# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_2019_S70
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

70

OFFICER, BOARD, AND COMMISSION REPORTS

photo and story of running text. Today’s audiences demand
vigorous storytelling that includes audio, visual imagery, infographics, and text. As we were doing in 2016 and will still be
doing in 2022, we continually investigate and strategize the best
ways to present our collective Witness, Mercy, and Life Together work in multimedia storytelling formats for easy viewing and
online sharing.

Opportunities
••

Continue creating a strong, confessional Lutheran
voice worldwide through joint communications
efforts with our 37 (at this writing) partner church
bodies.

••

Collaborate (following the lead of the President’s
Office, Church Relations, and the CTCR) with
counterparts in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran
Synod and Evangelical Lutheran Synod to raise the
confessional Lutheran voice in the United States.

••

Continue to grow interest—both within and outside
the Synod—in our online venues of communication.
Over the past triennium, as mentioned above, total
page-visits to the Synod’s website and its various
domains numbered 8.5 million. In the not-so-distant
future, under God’s blessing, we hope to crack 10
million … 12 million … and beyond.

Social media advancement
Social media is an always-changing world of many-sided
communication. The ability to connect in the moment, share a
photo, video, thought, or experience with thousands across the
globe, and receive their reaction in an instant makes it a powerful tool.
What we said in 2016 remains the case today: Almost daily,
new options for social media appear. What is the best use of
these communication outlets for the church? How can we share
the faith and direct people to Lutheran altars and pulpits where
they can experience Life Together in the family of God? How do
we wisely engage the culture and speak the truth in love? These
are questions we regularly ask and work to answer. In the coming triennium, we intend to:
••

Employ new outlets where people gather online.

••

Increase our use of social media analytics to inform
content creation and posting.

••

Be more strategic in using social media to increase
followers and their engagement with our content.

••

Redouble our efforts to help our congregations and
ministries use these tools well and consistently according to our confession of faith.

Challenges
Our challenges are perpetual as we explore new ways to
meet them. Chief among these are:
••

Reaching more LCMS households directly through
online and other forms of engagement.

••

Reaching a greater number of LCMS members under
the age of 30. This is imperative for the future life of
the church, and we are collaborating with our Youth,
Young Adult, and campus-ministry leaders to meet
this challenge.

••

Increasing the trust level of parish pastors so they
feel confident in sharing our communications with
their members. This can be accomplished only
through first-rate, worthwhile communications—
content that is faithful to the Word of God and the
Lutheran Confessions—delivered via an array of
media outlets.

••

Handling a heavy number of project requests from
ministry areas. The demands for services sometimes
tax our finite group of communicators and force us
to plan more carefully and seek more efficient ways
of engaging our audiences.

••

Being wise stewards of our resources while keeping
up with the pace of communication technology in
ways that serve the church well.

2019 Convention Workbook

LCMS COMMS is dedicated to telling the marvelous stories of our Synod’s endeavors in the most compelling ways. As
confessing Lutherans, we are heirs of the Reformation, truth is
on our lips, and the Good News of salvation in Christ Jesus is
at the core of all we do. Blessed to possess such grand and eternally important messages, we have no choice but to be relentless
in finding new and better ways to propel these stories out to the
world, positioning them in multiple places in print and online,
where they can edify the reader or viewer who discovers them.

CMO—CONCLUSION
Finally, a brief word of doxology, a portion of what I
shared with the Synod Board of Directors this past February—
praise and thanksgiving for what God has so abundantly given
us for our work together in the Synod, based on this passage
from St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of his
great love with which he loved us, even us, when
we were dead in our trespasses, God made alive
together with Christ—by grace you have been
saved! (Ephesians 2:4–5, my emphasis).
Thanksgiving for God’s grace made manifest in one another,
the baptized faithful. Look around. The diversity of gifts and
years and experience and wisdom within our church body is
simply stunning. It is no less so across the peoples and lands
and churches in which the Missouri Synod is present and active
with the Gospel.
Thanksgiving for a church body today that is “on the
move”—up and out and into the world with this Gospel. The
Bavarian pastor Wilhelm Loehe (1844) reflected on an essential
characteristic of the Church with these oft-quoted words:
The church of the New Testament is … a church
of all people, a church which has its children in
all lands and gathers them from every nation. It
is the one flock of the one shepherd, called out
of many folds (John 10:16), the universal—the
truly catholic—church which flows through all
time and into which all people pour. … This is
the thought which must permeate the mission
of the church or it will not know what it is or
what it should do. For mission is nothing but the