A church body with record assets and a shrinking income

The half of the budget nobody designates

Most of what donors give the LCMS arrives with instructions attached: for a missionary, for disaster relief, for a seminary. Unrestricted money is different. It is the only revenue that can pay for the Commission on Theology, the district presidents' council, the roster office, the audit, the legal department, the electricity. It is also the line that has collapsed.

In the fiscal year that began July 2007, the Synod budgeted $22.1 million of unrestricted support. For FY2024 it budgeted $15.5 million. That is a 30% fall in plain dollars. Measured in what those dollars actually buy, it is a fall of 52%.

The dip and partial recovery in the middle of that line tracks a real event: the restructuring that followed the 2010 convention, and a rebuild of unrestricted giving through the late 2010s. Read the trough with care, though: the Synod later restated FY2012 upward, from $17.7 million to $19.6 million, so the dip is shallower than the chart's own-year figures suggest. What broke the recovery is not in doubt. Across 2021–2024 inflation ran ahead of nominal support and the line fell to its lowest point in the record.

Flat is the new falling

The classic route by which a Lutheran congregation supports the national church runs offering plate → district → St. Louis. In nominal terms that channel has been remarkably steady, hovering around $13 million every year since 2018. Steady is the problem. Held constant against prices, the same $13 million has lost a quarter of its purchasing power in seven years.

The Synod is now funded by donors, not by the structure

The most consequential fact about LCMS finances is which pipe the money comes through. By the time this record opens, the pipe had already changed.

Of every $100 of gift income the Synod recorded in FY2019, about $20 arrived through the offering-plate-to-district route and $80 came directly from individuals, congregations and foundations writing to St. Louis. In FY2024 the institutional share fell to $17, and in FY2025 it was $18. Over seven years the range is narrow, 17 to 25, because the shift itself is not recent. It had already happened before this record begins.

The old channel keeps thinning underneath a structure that still assumes it. President Harrison's 2020 letter names “the continued 40-year decline in dollars that are first given into the local offering plate, then passed to district and finally to Synod.” The Synod's own transparency materials put the current split at 75 to 85 percent from donations against 15 to 25 percent through districts, and they note that raising those donations costs nine to ten cents of every dollar given.

Churches that stay open and empty out

Every financial line above sits on top of a membership line, and the membership line is the steepest thing in this archive.

Between 2005 and 2024 the LCMS lost about 806,000 baptized members, a third of its people. Over the same period it lost 350 congregations, under 6%. The two numbers together define the pressure: the Synod's parishes are thinning out rather than disappearing. The average LCMS congregation held 397 baptized members in 2005. In 2024 it held 282.

A building, a parsonage, a pastor's salary and a district apportionment do not shrink by a third when the roll does.

The loss is not spread evenly. Between 2009 and 2024, eight districts shed more than 39% of their baptized membership; the least-affected lost 15%. The Northeast, the Pacific coast and the old-industrial Midwest are emptying fastest. New Jersey (−46.9%), Northwest (−44.4%) and California/Nevada/Hawaii (−43.0%) lead the table. The plains and the upper Midwest are holding best: South Dakota (−15.3%), Nebraska (−17.3%), Iowa West (−20.4%) and North Wisconsin (−20.6%), along with the Mid-South district covering Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi (−17.4%).

Two districts finished the period with more congregations than they started with: Texas, up 25, and Montana, up three. Not one of the 35 finished with more members.

The Concordias took the hit

The Synod's Program Budget Summaries carry a table almost nobody reads: the combined operating budgets of every corporate entity in the system, from Concordia Plan Services down to the historical institute. Restated in constant dollars, it shows where the money actually moved.

The Concordia University System's operating budget peaked in real terms in FY2020, at $744 million in 2025 dollars. By FY2024 it was $473 million, a real contraction of 36% in four years, and the single largest loss anywhere in the LCMS system. Over the same window the number of Concordia universities fell from eight to six. As of 30 June 2022, the most recent date the Synod publishes, CUS also carried $145 million of capital debt: 81% of all the capital debt in the Synod's corporate family.

Meanwhile Concordia Plan Services, the health and retirement plans for church workers, has grown to 49% of the entire system's operating budget, up from 37% in FY2006. The benefits arm is now bigger than the Concordia universities and all 35 districts put together. Some of that is simply American health-care inflation rather than a choice anyone made; the effect on the balance of the system is the same.

Fewer people sent

Mission, international and national together, is the largest block in the accounts, 64% of FY2025 expenditure once shared costs are allocated. It is also where the headcount has fallen hardest. The Synod counted 121 missionaries in mid-2020 and 91 in December 2024, a 25% reduction. Military chaplains fell from 154 in June 2020 to 125 in December 2024.

