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Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
@TurnipMerchant
Jan 2 • 44 tweets • 22 min read • Read on X
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LCMS Year in Review 2025

Events are forgotten a few weeks after surfacing thanks to modern news cycles. It is, therefore, very easy to brush everything under the rug.

A lot publicly transpired online for the LCMS, and it shouldn't be so easily forgotten.
At the start of the year, there was an admission by an LCMS pastor that women could somehow be better pastors than he could (despite the fact that only men can be actual pastors), even admitting they could be pastors conditional upon their faithfulness.

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Also in January, Pastor Fiene sought the answer to the radicalization of young men. Contrary to many on the right, blaming the trend on the treatment of young men, he argued that the main cause ("demon") was the entitlement of young men.

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However, in early February, a national-level public controversy came out of left field, as General Flynn and Elon Musk declared that several Lutheran NGOs were illegally laundering money and facilitating mass immigration.

x.com/GenFlynn/statu…

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In response, a former board member of Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area declared that the LAMS-affiliated Lutheran NGOs receiving public funds were engaging in activities explicitly condoned by the LCMS.

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A few days later, Rep. Krishnamoorthi questioned the governor of Iowa on whether these Lutheran NGOs and the Lutheran church itself were money laundering operations.

She could not say.

In response to the newfound public pressure, LCMS President Matthew Harrison responded that the LCMS no longer funded Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, and that the affiliated NGOs were just doing what the government told them to do.

reporter.lcms.org/2025/lcms-pres…Image
A week later, the LCMS released rather thorough guidelines on how to handle immigration law enforcement should an officer visit a church.

Many wondered where this extensive guidance was during the lockdowns, when churches were pressured to close by the synod and the state. Image
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Next month, Fiene went semi-viral again after lambasting an interlocutor for his unwillingness to get fired for trying to convert Jews at his place of employment. This caused a lot of backlash, since Fiene himself has very secure employment.

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A couple weeks later, LCMS-affiliated Lutheran Services in America released an interfaith solidarity agreement in support of immigration and resettlement. This came after the new Trump administration started to clamp down on immigration.

A few days later, the official LCMS X account locked down and functionally abandoned this platform.

x.com/thelcmsImage
At the end of March, Pastor Jamie Holt released an article arguing that St. Paul was working towards egalitarianism, although he was culturally constrained. True Christianity, alongside God, strives for gender equality.

archive.ph/d8wqlImage
On April 1st, Pastor Holt released an article on transgender students and Christians, specifically on why they should be tolerated more. Further, the Bible is not the starting place for dealing with this, though it allegedly supports his beliefs.

archive.ph/7tRbCImage
Two days later, Pastor Holt clarified his positions, stating that he was not trying to change doctrines and was only motivated by President Harrison's work and words on women's leadership in the church.

substack.com/home/post/p-16…Image
Right before Pastor Holt released his articles, Harrison was declaring at the Southern District Convention that "the Missouri Synod is never going to give up women's suffrage, nor should we."

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While the rest of Spring was relatively uneventful, Summer saw more events come to pass.

A lot of LCMS-affiliated Recognized Service Organizations heartily celebrated pride month. You can read more about it here:

Also in the Summer, LCMS-affiliated Lutheran Social Services New York celebrated the resettlement of a family to the United States, as the home country was too unsafe due to its suppression of homosexuality.

In July, the Atlantic District voted 83% to partner with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (now Global Refuge). This seemingly contradicted Harrison's statements putting distance between the LCMS and LIRS, though he was present at the convention.

In August, CSL Professor Dr. Joel Biermann foreshadowed later controversy, releasing a video stating that St. Paul's commands for women to cover their heads is culturally antiquated and that doing so could lead to pride and confusion.

A few weeks later, Biermann debated Pastor David Ramirez. After arguing against the morality of lethal self defense, Biermann volunteered his opposition to immigration restriction, being against protecting American children and heritage.

Some found Biermann's arguments against self-defense convincing (like using baseball bats for defense instead of firearms). One of his prescriptions, that the use of lethal force and masculinity shouldn't be equated, resonated with a few pastors.

