there were among our 425 congregations, about 30 pastoral vacancies – congregations seeking to call a pastor.  As of April 2022, that figure had risen to 45 congregations with pastoral vacancies. Added to that figure are another 19 congregations that are seeking at least a part-time pastor – they are too small to support a full time pastor.

Put another way, as a denomination we’ve grown by about 10% - from 425 to 470 congregations in the last five years. But our pastoral vacancy rate has risen 50% - from about 30 to 45. That may reflect the reality of there being so many pastors in retirement age and so few entering the ministry.

I write to ask your prayers for our church - indeed the whole Christian church - that as our Lord commanded, we would “pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers into his harvest field.” I’m grateful we have an intern coming to Calvary shortly, our second intern in three years, and that we are willing to do our part to provide for the supply of future pastors.   Thank you for supporting that.

The NALC is going to announce later this year a three-year initiative to fund our many church-wide and congregational ministries, and I’ll write more about that in the future. But high on the list of ministry needs is the funding of seminary education, and the active recruitment of young men and women to the ministry of Word and sacrament.

As Paul said in I Corinthians, “We are all God’s fellow workers” – some are called, as he would write later in I Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4, to be “pastors and teachers”, but all are workers in the kingdom of God. Please do your part and pray.

Thank you.

Because of a cross,

Pastor Ken