The money did not fall with them. Audited mission spending was $29.0 million in FY2019 and $35.0 million in FY2024. Neither year had a National Youth Gathering, so they compare cleanly. Adjusted for inflation that is essentially flat. Roughly the same real spending is now supporting a quarter fewer people in the field.

The balance sheet was rebuilt

Set against everything above, the Synod's financial position has improved dramatically, and the improvement survives scrutiny.

Total net assets rose from $98.1 million at the close of FY2019 to $212.5 million at the close of FY2025. Even after inflation that is a real gain of 72%. The share carrying no donor restriction, the part the Board of Directors can actually deploy, went from $9.0 million to $72.8 million.

The most consequential number inside that: undesignated reserves. In FY2023 the Synod held $18.1 million undesignated, about 24% of a year's spending and well under the 40–50% that nonprofit practice recommends. By FY2025 it held $56 million, roughly 76% of the year's audited spending, or 69% of the budget it was measured against. Either way it clears the benchmark. As recently as FY2021 the undesignated balance was negative.

Three other genuine wins sit in the record. The historic Concordia University System debt ($32.0 million in 2005, and a $1.4 million annual drag on the Synod budget) was retired in full by 30 June 2019. The endowment reached $57 million in FY2025, up $6 million on the year. And the program expense ratio has run between 75% and 82% for seven straight years, against a Better Business Bureau standard of 65–67% and an internal target of 75%. (For FY2025 the Synod reports 78%; its own audited spending table works out to 79%.)

Attendance is climbing back. Membership keeps falling.

The membership number is the one everybody quotes. The attendance number has been moving in the other direction for four years, though it is worth being precise about what that means.

Average weekly worship attendance was 555,717 in 2024, up 1.55% on the year in a year when membership fell 2.34%. Since the 2020 pandemic floor of 481,130, attendance is up 15.5% while membership has continued down. As a share of baptized membership, attendance has recovered from 26.6% to 34.0%.

It has not, however, returned to where it was. The 2019 figure was 669,065, or 35.9% of baptized membership, so measured across the full window, attendance has fallen further than membership has. The recovery is real. The level is still below 2019.

The 2024 statistics carry three more signals worth watching. Adult confirmations rose 33.4% to 10,363 and adult baptisms rose 7.2% to 3,013, people joining as adults rather than inheriting membership. Net membership loss narrowed to 9,702, a 27% smaller decline than 2023. And enrolment in church-work programmes at the Concordia universities rose 7.8% in autumn 2025 to 777 students, with Concordia Chicago up 14% and Concordia Nebraska up 8.2%.

The Synod also retains its donors unusually well. Mission Advancement reports renewing 65–70% of contributors each year against a nonprofit-sector average of 45–55%.

The record year was built on money that arrives when people die

FY2024 was the strongest of the seven audited years in this record: $104.5 million of revenue and a $25.0 million increase in net assets. Read the composition and the picture changes.

Of that $104.5 million, $21.0 million came from bequests, final gifts from estates. A year later, bequests fell back to roughly $6 million. In FY2019 they were $13.3 million; in FY2020, $5.3 million. This is the single most volatile line in the accounts, and it is the line that did the most work in the year the Synod called a record.

The Synod itself has named the risk. Its 2023 annual report warned that “the passing of the Silent and early Baby Boomer generations is seen in bequests… the number of living contributors and potential contributors is in decline,” and that the demographic cliff hitting colleges “will ultimately impact giving to the church at all levels.”

The plate held. The pipe to St. Louis failed.

Everything above begins in 2005 at the earliest, because that is where the Synod's own published tables begin. Its statisticians hold a longer record, and it reframes the argument.

Measured in constant dollars, the money dropped in LCMS offering plates peaked in 2000, at $2.29 billion. In 2024 it was $1.49 billion. That is a real contraction of 35% in a quarter-century, and it is the number that looks like the collapse.

Read per head, the same line says the opposite. The Synod held roughly 1.92 million confirmed members in 1970 and roughly 1.29 million in 2024, a fall of a third. Divide the plate by the people still in it and giving per confirmed member rose 11% in real terms across those fifty-four years.

That eleven per cent conceals its own timing, however, and a trend fitted to the series recovers it. Real giving per member fell through the 1970s, bottoming in 1980 at $904 after the walkout and the recession that followed it. It then climbed for twenty-four years, gaining 32% by 2004, which is where the whole of the improvement was earned and rather more besides. Since 2004 the line has gone nowhere at all, drifting three per cent below its 2004 level and varying by about three per cent around its own average, which is noise rather than direction.

“While membership has declined, giving has not been dramatically affected. This may say a great deal about the quality of members that have remained committed to the LCMS when others have left.”