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September brought a confusing development. The secular, left-leaning press joined with LCMS moderates in lambasting anyone labeled a "Neo-Confederate." Many still wonder why LCMS conservatives would take the SPLC as infallible gospel.

In September, outrage mounted over Iryna Zarutska’s murder (from August). President Harrison’s silence added her death to a growing list of tragedies the Synod selectively ignored.

As outrage over Zarutska’s murder reached a boiling point, Charlie Kirk was shot in front of his family. Immediately, Lutheran workshop Ad Crucem posted a Christian Nationalist rallying cry that was poorly received by the pastorate.

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Harrison’s Facebook response the next day struck many as self-centered, pivoting from the recent tragedies to praise immigration and counter Christian Nationalism.

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The next day, Pastor Deberny decried the "cancel culture" of companies firing employees for publicly celebrating Kirk's assassination.

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That same day, Pastor Benjamin Ball released a letter in response to Zarutska's and Kirk's assassination, calling on authorities to restore the rule of law and execute God's wrath against wickedness.

Later in September, Dean of the Lutheran School of Theology in Kenya Dr. Schulz published a Kenyan pastor's plea to the LCMS: "Leave us to our poverty, and stop interfering with God's Word in Africa and our Lutheran Seminary in Kenya!"

lutheranphilosopher.com/leave-us-to-ou…Image
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With October came news that Concordia University Wisconsin was stonewalling a nascent Turning Point USA chapter, denying recognition even after the assassination because of TPUSA's Professor Watchlist (which tracks leftist professors)

Towards the end of October, a young woman contacted an LCMS district after attending a service in which a vested woman was distributing communion and leading the prayer of the church.

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The same day, an LCMS congregant under the alias "Lutheran Leftist" declared "The hammer and sickle has been a symbol of hope for millions... Its legacy is complicated." Though the swastika is completely unconscionable.

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A few days later, the aforementioned young woman revealed that the district tried to ignore her, dismissed her concerns, and claimed that the district wasn't interested in intervening.

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Towards the end of October, Jordan Cooper and several LCMS pastors took shots at the Bugenhagen Conference, grossly misrepresenting LCMS Pastor Karl Hess's speech on slavery and Christianity.

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This prompted a few questions from the Bugenhagen Conference. Specifically, why are LCMS congregants trusting Jordan Cooper to teach them, given he was rejected from the pastorate for denying the book of Genesis?

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Pastor Todd Wilken then weighed in on the controversy, further misrepresenting Hess alongside Cooper. Wilken was invited to discuss the issue in good faith. Instead of defending himself, he decided to quickly and uneventfully move on from the subject.

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Then, in mid November, a scandal broke in which an LCMS pastor was using a trans pride stole.

The same church had women leading chapel services, and the church's school library kept pro-Islam and LGBTQ+ affirming children's books.

adcrucem.news/p/doctrine-gov…
The day the news broke, President Harrison released a message declaring that he was satisfied with how the situation was being handled up to that point, though the issue was initially raised in 2024.

reporter.lcms.org/2025/president…Image
Towards the end of November, hearkening back to the immigration issues at the start of the year, Tucker Carlson blamed Lutheran and Catholic charities for hostilely facilitating an immigrant invasion of the United States.

Soon after, Ad Crucem released information on the pastor with the trans stole which contradicted President Harrison's statement. Specifically, Harrison and the synod knew about what was happening at that church and tried to brush it under the rug.

adcrucem.news/p/205-days-to-…Image
A day later, Pastor Deberny exhorted Christians to be more charitable and tolerant "in our dialogue with the LGBT community." He further said that the most faithful Christians he knows are celibate homosexuals.

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The next day, Ad Crucem published a remarkable insight on the LCMS's lengthy and secret "process" for handling manifest and impenitently sinful pastors, noting that laymen, by contrast, could be publicly run out of congregations in mere weeks.

open.substack.com/pub/adcrucem/p…Image
At the start of December, the pastor under scrutiny resigned. Surprisingly, this move was sharply opposed by the congregation, several members of which suggested that the church should leave the LCMS for the ELCA. The congregation remains in the LCMS.

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Then, towards the end of December, a video from last year at King of Kings Omaha was unearthed, in which, after several re-baptisms, a transgender was baptized.

