A hundred and four missionaries, and a communion thirteen times its size

One hundred and four

The Office of International Mission counted 104 Synod-called missionaries in December 2025, alongside 15 alliance missionaries, placed across 34 countries. Counting spouses and children, 345 people are on the field.

That is one missionary for every 15,722 baptized LCMS members. It is also, set against the entity that sends them, a remarkably small number: the Synod spends 64% of its programme budget on mission and puts a hundred and four people abroad.

The direction has changed. Part One recorded the missionary count falling from 121 in the FY2019 and FY2020 reports to 91 by December 2024, a quarter of the force gone in four years. The December 2025 figure is 104, a recovery of 14% in a single year and the first genuine reversal anywhere in this series.

The chaplaincy has not recovered. The Synod counted 154 military chaplains in June 2020, 125 in December 2024 and 121 in December 2025. Four are deployed.

The Synod is the small partner in its own fellowship

The LCMS maintains 104 formal relationships with church bodies in 73 countries. Those bodies represent, on the Synod's own count, 22 million people.

The Synod has 1.6 million baptized members. It is, in other words, a thirteenth of the communion it convenes, and the proportion moves further against it every year that Figure 4 of Part Two falls. Forty-four of those bodies are in altar and pulpit fellowship, which is the full relation; 36 are working toward it; 24 are non-Lutheran bodies engaged for cooperation in externals.

Where it actually goes

Mission takes 64% of the Synod's programme spending. The rest of the list is short enough to print in full, and one line on it is worth the whole of Part Three.

Of $74.0 million in FY2025 expenditure, international and national mission took $47.8 million. Ecclesiastical programmes, which is the officers, boards, commissions and the convention, took $12.6 million. University education, the six remaining Concordias, took $1.9 million, which is 2.5% of what the Synod spent.

The restricted pile tells the same story from the other side. Of roughly $82 million in temporarily restricted net assets, the Synod names $44 million: $15 million for international mission work, $13 million earmarked for international missionaries, $6 million each for mercy work and disaster support, and $4 million for pastoral education.

Thirteen million dollars is banked against 104 missionaries, which the Synod itself describes as more than a year of funding in hand. Donors have given for missionaries faster than the Synod has sent them, and the constraint on the force is therefore not the money. Part Two named what it is: eighty-eight men entered the seminaries this year.

Two thousand two hundred

The largest mission field the LCMS operates is not abroad. It is the 119,133 non-member children sitting in its own classrooms every weekday, and last year it baptized 2,200 of them.

That is 13% of every child baptized in the Synod, and it comes from a system the accounts file under education rather than mission. It is also cheap. University education and school ministry together draw a fraction of what the international force costs, because the congregations that run the schools pay for them, and so do the families who send their children.

A sending church with less to send

The same shape has appeared in all four parts. The Synod made its commitments for a church body that no longer exists, it funds them from a base that is still shrinking, and it staffs them for work it no longer has.

The mission accounts are the clearest case. The money is there, restricted and banked. The relationships are there, 104 of them across 73 countries. What is thinning is the church that stands behind them, and the recovery to 104 missionaries, real and worth recording, was accomplished in a year when the Synod lost another 9,702 members net.