And, at the end of this year, President Harrison has announced that he will be running for another 3 year term next year, no doubt to keep the progress going.

witness.lcms.org/2025/abounding…Image

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More from @TurnipMerchant

Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
Aug 23, 2024
This isn’t the main discussion, but “We’re not like the other Protestants” is a very real group, and the identity is fundamentally unstable. It’s purely a means to disassociate with less respectable evangelicals, and part of doing that is putting on a more historical mask.
Lutherans are the most notorious in this group. The conservative Lutheran identity was once linked to a very strong German-American tradition that predated the 1848ers (whom they denounced as atheist socialists in their own language when they arrived).
During the progressive era, however, the Lutherans anglicized, and beyond anglicizing, there was a huge push to Americanize. This entailed largely altering or abolishing parts of the culture that had been carried over or had developed for nearly a century at that point.
Read 7 tweets
Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
Jul 23, 2024
“Satanism, the actual worship or service of the devil, is more dangerous than the simple practice of the occult. Yet many people today consider themselves so civilized and sophisticated that they are unwilling to accept the idea that some people actually worship and serve Satan…
It sounds so medieval! However, in an 80-page report concerning specific charges of satanic child molestation brought against a day care center, the California attorney general said that the sheriff’s deputies so doubted the accusations that they…
neglected to search for additional evidence. ‘This failure to substantiate the children’s claims became more pronounced when allegations of satanic rituals and homicides emerged. The more bizarre allegation—and the lack of evidence to support it—the more…
Read 21 tweets
Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
Jul 3, 2024
The end of “The Believing Christian Rejoices in His Regeneration”: Image
Adding these prayers to the daily evening prayers at home has highlighted a lot of the differences in diction between modern Christians and Christians a century ago. Besides “Worldlings” and “birthright”, the “sinful world and… its society” is a common derogatory phrase. Image
In fact, these older prayers treat the world’s society as something to be disdained, even despised.

I doubt these (far more) faithful Christians would scan through parts of the world’s society, like Hollywood films, looking for Christian elements to justify their consumption. Image
Read 6 tweets
Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
May 15, 2024
Today on May 15th, 2024, a close friend of mine sent me a public Facebook post and YouTube video from First Lutheran Church. As read out by Reverend Joseph Highley on the morning of May 12th, First Lutheran Church in Ponca City has declared me excommunicated.
If treated as valid, this would exclude me from every LCMS congregation. Reverend Highley and First Lutheran have done this despite resigning my membership with them on April 8th, having declared multiple times that the excommunication is a necessary punitive action.
The charges follow the same vague and politically contrived rationale that was made public last May. The first condemned me for not submitting to Reverend Highley’s and First Lutheran’s ‘God-established’ authority, also condemning me for having recorded and published everything.
Read 7 tweets
Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
Feb 17, 2024
Quite the opposite.

Since I do not want America intervening across the world and sending our young men to die for, frankly, nothing, I want to oppose what it actually does.

Accusing it of “conquering Europe” is one of the few things it hasn’t done. It’s unconvincing.
It’s doubly unconvinced to accuse me of “covering” for American foreign intervention, considering I’ve spent a great deal of time criticizing it, writing against it, and generally opposing it. It’s a position I was raised with, and it’s not something I’ve ever discarded.
When I wrote on the topic, I did not delve into baseless assertions as to the spiritual character of Americans along with banal esoterica, so perhaps it’s a lesser work. Nonetheless, I wrote it.

mises.org/wire/us-follow…
Read 6 tweets
Ryan Turnipseed 🦬 Profile picture
May 18, 2023
On January 21st, I wrote a Twitter thread outlining issues that I and others had with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod's new edition of Luther's Large Catechism. After it was pulled and later re-released and reaffirmed, a lot has changed for me.

So, what has happened?
The original thread is attached. A great number of laymen and pastors wrote their concerns to the President of the LCMS, Matthew Harrison, and the book was pulled. Nine days later, everything was reaffirmed.

On February 21st, Matthew Harrison released a letter through rather unorthodox channels which condemned the "Alt Right" as unchristian and called for their excommunication.

Read 62 tweets

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